Uhm, dude, you have a really screwed up image of the Indian IT industry if you think it's 12 year olds banging on a keyboard for 80 hours a week.
I work for a large German IT company. We have a pretty ugly campus. I was in Bangalore last year. Not only are the IT campuses one of the nicest things that you find around, they're just plain helluva lot nicer than the campuses that you find in western companies. The employees make quite decent wages by local standards, and have one of the best work environments that you can find at any job there -- more or less comparable to a western work environment.
If you want to talk about the shitty living conditions in India that's fine. Things do get pretty ugly there. But don't talk about their IT industry in the same breath; it's one of the things that's actually helping to pull small portions of their economy and labor standards up a notch.
I fly these Lufthansa routes fairly often and you're looking at ticket prices of $600 - $900, generally. Granted, you're generally already paying a bit extra to fly Lufthansa (about $50 - $100 more than competitors, generally), but they've got some of the best service to be found with any major international carrier.
Really, at that point the $30 doesn't make much of a difference. The things that you have to consider is that these flights are around 6-10 hours and most folks don't have batteries that last that long. You only get power jacks in business class. Also, depending on your laptop size, many won't fit on the tray in front of the seats (mine won't, but it's a large Fujitsu-Siemens model).
I noticed for the first time recently in the book The Persian Puzzle (on US policy dealing with Iran) that it had a handful of references in its bibliography that pointed to Wikipedia. I think that's a significant step, actually...
Just think of it as a GPL violation. We all get up in arms about that, right?
No, no, no. I'm doing terrible things to my karma here, but people just don't seem to get this.
This is much more like software patents, where we get frustrated with the fact that we're not allowed to copy what somebody already invented. Generally speaking copying is allowed.
Have you ever been to the grocery store? Or maybe the electronics store? Or heck, Radio Shack. Basically every product at Radio Shack ("Realistic" was their store brand) rolls off the same commodity production line as some other name brand item.
There's a big difference between copying a copyrighted work and copying an idea or a design. Every time we complain about patents it's because we're offended by the fact that it's possible to claim exclusive rights on an idea -- not a specific implementation.
Trademark is yet another issue and the one where it looks like there are some issues here. Of course, a registered mark hasn't yet been granted (I checked earlier today). If that mark goes through this company will have a problem; but of course it's perfectly valid for them to contest that it's a generic term used for players and whatnot.
Only in the case that it is in fact a trademark. As Apple does not display a (R) logo for a registered mark or even a (T) logo for a trademark then I assumed that they did not assert one.
It appears that they've applied for a registered mark on their logo (but not the word itself, from what I grok), but haven't yet been granted a registered trademark on the SHUFFLE logo as of now.
And you sir do not understand copyright law at all.
This is nothing like the Pear PC.
If the CherryOS guys decided to make a product from scratch that looked a lot like the Pear PC they would have been in the clear. If they'd decided to call it, let's say, another fruit as a reference to the other trademarked things it's related to, they'd be in the clear (oh, wait -- they did that one).
It's when they actually copied the source code that they had a problem. Unless there's been some foul play in rooting out the design plans from Apple, which noone has suggested.
It's called reverse engineering. And it's perfectly legal. (Well, aside from some possible quirks with DMCA interpretation.) It has nothing to do with copyright infringement.
The only way that this could have issues is with a patent or trademark issue. And I'm not aware of any relevant patents and it seems that Apple does not have a registered mark for the term shuffle.
I don't think there are any trademarks that have been hit and other than that they just kind of look the same and have similar functionality.
As far as I can see this really isn't all that different from walking into the grocery store and finding the generic products that do about the same thing next to the name brand ones.
It's actually generally not from using the mouse -- it's from holding your hand out to the location where your mouse is.
I've been having some relatively minor CTS problems in the last year or so (aside from being a computer dork I play guitar and bass, which are probably worse on the hands and wrists) and when I started complaining about such one of the guys in the office pulled a predecessor to this out of the Cabinet Of Strange Devices (same concept, no scroll wheel and the rolling wheel controls a normal mouse mounted to the thing).
It helps a bit -- it's no miracle, but it does keep you from holding your right arm suspended for several hours a day, and I've only gotten the oh-so-typical-CTS-tingle in my right arm a few times since I started using it and usually later in the day.
