Re:The truth is hard to believe
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Good luck to everyone trying to spin a better tale than this. Probably too late for anyone to actually see this but, I couldn't help myself. With appologies to Tom Waits.
blowfishgoesalone
Well he came home from the bar with a kernel in his head and a modified computer from intel and a hunk of code he opened up like GPL'ed things and a coding itch that he couldn't make still
He tried to take up with the OpenBSD coding crowd but Theo said he'd code the blowfish all alone He went to sleep at the bottom of the kthread pool and he said "gee, but it's great to be/home"
Well he came home from the bar with a kernel in he head and idea for a framebuffer display and he knew that he'd be ready with a his bulletproof geTTY and a half a K of new lines every day.
and holled up in a room above a hardware store coding nothing there but 'he put up on the mirrors and he put a spell on the entire hacker world and stayed like that for almost 7 years
Well he packed up up all his expectations he lit out for California with a transmeta laptop on his knee with a fortune file in his/usr/share and some caffine to get him there they found him in mighty coding spree
hackmaster got him a thing called HURD and laughed it down with every word but was soon singing the free software song he got 20 years for coding her from some corrupt bought-out govenor said everything this nerdboy does is wrong
Now some say he's doing the obituary mambo and some say he's hanging on the wall perhaps this yarns the only thing that holds this man together some say that he was never here at all.
Some say they saw him down in ol Redmond snearing from a boxcar going by and if you think that you can tell a bigger tale I swear to God you'd have to tell a lie...
That summary is potentially misleading because it leaves out the reason why he was annoyed. Here is the whole paragraph:
Because OpenSSL has a BSD-style license, many vendors simply grabbed the source code and incorporated it into their proprietary products. Those vendors wanted literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees. As Steve attests, "as a taxpayer, I felt very annoyed. But it made me realize a couple of things. First, if OpenSSL had been validated, then it was possible for us to do it again. Secondly, if we could do it we could save a lot of money for the program."
So he was annoyed at vendors who he thought were ripping the governent off, not at the wastefullness of the government auditing OpenSSL as I read the summary to say.
You nailed two the important catagories of gameplay - solitary and massively multiplayer, but you missed an important third catagory - social "party" games.
These are games that you can get together with a few friends and have a good time. Games like smash brothers, mario party, wario ware, tennis/golf games, pokeman puzzle. These are games that you can pick up and begin playing immediately, and there is really no such thing as beating the game, just beating your friends. And it doesn't matter if you are 8 or 35 they are still fun. These are the types of games that is talking about and they are the types of games that nintendo excells at.
The truth of the matter is that any game that requires a large investment of ones time and attention to be fun will never appeal to more than a small audience - the kids and hardcore gamers. With the cost of producing games constantly rising, nintendo doesn't want to cater(sp?) to the hardcore with their constantly increasing demands and low numbers. They want to make games that are just fun. They don't want to be the next Wizards of the Coast - they want to be the next Milton Bradley.
Yeah, the economist is left-wing, alright. That is why they supported the war in Iraq to begin with, are strong proponents of globalization, and free-trade. All strong left-wing policies. But then again they have those crazy right-wing views like saying that monopolies like Microsoft need to be delt with more harshly than they currently are. </sarcasm>
The economist is neither left-wing nor right-wing, nor are they unbias. I wouldn't really call them libertarian either (look at their recent write up on the libertarian candidate to see that he is not treated as one of their flock). They have a unique bias that you don't find in other papers. If I had to charaterize it, I would say that they care first and foremost for the economy as a whole as well as world stability. This is contrasted with traditional conservatives who put the "rights" of individual businesses first and foremost. Sometimes these interests coincide and sometimes they don't. They are pragmatic, acknowledging that market forces, while overwelmingly positive, sometimes have negative effects on society. However, unlike liberals, their proposed remedies always involve fixing the root supply-and-demand cause of the problem, rather than trying to enforce expensive brute force legislation that must constantly fight against the market forces. Furthermore, I must agree with your parent, that when they do write opinion pieces they do a much better job of backing up thier point of view than most. Even though I don't always agree with them, they always make me think.
Lastly, they do attempt (and in my opinion usually succeed) in presenting unbiased reports of the other points of view. They do this because they have a genuine interest in understanding the dynamics of the political and economic systems that we are engulfed in. They are above all pragmatic and realise that you cannot develop an educated opinion or course of action if you ignore the elements that make up the situation.
