Even if this is the case; Novell can simply GPL the relevant code (IF there is any) or release it into the public domain. It is probably of little (business) interest to them anyway.
Of course, SCO might still then have a case against IBM, but Linux would be safe.
As a sidenote, I'd say that people generally give far too much credit to anything with a digital readout... people belive that computers are infallible.. or at least very accurate. (perhaps it's the fault of digital wristwatches, which do happen to be quite accurate for their size and cost)
Teaching physics, I often have to tell the students to use common sense instead of blindly trusting the meter.
For instance, in the lab we have digital slide calipers with no less than three(!) digits after the decimal point. Obviously, the real precision is nowhere near one micrometer (just look at how a real micrometer is built and you'll see what I mean) but the students will nevertheless assume it has that precision unless you tell them otherwise.
Once, a group of students hadn't zeroed the caliper properly, and all their readings were off by 3 cm, an error which should've been obvious as the measured object was only 10 cm. (The calipers also have an plain ruler-scale on it as well.)
It all just goes to show that fancy digital gadgets will almost always win over common sense.
Today, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the civilian agency of the US Government responsible for researching and making available data concerning the physical properties of substances including chemical elements, annouces the discontinued use of francium as the name of the 87th chemical element.
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door. It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
Well.. they've been saying that for years and years now, and it just hasn't shown itself to be true.
Mainframes have a completly different design and philosophy from the ground up. They are machines built for a specific purpose. (handling massive amounts of data and I/O reliably and securely)
Workstations just aren't like that.. A multi-purpose machine will never outbeat a machine built for a specific purpose.
I know a mainframe guy who's been in the business for 30 years. He's yet to se a machine 'crash' (in the PC sense of the word).. Replace that with 100 workstations and you'll always have something to fix..
As a sidenote: The Welch patent expires next month! (the 20th of June) GIFs will soon be free!
(Well, with the exception of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, where it expires 27 dec 2004, as well as Japan, don't know when that one is due..)
It may be interesting to see what happens.. you might end up with a funny situation like when the encryption-export restrictions caused browser makers to have one version for the US and one foreign version.. which of course didn't stop people outside the US from using the strong-encryption version.
Isopropanol doesn't cut through grease or goo really because it is not a petroleum product. Alcohols are products of fermentation of organic material.
Isopropanol is a petroleum product. Only ethanol is produced by fermentation. And where the stuff comes from has nothing to do with the chemical properties.
Is someone keeping statistics on this? Perhaps we could extrapolate CmdrTaco's repost-delay and figure out approximately when he will lose all near-memory and become like the guy in the film Memento?
.RAR compression uses blocks, like bz2 (See other posts about this) and is therefore not suitable for compressing streams.
Also, your comparison is flawed, looking at the compression factors you achived (and the file size) I'm guessing that what you're trying to compress already is. (a DivX file?)
Game development is not what it used to be. Nor will it be again. Get over it.
As computer games have become mainstream entertainment, the industry has also gone the same way: A few large companies serving 99% of the audience.
Anyone who is litterate can write a book. Anyone with a camera can make a movie. Very few writers get published, and few amateur moviemakers go big-time. Why would it be any different for game developers?
Writers can always publish themselves and there's always UHF freqencies and public-access for the amateur TV-producer. Shareware and such are the computer game equivalents of these. Nothing wrong with that. Many Hollywood directors started out with a Super-8 as well.
But please, don't pretend that you can turn back time to when competitive computer games could be produced by a lone independent developer.
Seriously! Given the number of times the "death of the paper document" was predicted and the amount of "paperless office" ideas floated, one must say that there is still nothing like good old hardcopy.
In fact, computers have increased the amount of paper used. A rep. for a paper-mill I once visited said that the laser printer was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Computers are great for distribution. But they've got a long way to go if they want to beat paper at (text) presentation.
Why not get a copy of the library of congress records? They've got quite a lot of books in there and they're public, so you should be able to get them at the cost of reproduction. (although, given the sheer size, that might mean some money)
Seems to me to be a good 'skeleton' for a database like this.
>>This explanation is just crackpot-science. >(Why do geeks so often get defensive when you point out gaps in science's perfection?)
No, I just get irritated when people flaunt their own ignorance as an argument that something must be poorly understood by everyone else as well.
>>Crystal growth and dendrite-formation are well-understood subjects within physical chemistry.
>Not symmetries that are maintained over distances of a millimeter or more.
What do you supposedly mean by "symmetry"? Snowflakes are not perfectly symmetric. Anyway, dendrite formation simulation (at the macroscopic scale) is a popular subject in numerical methods. Here's a quick link off google.