The Turkish Technology Channel had a weekly show on Linux; I did an interview there a while back when I was in Turkey. It seems to be now defunt, or at least I assume as much from this page which I can't actually read...
Siemens and Bull (both major vendors in Europe), Dell, and IBM, and probably a lot more that I'm forgetting support ia64.
Actually pretty much every hardware vendor (that's traditionally worked with Intel CPUs) supports ia64 in one way or another.
But this article isn't a surprise. ia64 is just presently a pretty crappy CPU for clustered computing because it's very hot, sucks a lot of power and very expensive. When building a large cluster you naturally have to balance heat, energy and cost against performance much more than you do with most setups.
Not really -- they're both popular "news" sources that double as entertainment and are very popular. You could turn it around and say that you have to compare The Sun to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times since those are the three most popular newspapers in the US.
the rest of the world watches news - america watches fox
Actually there's this assumption that the US news tends to be a lot worse than the rest of the world's; I mean -- it's bad, but it's mostly just notable because it's so exported.
I mean -- Fox News, as bad as it is -- is still quite a step up from Germany's most popular newspaper, Bild Zeitung ("Picture Times"), or how about England's most read paper, The Sun?
It's easy to look at Fox from inside the US and think, "Wow, this is terrible..." and it is, but that's not a unique phenomenon to the US and just as the UK tends to export The Guardian, the BBC, the Economist -- or Germany the Frankfurter Algemeine, Speigel or Die Zeit the US tends to export CNN, Newsweek, the New York Times, the New Yorker and so on. That's not to say that any of those are perfect, but they're markedly better.
Ironically, when I said the same thing yesterday I mentioned the Gentoo / Ricer site; I mean, at least yesterdays mediocre "news" was at least new. This has been there for months...
Your stereotype is all wrong. Most OSS developers are 20-30 and are either university students or full-time IT professionals. Here's just one survey that I dug up quickly.
We basically have no heros in the sense of this article. Despite being one of the largest (quite possibly the largest) and most visible OSS comunities it's become something of a distinctive property of our community that we don't have someone that's out there making a lot of noise.
I'm not sure what really defines a hero; in fact most of our "heros" in the F/OSS community probably aren't those who have contributed the most. More often they're just the guys that are stark-raving-mad and don't want anyone to miss the circus.
It's not really worth the time to explain it here (since it's rather involved and this article was particularly bad), but I'm planning on posting something probably to kde-core-devel once the KDE conference is over. If you're interested you can follow the archives there.
I submitted this talk before Spotlight was announced. Fundamentally they're different concepts, but that's not clear from the pretty poor coverage that's hitting the news sites now.
Well, this idea was from my talk at the KDE developers' conference. I actually submitted it just a few days before Spotlight was announced.
Similar, but more pervasive and based on some pretty different models for data collection and ranking. Unfortunately this article hits at a time when there really isn't any reasonable resource for what the plans are, but that should show up somewhere on public mailing lists in the next week or two.
The important differences are that it will be based on a generalized idea linkage inside of the desktop and that it won't be a stand alone tool, but a framework that can be used for having search-centric UIs throughout the desktop.
It was mentioned that this is similar to KMail and JuK at the moment; while I wrote the search code for both of those and that got some of the ideas rolling in my head, this is a pretty big jump from both of those.
SP2 is a free update. If I download it, put it on a CD, and give it to someone else to install, it's not illegal.
Yes, it is.
There's nothing to "agree" to on the download page. The EULA is built into the setup.
That means nothing. You don't have the right of redistribution unless it's explicitly granted.
I'm sure Microsoft doesn't mind the fact that people on P2P networks are sharing it. It takes the load off their servers.
Ah, so now you represent Microsoft too, eh? People, copyright law just doesn't work this way -- you're not allowed to copy it if they don't explicitly say you can't. You don't have to accept a license to not be able to copy it. You don't have a right to copy it. Period. The only way that you would have a right to copy it is if the copyright holder granted you such, which I'm pretty sure MS didn't. This was set up as a "legitimate use for p2p" but basically it's just another case of p2p being used for copyright infringement.
The RIAA and MPAA won't care at all about this -- they'll just claim it's lies.
There's no reference point and no tracking of purchases not made; you can't make a comparison without a baseline.
Demographically this is going to be very slanted; most consumers wouldn't fill out something like this.