The first thing that came to my mind was what use is a patent to a non-profit? I mean what else can you do with a patent other than profit from it's licencing? Anyway with this tax write off bit - how do you determine the market value of a patent when you file your taxes? It's not like stocks or goods, where you can look at what it is currently selling for in the market and use that value.
Lastly, if you can get a tax write off for donating patents to a non-profit, how about creating a non-profit who accepts patents and then licenses them under a non-revokable, restrictionless license. This would allow corporations to protect themselves from someone else patenting their inventions, and get a tax write off, for choosing not to inforce their patent. Seems like it would be a good idea, at least until we get some real patent reform.
Lets look at it another way. If you ask "Is this tolerable?" then there is always an argument that it is, and the system will just continue to get worse, but we will get accustumed to it, and each successive change won't look that bad.
We should instead be asking "Is this necisarry or benificial to society?". That is the whole purpose of patents - to provide individual incentive so that technology progesses quicker than it would otherwise. So ask yourself - did this invention require a large investment to discover that can only be recouped by granting a monopoly on it's use? No. I'm sure discovering the invention itself did not require any substantial investment. Implementing it will but those are normal business costs and don't need to be protected as everyone who implements this idea will have to pay them, not just the inventor.
Do the benifits of having the plans to this invention out in the open, as opposed to it being kept as a trade secret, overweight the detriment of having to wait 20 years to use those plans? No - this is a concept whose details are obvious once implemented and thus there is no chance for the inventor to hoard this idea as trade secret. In other words, the plan will be in the open regardless of whether it is patented or not, so it does not benifit society to wait 20 years for what it could have now.
Would the inventor still have invented this as quickly if patent system did not exist? Yes, and not only that but I am sure the bank would also have implemented the idea even if they couldn't patent it. This patent does nothing to benifit society so there is no reason that a sensible patent system should allow it.
You missed the "trying to find and download increasingly obscure songs". That's why I used napster back in the day. I always have and always will buy the music I like. But napster was an awesome place to find b-sides, live music, and other rare music from your favorite artists. While you were at it, you could browse the music collection of the people you were downloading from and discover new bands. About 1/4 of the albums I bought during that period were from bands I discovered on napster. Lastly it allowed for situation like he mentioned where you partying at 3 in the morning and have the spontaneous desire to listen to some random song that you haven't heard in years.
I haven't used any filesharing programs since before napster was shut down (I have always obeyed the spirit of the law, but as I have become more outspoken about certain things I've decided to also obey the letter of the law, lest people think me a hypocrite). I must say that none of the new download services fill needs at all. Granted, I am not representitive of the filesharing population, seeing as last time I heard the most popular downloads were fifty cent and britney spears. But fortunately, artists are becoming more tech savy, and most now have music samples on thier websites, and there are some interesting music sites spouting up on the web, but none of them offer anything like what napster was.
They can't turn you over to the authorities because file sharing is only a civil offense not a criminal one. The state will only procecute you if you have committed a criminal offense, so the record label's only recourse is to sue you in civil court. At least for now.
However, if you make money from copyright infringement then that is a criminal offense, and you the FBI does procecute people over that.
This may be an artifact of linux, as I've noticed it before with a few pieces of code I wrote where a directory already existed, and it created another with the same name under it.
Hmm, interesting. One gotcha that you need to keep your eye open for is the ending "/". For example, if you say:
mv dir1 dir2
it will rename dir1 to dir2, overwriting the contents of dir2 if files of the same name already exist. But if you say:
mv dir1 dir2/
it will move dir1 into dir2, as a subdirectory.
Don't know if that was the case, but thought I'd mention it. Cheers!
This means that foobar.dll v1.0 and foobar.dll v1.1 can exist on disk at the same location (to the requesting program).
This is already possible in Linux and has been for years (it probably inherited the practice from other unices before it was created). The way that linux handles different versions of the same libraries is actually really nice. You can read about it here . Where the problem comes in is that that either the package manger doesn't like to install multiple versions of the libraries, or the user isn't aware that it is possible. I think that the latter is the more common case. The user sees that they need library version Y, and they have X so they naturally upgrade the package rather than installing it beside the existing one.