>>Suggesting that all water molecules in a snowflake crystal vibrate in harmony in a state of equillibrium violates the laws of thermodynamics.
>Which law is that? Conservation of Chaos?;^/
That's one way of putting it, if you like. Although "maximation of chaos" would be better. The second law of thermodynamics.
Molecular vibrational levels are Boltzmann-distributed at equillibrium, if all molecules in an ensemble were to vibrate at the same level they would have low entropy, in time (and in crystals this can be as slow as 10^-10 s) the distribution of vibrations among the molecules will spread out until a Boltzmann distribution is reached.
This explanation [caltech.edu] is obviously handwaving-- the symmetry is perfect (or close to it) over scales of millions of molecules.
I've been arguing since 1980 or so that an ice crystal in freefall is not at absolute zero (obviously) so it must have internal vibrations. This is basically 'noise', but as it echoes thru the ice, it stops looking random and becomes symmetrical, like Chladni patterns [google.com] on a vibrating plate or drumhead. (Or like the radiating circles from a drip of water into a circular pool, reconverging at an opposite point.) Because these symmetries are present from the first stage of growth, they maintain symmetrical growth. [snip]
This explanation is just crackpot-science. Crystal growth and dendrite-formation are well-understood subjects within physical chemistry.
Of course their explanation is grossly simplified, that page is oriented towards the layman, not inorganic chemists. If you don't understand it, read a book on the subject.
Molecular vibrations are present at absolute zero, they're called zero-point vibrations and are a well-known consequence of quantum theory.
Suggesting that all water molecules in a snowflake crystal vibrate in harmony in a state of equillibrium violates the laws of thermodynamics.
Call that "discrimination" is hardly justified, what it most likely is, is good old managerial incompetence, perhaps with a dashing of conservatism as well.
Anyone who claims that one programming language is superior for all and any purpose is obviously incompetent to make such decisions.
Personally, I wouldn't stay long at a company like that. Unfortunately these kinds of things are very, very, common. Bosses know one way of doing things, and they want it done that way, no matter if its not a good way or not.
Maybe it's the fact that terrorists don't read scientific journals.
Why not? Because scientific journals present new research, and you don't need new knowledge to produce biological and chemical weapons. Sarin gas was first manufactured in 1938. Mustard gas long before that. Almost anyone who has studied a fair amount of organic chemistry can make this stuff. It's all common knowledge.
As for bioweapons.. the same thing goes. Making penicillin-resistant E. Coli takes undergraduate biotech skills. (at least at my uni.)
Want to make botulism toxin, one of the most toxic substances known? Leave a bottle of garlic in oil on top of your refrigerator for a few weeks.
Or maybe we should just ban education? And books and libraries. Knowledge is dangerous, kids.
It's just another example of how stupid most DRM schemes are.
Ok, maybe this one isn't so stupid, it might take the cracker, oh say.. a few minutes longer to figure this out than if they'd written to the system registry instead.
Perhaps futile is a better word? Even managment should be able to figure this out: The user has the same degree of control over his machine as software does. Either you seperate these freedoms (read: Palladium) or you do something non-standard (e.g. non-redbook-CD protection methods), in the latter case you will break something.
Now selling broken software is one thing, but selling software likely to clobber the rest of your system, that's just plain crapware.
(Hmm, and what if some other piece of software uses the same DRM scheme and writes over the same sector again, then what does Joe Sixpack do?)
Everything in kanji (pictures) can be written in hiragana the "native" phonetic alphabet. There is no real problem converting that to romaji (English, ASCII etc). It is even be easier since there is no confusion caused by starting with a writing system similar to romaji.
I agree. There is no real problem for a japanese-speaker to convert to romaji. It's almost impossible for them to use a computer without this knowledge. Romaji translitterations are consistent, as well.. but the problem is that they are not always consistent with how a native english-speaker would translitterate. (even translitterating an english word to katakana and then "back" to romaji doesn't really work say:"SevenEleven"-->"SebunElebun" in Japan)
But you are correct in pointing out that they do have rules for translitteration, which is a at least a good step in the right direction.
Usually the problem is that, as in your case, the name contains characters that are not native to other languages.. well.. get rid of the accents! That should fix everything. Use BOTH. (Of course, if such a thing were allowed.)
Of course, that's the obvious solution. OTOH, the problem with this is that translitteration isn't easy, or consistent.
Swedish characters like å, ä, ö, for example: English-speakers usually "brush the dirt off" and write a and o instead. But the correct translitteration is aa, ae and oe, respectively. (With japanese it gets even worse..)
Not to mention names like München (Munich).. Should the have www.münchen.de or www.munchen.de or www.muenchen.de or www.munich.de or all of them?