When I read the description I thought, "hey, cool" as I really do buy quite a few of the things that I see or hear first via file sharing, but looking at how it's done this really won't accomplish anything or get anyone important's attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, dude, you have a really screwed up image of the Indian IT industry if you think it's 12 year olds banging on a keyboard for 80 hours a week.
I work for a large German IT company. We have a pretty ugly campus. I was in Bangalore last year. Not only are the IT campuses one of the nicest things that you find around, they're just plain helluva lot nicer than the campuses that you find in western companies. The employees make quite decent wages by local standards, and have one of the best work environments that you can find at any job there -- more or less comparable to a western work environment.
If you want to talk about the shitty living conditions in India that's fine. Things do get pretty ugly there. But don't talk about their IT industry in the same breath; it's one of the things that's actually helping to pull small portions of their economy and labor standards up a notch.
I fly these Lufthansa routes fairly often and you're looking at ticket prices of $600 - $900, generally. Granted, you're generally already paying a bit extra to fly Lufthansa (about $50 - $100 more than competitors, generally), but they've got some of the best service to be found with any major international carrier.
Really, at that point the $30 doesn't make much of a difference. The things that you have to consider is that these flights are around 6-10 hours and most folks don't have batteries that last that long. You only get power jacks in business class. Also, depending on your laptop size, many won't fit on the tray in front of the seats (mine won't, but it's a large Fujitsu-Siemens model).
I noticed for the first time recently in the book The Persian Puzzle (on US policy dealing with Iran) that it had a handful of references in its bibliography that pointed to Wikipedia. I think that's a significant step, actually...
No, no, no. I'm doing terrible things to my karma here, but people just don't seem to get this.
This is much more like software patents, where we get frustrated with the fact that we're not allowed to copy what somebody already invented. Generally speaking copying is allowed.
Have you ever been to the grocery store? Or maybe the electronics store? Or heck, Radio Shack. Basically every product at Radio Shack ("Realistic" was their store brand) rolls off the same commodity production line as some other name brand item.
There's a big difference between copying a copyrighted work and copying an idea or a design. Every time we complain about patents it's because we're offended by the fact that it's possible to claim exclusive rights on an idea -- not a specific implementation.
Trademark is yet another issue and the one where it looks like there are some issues here. Of course, a registered mark hasn't yet been granted (I checked earlier today). If that mark goes through this company will have a problem; but of course it's perfectly valid for them to contest that it's a generic term used for players and whatnot.
Only in the case that it is in fact a trademark. As Apple does not display a (R) logo for a registered mark or even a (T) logo for a trademark then I assumed that they did not assert one.
It appears that they've applied for a registered mark on their logo (but not the word itself, from what I grok), but haven't yet been granted a registered trademark on the SHUFFLE logo as of now.
And you sir do not understand copyright law at all.
This is nothing like the Pear PC.
If the CherryOS guys decided to make a product from scratch that looked a lot like the Pear PC they would have been in the clear. If they'd decided to call it, let's say, another fruit as a reference to the other trademarked things it's related to, they'd be in the clear (oh, wait -- they did that one).
It's when they actually copied the source code that they had a problem. Unless there's been some foul play in rooting out the design plans from Apple, which noone has suggested.
It's called reverse engineering. And it's perfectly legal. (Well, aside from some possible quirks with DMCA interpretation.) It has nothing to do with copyright infringement.
The only way that this could have issues is with a patent or trademark issue. And I'm not aware of any relevant patents and it seems that Apple does not have a registered mark for the term shuffle.
I don't think there are any trademarks that have been hit and other than that they just kind of look the same and have similar functionality.
As far as I can see this really isn't all that different from walking into the grocery store and finding the generic products that do about the same thing next to the name brand ones.
It's actually generally not from using the mouse -- it's from holding your hand out to the location where your mouse is.
I've been having some relatively minor CTS problems in the last year or so (aside from being a computer dork I play guitar and bass, which are probably worse on the hands and wrists) and when I started complaining about such one of the guys in the office pulled a predecessor to this out of the Cabinet Of Strange Devices (same concept, no scroll wheel and the rolling wheel controls a normal mouse mounted to the thing).
It helps a bit -- it's no miracle, but it does keep you from holding your right arm suspended for several hours a day, and I've only gotten the oh-so-typical-CTS-tingle in my right arm a few times since I started using it and usually later in the day.