This is where.NET comes in. There is no more DLL hell. Kind of live WinForms/Avalon:P
Every situation is unique, and sometimes different situations require different actions. You see the simularities between two situations, and your opinion is that differences are nonconsequential, but that doesn't mean the other person thinks they same way. They might think that the differences are very important and the simularities are nonconsequential. That doesn't mean that they have a double standard or are hypocritical, it just means that they put different value on the various aspects of the situations than you.
It's just like the Kerry is a waffler fallacy. Votes for PATRIOT act, then when he actually gets to read it, changes his mind. Does not vote for iraq funding, but latter does when the source of the funding is changed. To a conservative pundit, there is not concievable reason not to support things go towards "national security", but Kerry disagreed. The same way a libertarian can't think of any reason to give up privacy, but the conservatives think that that it is sometimes necesarry. That does not mean that they are hypocrites, it means they see things differently than you.
11. Because this genetic material is licensed free of charge, there is no warranty for the genetic material, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the genetic material "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the genetic is with you. Should the genetic material prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
12. In no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who may modify and/or redistribute the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the implantation or inability to implant the genetic material (including but not limited to loss of gentic offspring or genetic offspring being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the genetic material to interoperate with any other genetic material), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Seeing as how these are guides for system administrators, I don't see how your parents need to know any of this. Besides it isn't a knowledge problem that this solves, but a business problem.
This is a loose agreement by ISP's about what they need to do on thier part to confront spam. These things would improve the situation, but ISP's are reluctant to implement them out of fear that the user will become angry with the tightened security problem and go to another ISP. And I am not talking about spammers, I am talking about everyday users who don't like to be told to patch thier systems or get off the internet.
So what this guidelines does is provide a unified front - a lowest common denominator policy that all the ISPs are willing to implement. It will improve the situation somewhat, but will not be too noticable by the user, and to the extent that it is they can't leave and go somewhere else because all the major ISP's will be doing it.
Anyway, about that warm summer nights thing. The only place I have lived in New Mexico that stays warm at night is Albuquerque, because all the concrete absorbs the heat all day and then releases it all night. Most everywhere else is wonderfull at night. That is actually one of my favorite things about the desert climate - no matter how hot it gets during the day it still cools down at night due to having no humidity. I can't stand being out in the East or down the South during the summer, where it is hot and muggy all day and then warm and muggy all night.
my favorite tool for todo-lists is my palm. I have tried many different task list programs, and even with a good one (like omni outliner for OS X), I find myself rarely using them. Having something that is sitting right there on my desk where it is always visable and I have instant access to it all day long is far more usefull than an application than I have to start up. When I don't have my palm I end up like you, resorting to sticky notes (which are too small) or notebook paper (which gets lost in all the rest of my papers).
Furthermore, unlike a desktop application, I can take my palm with me to lab, the field, the other lab across the street, the grochery store... you get the point. The only complaint I have about the palm is that I wish it let me have more catagories. I have about 10 catagories for home use and another half dozen for all the projects at work, and some of those could really be broken into sub catagories (one of the reasons that omni-office rocks: nested todo-items). But still, the palm is the most used todo tool I have ever had.
hehe I just read all of that and realized I could be talking about writing notes on my hand, and everything I said would still makes sense.
The licence cost part is correct depending on how you look at it. When most people talk about software licences they are thinking of EULAs, which are supposed "licences to use". So what they are saying is that you don't need to pay someone to get a licence to use the software. Which is absolutely true - there is no cost, monitarily or in source, to use open source software.
Of couse we all know that you don't need a license to use software, just to redistrubute it, so those EULAs aren't really licences at all. They are just notices that say you have no licence to distribute, as well as an attempt to get you to agree to a bunch of things that probably aren't legaling binding anyway, since EULAs are not valid contracts.
Open source licences on the other hand are real distribution licences. But the only cost is when you want to redistribute derivitives works, in which case, the cost is the source to those derivative works. In the standard user's perception of "software license" there is no cost.
In addition to those, the method that most animation studios use is really more of a digitizer than a scanner. The way it works is you have a pen whose position in three space is monitored. They you go and touch the tip of the pen to the model. Each touch is registered in the computer as a point of the surface of the model. So you keep putting in points as you see fit, and when you are done, some software makes a mesh out of all of the points.
Quake III does indeed use NURBS objects for all of the curved landscape. It generates a meshes from the NURBS object when loading the level, the detail of which is dependent on the capabilities of your system.