(Actually they do have all of these except the first, ironically..)
Ok.. now I have full understanding why people want DNS adresses in their own language.
For instance, I live in Sweden, where the township of Mönsterås has to use the URL "monsteras", which happens to mean "monster-carcass"..
But on the other hand, a big point of the internet is that it's supposed to be international, how are for instance americans supposed to type unique swedish characters to find the web site?
Not to mention chinese and japanese sites..
If english words made any sense
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 3, Funny
then lackadaisically would mean "with a shortage of flowers"..
Slashdot Mirror
Rick Blaine: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Police Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[A croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Police Captain Renault: [sotto voice] Oh, thank you very much.
Even if this is the case; Novell can simply GPL the relevant code (IF there is any) or release it into the public domain.
It is probably of little (business) interest to them anyway.
Of course, SCO might still then have a case against IBM, but Linux would be safe.
As a sidenote, I'd say that people generally give far too much credit to anything with a digital readout...
people belive that computers are infallible.. or at least very accurate.
(perhaps it's the fault of digital wristwatches, which do happen to be quite accurate for their size and cost)
Teaching physics, I often have to tell the students to use common sense instead of blindly trusting the meter.
For instance, in the lab we have digital slide calipers with no less than three(!) digits after the decimal point.
Obviously, the real precision is nowhere near one micrometer (just look at how a real micrometer is built and you'll see what I mean) but the students will nevertheless assume it has that precision unless you tell them otherwise.
Once, a group of students hadn't zeroed the caliper properly, and all their readings were off by 3 cm, an error which should've been obvious as the measured object was only 10 cm.
(The calipers also have an plain ruler-scale on it as well.)
It all just goes to show that fancy digital gadgets will almost always win over common sense.
Today, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the civilian agency of the US Government responsible for researching and making available data concerning the physical properties of substances including chemical elements, annouces the discontinued use of francium as the name of the 87th chemical element.
Actually, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry is the governing body on element names..
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door. It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
Well.. they've been saying that for years and years now, and it just hasn't shown itself to be true.
Mainframes have a completly different design and philosophy from the ground up.
They are machines built for a specific purpose. (handling massive amounts of data and I/O reliably and securely)
Workstations just aren't like that.. A multi-purpose machine will never outbeat a machine built for a specific purpose.
I know a mainframe guy who's been in the business for 30 years. He's yet to se a machine 'crash' (in the PC sense of the word).. Replace that with 100 workstations and you'll always have something to fix..
As a sidenote: The Welch patent expires next month! (the 20th of June) GIFs will soon be free!
(Well, with the exception of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, where it expires 27 dec 2004, as well as Japan, don't know when that one is due..)
It may be interesting to see what happens.. you might end up with a funny situation like when the encryption-export restrictions caused browser makers to have one version for the US and one foreign version.. which of course didn't stop people outside the US from using the strong-encryption version.
Isopropanol doesn't cut through grease or goo really because it is not a petroleum product. Alcohols are products of fermentation of organic material.
Isopropanol is a petroleum product. Only ethanol is produced by fermentation. And where the stuff comes from has nothing to do with the chemical properties.
..between reposts now.
Is someone keeping statistics on this?
Perhaps we could extrapolate CmdrTaco's repost-delay and figure out approximately when he will lose all near-memory and become like the guy in the film Memento?
.RAR compression uses blocks, like bz2 (See other posts about this) and is therefore not suitable for compressing streams.
Also, your comparison is flawed, looking at the compression factors you achived (and the file size) I'm guessing that what you're trying to compress already is. (a DivX file?)
There are thousands of units of independently produced games being sold right this minute. Thousands.
Sure. And there are also thousands of people watching UHF television as well.
Would you say that they're competing with the major TV-networks? I wouldn't.
In the words of the article.
Game development is not what it used to be. Nor will it be again. Get over it.
As computer games have become mainstream entertainment,
the industry has also gone the same way:
A few large companies serving 99% of the audience.
Anyone who is litterate can write a book.
Anyone with a camera can make a movie.
Very few writers get published, and few amateur moviemakers go big-time.
Why would it be any different for game developers?
Writers can always publish themselves and there's always UHF freqencies
and public-access for the amateur TV-producer.
Shareware and such are the computer game equivalents of these.
Nothing wrong with that. Many Hollywood directors started out with a Super-8 as well.
But please, don't pretend that you can turn back time to when competitive computer games
could be produced by a lone independent developer.
Seriously! Given the number of times the "death of the paper document" was predicted
and the amount of "paperless office" ideas floated,
one must say that there is still nothing like good old hardcopy.
In fact, computers have increased the amount of paper used.