The Turkish Technology Channel had a weekly show on Linux; I did an interview there a while back when I was in Turkey. It seems to be now defunt, or at least I assume as much from this page which I can't actually read...
Ugh, just replying randomly because I accidentally modded this down instead of up and want to undo my mod...
Siemens and Bull (both major vendors in Europe), Dell, and IBM, and probably a lot more that I'm forgetting support ia64.
Actually pretty much every hardware vendor (that's traditionally worked with Intel CPUs) supports ia64 in one way or another.
But this article isn't a surprise. ia64 is just presently a pretty crappy CPU for clustered computing because it's very hot, sucks a lot of power and very expensive. When building a large cluster you naturally have to balance heat, energy and cost against performance much more than you do with most setups.
KDE has had a plugable metadata framework for years -- KFileMetaInfo. There's also a similar layer in GNOME VFS if I'm not mistaken.
They haven't yet been used for indexing in anything that's presently released, but that's coming.
Not really -- they're both popular "news" sources that double as entertainment and are very popular. You could turn it around and say that you have to compare The Sun to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times since those are the three most popular newspapers in the US.
Actually there's this assumption that the US news tends to be a lot worse than the rest of the world's; I mean -- it's bad, but it's mostly just notable because it's so exported.
I mean -- Fox News, as bad as it is -- is still quite a step up from Germany's most popular newspaper, Bild Zeitung ("Picture Times"), or how about England's most read paper, The Sun ?
It's easy to look at Fox from inside the US and think, "Wow, this is terrible..." and it is, but that's not a unique phenomenon to the US and just as the UK tends to export The Guardian, the BBC, the Economist -- or Germany the Frankfurter Algemeine, Speigel or Die Zeit the US tends to export CNN, Newsweek, the New York Times, the New Yorker and so on. That's not to say that any of those are perfect, but they're markedly better.
Ironically, when I said the same thing yesterday I mentioned the Gentoo / Ricer site; I mean, at least yesterdays mediocre "news" was at least new. This has been there for months...
If you want something informative, there's the old reliable Distro Watch and if you want something funny, try:
I suppose it will probably also be interesting for, uhm, the "national security" folks too. Great. ;-)
Your stereotype is all wrong. Most OSS developers are 20-30 and are either university students or full-time IT professionals. Here's just one survey that I dug up quickly.
OSS developers survey
We basically have no heros in the sense of this article. Despite being one of the largest (quite possibly the largest) and most visible OSS comunities it's become something of a distinctive property of our community that we don't have someone that's out there making a lot of noise.
I'm not sure what really defines a hero; in fact most of our "heros" in the F/OSS community probably aren't those who have contributed the most. More often they're just the guys that are stark-raving-mad and don't want anyone to miss the circus.
It's not really worth the time to explain it here (since it's rather involved and this article was particularly bad), but I'm planning on posting something probably to kde-core-devel once the KDE conference is over. If you're interested you can follow the archives there.
I submitted this talk before Spotlight was announced. Fundamentally they're different concepts, but that's not clear from the pretty poor coverage that's hitting the news sites now.
Well, this idea was from my talk at the KDE developers' conference. I actually submitted it just a few days before Spotlight was announced.
Similar, but more pervasive and based on some pretty different models for data collection and ranking. Unfortunately this article hits at a time when there really isn't any reasonable resource for what the plans are, but that should show up somewhere on public mailing lists in the next week or two.
The important differences are that it will be based on a generalized idea linkage inside of the desktop and that it won't be a stand alone tool, but a framework that can be used for having search-centric UIs throughout the desktop.
It was mentioned that this is similar to KMail and JuK at the moment; while I wrote the search code for both of those and that got some of the ideas rolling in my head, this is a pretty big jump from both of those.
Uhm, you do know that Germany is in the Northern Hemisphere and that it's summer here too, right? It's 34 C (94 F) here in southern Germany today...
- The RIAA and MPAA won't care at all about this -- they'll just claim it's lies.
- There's no reference point and no tracking of purchases not made; you can't make a comparison without a baseline.
- Demographically this is going to be very slanted; most consumers wouldn't fill out something like this.
When I read the description I thought, "hey, cool" as I really do buy quite a few of the things that I see or hear first via file sharing, but looking at how it's done this really won't accomplish anything or get anyone important's attention.