Huh? Punch cards were not a major plot point, they were just an irrelevent form of media. Any form of media would have worked just as well and no-one complained that the movie didn't use punch cards. What they complained about was the fact that the underlying philosophical dilemas were not accurately preserved. Those dilemas are timeless and are the entire point of the story.
That is what makes a good movie adaptation. Since you have a different medium you must change the details of the plot to have good pacing for the timeframe alloted, and there are many other minor details which are flexible, but if one preserves the nature of the characters, the universe, and the theme of the book then it is a good adaptation. The flaw in the Minority Report and Total Recall is that they didn't understand what was minor detail and what was central to the story.
Read the fine article. You are correct that mesh optimization has been a most popular MA/PhD thesis subjects for over two decades. Which is exactly why someone comming up with a method that is an order of magnitude better than any other previous method is big news.
Also for all those questioning it's usefullness, you need not look any further than 3D scanning. When it comes to detailed models, very few things are done by scratch, instead the are digitized using one of many scanning techniques. This model is then massaged by hand by an artist. This technique would allow you to get a much better first cut, saving time for the artists.
Lastly, quake and others generated meshes from smooth NURBS objects. This is quite different, and much easier than generating one mesh object from another. Those tequniques are not usefull for scanned objects where you start with a dense mesh object.
The problem with this is that it doesn't provide a stable paycheck. If you look at many open source projects, they refuse to take donations simply because the money wouldn't help them (other than hosting). If you are a volenteer free software developer, getting a few bucks might be nice, but it won't enable you to spend anymore time writting free software than you already do. You have commitments to your job, schooling and family, and in most cases you don't have the flexibility to work less job hours (and get paid less) as you get more donations. If developers will not accept donations for what they are already doing, why would they go after a bounty? So no, I don't see it being the future of free software. The future will continue to be a mix of businesses that use and need to improve open source software, and volenteers.
It is true that in both cases people contribute their talent and labor to a collaborative project. But unlike open source software, you are building off of and distributing someone else's work without their permission. That is illegal, and is exactly what SCO is claiming happens in OSS but it doesn't.
Not being able to read unlicensed work from other countries is a drag, and I don't particularly blame you for breaking the law when no-one is getting hurt. But it concidering how much FUD and confusion is already being spread by opponents of OSS, it really doesn't help for well-meaning people to muddy the waters with analogies like this.
Interesting that Alltel (aka cricket) isn't on the most hated list. Every single person that I know (here in New Mexico) that has used thier service has complained about thier customer service and about half of them have had billing problems. Most of them have since switched to Verison or Sprint, depending on if coverage or gsm digital was more important to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably too late for anyone to actually see this but, I couldn't help myself. With appologies to Tom Waits.
blowfishgoesalone
That summary is potentially misleading because it leaves out the reason why he was annoyed. Here is the whole paragraph:
Because OpenSSL has a BSD-style license, many vendors simply grabbed the source code and incorporated it into their proprietary products. Those vendors wanted literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees. As Steve attests, "as a taxpayer, I felt very annoyed. But it made me realize a couple of things. First, if OpenSSL had been validated, then it was possible for us to do it again. Secondly, if we could do it we could save a lot of money for the program."
So he was annoyed at vendors who he thought were ripping the governent off, not at the wastefullness of the government auditing OpenSSL as I read the summary to say.
You nailed two the important catagories of gameplay - solitary and massively multiplayer, but you missed an important third catagory - social "party" games.
These are games that you can get together with a few friends and have a good time. Games like smash brothers, mario party, wario ware, tennis/golf games, pokeman puzzle. These are games that you can pick up and begin playing immediately, and there is really no such thing as beating the game, just beating your friends. And it doesn't matter if you are 8 or 35 they are still fun. These are the types of games that is talking about and they are the types of games that nintendo excells at.
The truth of the matter is that any game that requires a large investment of ones time and attention to be fun will never appeal to more than a small audience - the kids and hardcore gamers. With the cost of producing games constantly rising, nintendo doesn't want to cater(sp?) to the hardcore with their constantly increasing demands and low numbers. They want to make games that are just fun. They don't want to be the next Wizards of the Coast - they want to be the next Milton Bradley.
Yeah, the economist is left-wing, alright. That is why they supported the war in Iraq to begin with, are strong proponents of globalization, and free-trade. All strong left-wing policies. But then again they have those crazy right-wing views like saying that monopolies like Microsoft need to be delt with more harshly than they currently are.
</sarcasm>
The economist is neither left-wing nor right-wing, nor are they unbias. I wouldn't really call them libertarian either (look at their recent write up on the libertarian candidate to see that he is not treated as one of their flock). They have a unique bias that you don't find in other papers. If I had to charaterize it, I would say that they care first and foremost for the economy as a whole as well as world stability. This is contrasted with traditional conservatives who put the "rights" of individual businesses first and foremost. Sometimes these interests coincide and sometimes they don't. They are pragmatic, acknowledging that market forces, while overwelmingly positive, sometimes have negative effects on society. However, unlike liberals, their proposed remedies always involve fixing the root supply-and-demand cause of the problem, rather than trying to enforce expensive brute force legislation that must constantly fight against the market forces. Furthermore, I must agree with your parent, that when they do write opinion pieces they do a much better job of backing up thier point of view than most. Even though I don't always agree with them, they always make me think.
Lastly, they do attempt (and in my opinion usually succeed) in presenting unbiased reports of the other points of view. They do this because they have a genuine interest in understanding the dynamics of the political and economic systems that we are engulfed in. They are above all pragmatic and realise that you cannot develop an educated opinion or course of action if you ignore the elements that make up the situation.
The first thing that came to my mind was what use is a patent to a non-profit? I mean what else can you do with a patent other than profit from it's licencing? Anyway with this tax write off bit - how do you determine the market value of a patent when you file your taxes? It's not like stocks or goods, where you can look at what it is currently selling for in the market and use that value.
Lastly, if you can get a tax write off for donating patents to a non-profit, how about creating a non-profit who accepts patents and then licenses them under a non-revokable, restrictionless license. This would allow corporations to protect themselves from someone else patenting their inventions, and get a tax write off, for choosing not to inforce their patent. Seems like it would be a good idea, at least until we get some real patent reform.
Lets look at it another way. If you ask "Is this tolerable?" then there is always an argument that it is, and the system will just continue to get worse, but we will get accustumed to it, and each successive change won't look that bad.
We should instead be asking "Is this necisarry or benificial to society?". That is the whole purpose of patents - to provide individual incentive so that technology progesses quicker than it would otherwise. So ask yourself - did this invention require a large investment to discover that can only be recouped by granting a monopoly on it's use? No. I'm sure discovering the invention itself did not require any substantial investment. Implementing it will but those are normal business costs and don't need to be protected as everyone who implements this idea will have to pay them, not just the inventor.
Do the benifits of having the plans to this invention out in the open, as opposed to it being kept as a trade secret, overweight the detriment of having to wait 20 years to use those plans? No - this is a concept whose details are obvious once implemented and thus there is no chance for the inventor to hoard this idea as trade secret. In other words, the plan will be in the open regardless of whether it is patented or not, so it does not benifit society to wait 20 years for what it could have now.
Would the inventor still have invented this as quickly if patent system did not exist? Yes, and not only that but I am sure the bank would also have implemented the idea even if they couldn't patent it. This patent does nothing to benifit society so there is no reason that a sensible patent system should allow it.
You missed the "trying to find and download increasingly obscure songs". That's why I used napster back in the day. I always have and always will buy the music I like. But napster was an awesome place to find b-sides, live music, and other rare music from your favorite artists. While you were at it, you could browse the music collection of the people you were downloading from and discover new bands. About 1/4 of the albums I bought during that period were from bands I discovered on napster. Lastly it allowed for situation like he mentioned where you partying at 3 in the morning and have the spontaneous desire to listen to some random song that you haven't heard in years.
I haven't used any filesharing programs since before napster was shut down (I have always obeyed the spirit of the law, but as I have become more outspoken about certain things I've decided to also obey the letter of the law, lest people think me a hypocrite). I must say that none of the new download services fill needs at all. Granted, I am not representitive of the filesharing population, seeing as last time I heard the most popular downloads were fifty cent and britney spears. But fortunately, artists are becoming more tech savy, and most now have music samples on thier websites, and there are some interesting music sites spouting up on the web, but none of them offer anything like what napster was.
They can't turn you over to the authorities because file sharing is only a civil offense not a criminal one. The state will only procecute you if you have committed a criminal offense, so the record label's only recourse is to sue you in civil court. At least for now.
However, if you make money from copyright infringement then that is a criminal offense, and you the FBI does procecute people over that.
Hmm, interesting. One gotcha that you need to keep your eye open for is the ending "/". For example, if you say:it will rename dir1 to dir2, overwriting the contents of dir2 if files of the same name already exist. But if you say:it will move dir1 into dir2, as a subdirectory.
Don't know if that was the case, but thought I'd mention it.
Cheers!
This means that foobar.dll v1.0 and foobar.dll v1.1 can exist on disk at the same location (to the requesting program).
.NET comes in. There is no more DLL hell. :P
This is already possible in Linux and has been for years (it probably inherited the practice from other unices before it was created). The way that linux handles different versions of the same libraries is actually really nice. You can read about it here . Where the problem comes in is that that either the package manger doesn't like to install multiple versions of the libraries, or the user isn't aware that it is possible. I think that the latter is the more common case. The user sees that they need library version Y, and they have X so they naturally upgrade the package rather than installing it beside the existing one.
This is where
Kind of live WinForms/Avalon
Every situation is unique, and sometimes different situations require different actions. You see the simularities between two situations, and your opinion is that differences are nonconsequential, but that doesn't mean the other person thinks they same way. They might think that the differences are very important and the simularities are nonconsequential. That doesn't mean that they have a double standard or are hypocritical, it just means that they put different value on the various aspects of the situations than you.
:)
It's just like the Kerry is a waffler fallacy. Votes for PATRIOT act, then when he actually gets to read it, changes his mind. Does not vote for iraq funding, but latter does when the source of the funding is changed. To a conservative pundit, there is not concievable reason not to support things go towards "national security", but Kerry disagreed. The same way a libertarian can't think of any reason to give up privacy, but the conservatives think that that it is sometimes necesarry. That does not mean that they are hypocrites, it means they see things differently than you.
Even if they are wrong
NO WARRANTY
11. Because this genetic material is licensed free of charge, there is no warranty for the genetic material, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the genetic material "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the genetic is with you. Should the genetic material prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
12. In no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who may modify and/or redistribute the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the implantation or inability to implant the genetic material (including but not limited to loss of gentic offspring or genetic offspring being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the genetic material to interoperate with any other genetic material), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Seeing as how these are guides for system administrators, I don't see how your parents need to know any of this. Besides it isn't a knowledge problem that this solves, but a business problem.
This is a loose agreement by ISP's about what they need to do on thier part to confront spam. These things would improve the situation, but ISP's are reluctant to implement them out of fear that the user will become angry with the tightened security problem and go to another ISP. And I am not talking about spammers, I am talking about everyday users who don't like to be told to patch thier systems or get off the internet.
So what this guidelines does is provide a unified front - a lowest common denominator policy that all the ISPs are willing to implement. It will improve the situation somewhat, but will not be too noticable by the user, and to the extent that it is they can't leave and go somewhere else because all the major ISP's will be doing it.
You beat me to it :P
Anyway, about that warm summer nights thing. The only place I have lived in New Mexico that stays warm at night is Albuquerque, because all the concrete absorbs the heat all day and then releases it all night. Most everywhere else is wonderfull at night. That is actually one of my favorite things about the desert climate - no matter how hot it gets during the day it still cools down at night due to having no humidity. I can't stand being out in the East or down the South during the summer, where it is hot and muggy all day and then warm and muggy all night.
my favorite tool for todo-lists is my palm. I have tried many different task list programs, and even with a good one (like omni outliner for OS X), I find myself rarely using them. Having something that is sitting right there on my desk where it is always visable and I have instant access to it all day long is far more usefull than an application than I have to start up. When I don't have my palm I end up like you, resorting to sticky notes (which are too small) or notebook paper (which gets lost in all the rest of my papers).
Furthermore, unlike a desktop application, I can take my palm with me to lab, the field, the other lab across the street, the grochery store... you get the point. The only complaint I have about the palm is that I wish it let me have more catagories. I have about 10 catagories for home use and another half dozen for all the projects at work, and some of those could really be broken into sub catagories (one of the reasons that omni-office rocks: nested todo-items). But still, the palm is the most used todo tool I have ever had.
hehe I just read all of that and realized I could be talking about writing notes on my hand, and everything I said would still makes sense.
The licence cost part is correct depending on how you look at it. When most people talk about software licences they are thinking of EULAs, which are supposed "licences to use". So what they are saying is that you don't need to pay someone to get a licence to use the software. Which is absolutely true - there is no cost, monitarily or in source, to use open source software.
:)
Of couse we all know that you don't need a license to use software, just to redistrubute it, so those EULAs aren't really licences at all. They are just notices that say you have no licence to distribute, as well as an attempt to get you to agree to a bunch of things that probably aren't legaling binding anyway, since EULAs are not valid contracts.
Open source licences on the other hand are real distribution licences. But the only cost is when you want to redistribute derivitives works, in which case, the cost is the source to those derivative works. In the standard user's perception of "software license" there is no cost.
Just splitting hairs
In addition to those, the method that most animation studios use is really more of a digitizer than a scanner. The way it works is you have a pen whose position in three space is monitored. They you go and touch the tip of the pen to the model. Each touch is registered in the computer as a point of the surface of the model. So you keep putting in points as you see fit, and when you are done, some software makes a mesh out of all of the points.
Quake III does indeed use NURBS objects for all of the curved landscape. It generates a meshes from the NURBS object when loading the level, the detail of which is dependent on the capabilities of your system.
Huh? Punch cards were not a major plot point, they were just an irrelevent form of media. Any form of media would have worked just as well and no-one complained that the movie didn't use punch cards. What they complained about was the fact that the underlying philosophical dilemas were not accurately preserved. Those dilemas are timeless and are the entire point of the story.
That is what makes a good movie adaptation. Since you have a different medium you must change the details of the plot to have good pacing for the timeframe alloted, and there are many other minor details which are flexible, but if one preserves the nature of the characters, the universe, and the theme of the book then it is a good adaptation. The flaw in the Minority Report and Total Recall is that they didn't understand what was minor detail and what was central to the story.
Read the fine article. You are correct that mesh optimization has been a most popular MA/PhD thesis subjects for over two decades. Which is exactly why someone comming up with a method that is an order of magnitude better than any other previous method is big news.
Also for all those questioning it's usefullness, you need not look any further than 3D scanning. When it comes to detailed models, very few things are done by scratch, instead the are digitized using one of many scanning techniques. This model is then massaged by hand by an artist. This technique would allow you to get a much better first cut, saving time for the artists.
Lastly, quake and others generated meshes from smooth NURBS objects. This is quite different, and much easier than generating one mesh object from another. Those tequniques are not usefull for scanned objects where you start with a dense mesh object.
The problem with this is that it doesn't provide a stable paycheck. If you look at many open source projects, they refuse to take donations simply because the money wouldn't help them (other than hosting). If you are a volenteer free software developer, getting a few bucks might be nice, but it won't enable you to spend anymore time writting free software than you already do. You have commitments to your job, schooling and family, and in most cases you don't have the flexibility to work less job hours (and get paid less) as you get more donations. If developers will not accept donations for what they are already doing, why would they go after a bounty? So no, I don't see it being the future of free software. The future will continue to be a mix of businesses that use and need to improve open source software, and volenteers.
It is true that in both cases people contribute their talent and labor to a collaborative project. But unlike open source software, you are building off of and distributing someone else's work without their permission. That is illegal, and is exactly what SCO is claiming happens in OSS but it doesn't.
Not being able to read unlicensed work from other countries is a drag, and I don't particularly blame you for breaking the law when no-one is getting hurt. But it concidering how much FUD and confusion is already being spread by opponents of OSS, it really doesn't help for well-meaning people to muddy the waters with analogies like this.
Proof by contridiction that all natural numbers are interesting:
Suppose that there is at least one uninteresting natural number. One of those numbers must be the smallest uninteresting number.
Now that's pretty interesting.
I could have swore that alltel owned cricket, but apparently they have been owned by leap wireless since thier inception.
But anyway my experiance with both alltel and cricket has been the same.
Interesting that Alltel (aka cricket) isn't on the most hated list. Every single person that I know (here in New Mexico) that has used thier service has complained about thier customer service and about half of them have had billing problems. Most of them have since switched to Verison or Sprint, depending on if coverage or gsm digital was more important to them.
Maybe they aren't as bad in other states.