A rep. for a paper-mill I once visited said that the laser printer was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Computers are great for distribution. But they've got a long way to go
if they want to beat paper at (text) presentation.
Why not get a copy of the library of congress records?
They've got quite a lot of books in there and they're public, so you should be able to get them at the cost of reproduction.
(although, given the sheer size, that might mean some money)
Seems to me to be a good 'skeleton' for a database like this.
>>This explanation is just crackpot-science.
;^/
>(Why do geeks so often get defensive when you point out gaps in science's perfection?)
No, I just get irritated when people flaunt their own ignorance as an argument that something must be poorly understood by everyone else as well.
>>Crystal growth and dendrite-formation are well-understood subjects within physical chemistry.
>Not symmetries that are maintained over distances of a millimeter or more.
What do you supposedly mean by "symmetry"? Snowflakes are not perfectly symmetric.
Anyway, dendrite formation simulation (at the macroscopic scale) is a popular subject in numerical methods. Here's a quick link off google.
>>Suggesting that all water molecules in a snowflake crystal vibrate in harmony in a state of equillibrium violates the laws of thermodynamics.
>Which law is that? Conservation of Chaos?
That's one way of putting it, if you like. Although "maximation of chaos" would be better.
The second law of thermodynamics.
Molecular vibrational levels are Boltzmann-distributed at equillibrium, if all molecules in an ensemble were to vibrate at the same level they would have low entropy, in time (and in crystals this can be as slow as 10^-10 s) the distribution of vibrations among the molecules will spread out until a Boltzmann distribution is
reached.
This explanation [caltech.edu] is obviously handwaving-- the symmetry is perfect (or close to it) over scales of millions of molecules.
I've been arguing since 1980 or so that an ice crystal in freefall is not at absolute zero (obviously) so it must have internal vibrations. This is basically 'noise', but as it echoes thru the ice, it stops looking random and becomes symmetrical, like Chladni patterns [google.com] on a vibrating plate or drumhead. (Or like the radiating circles from a drip of water into a circular pool, reconverging at an opposite point.) Because these symmetries are present from the first stage of growth, they maintain symmetrical growth.
[snip]
This explanation is just crackpot-science.
Crystal growth and dendrite-formation are well-understood subjects within physical chemistry.
Of course their explanation is grossly simplified, that page is oriented towards the layman, not inorganic chemists.
If you don't understand it, read a book on the subject.
Molecular vibrations are present at absolute zero, they're called zero-point vibrations and are a well-known consequence of quantum theory.
Suggesting that all water molecules in a snowflake crystal vibrate in harmony in a state of equillibrium violates the laws of thermodynamics.
Call that "discrimination" is hardly justified,
what it most likely is, is good old managerial incompetence,
perhaps with a dashing of conservatism as well.
Anyone who claims that one programming language is superior for all and any purpose is obviously incompetent to make such decisions.
Personally, I wouldn't stay long at a company like that. Unfortunately these kinds of things are very, very, common. Bosses know one way of doing things, and they want it done that way, no matter if its not a good way or not.
I don't even know where to start..
Maybe it's the fact that terrorists don't read scientific journals.
Why not? Because scientific journals present new research, and you don't need
new knowledge to produce biological and chemical weapons.
Sarin gas was first manufactured in 1938. Mustard gas long before that.
Almost anyone who has studied a fair amount of organic chemistry can make this stuff.
It's all common knowledge.
As for bioweapons.. the same thing goes. Making penicillin-resistant E. Coli takes undergraduate biotech skills.
(at least at my uni.)
Want to make botulism toxin, one of the most toxic substances known?
Leave a bottle of garlic in oil on top of your refrigerator for a few weeks.
Or maybe we should just ban education?
And books and libraries. Knowledge is dangerous, kids.
It's just another example of how stupid most DRM schemes are.
Ok, maybe this one isn't so stupid, it might take the cracker, oh say..
a few minutes longer to figure this out than if they'd written to the system registry instead.
Perhaps futile is a better word?
Even managment should be able to figure this out:
The user has the same degree of control over his machine as software does.
Either you seperate these freedoms (read: Palladium) or you do something non-standard
(e.g. non-redbook-CD protection methods), in the latter case you will break something.
Now selling broken software is one thing, but selling software likely to clobber the
rest of your system, that's just plain crapware.
(Hmm, and what if some other piece of software uses the same DRM scheme
and writes over the same sector again, then what does Joe Sixpack do?)
Guess I know what the next version of Tux Racer is going to look like..
Yes, it may be unknown to most users, but that doesn't mean it's hidden any more than most features in Office.
Anyway, AFAIK a better (non-ODBC) MySQL driver for openoffice.org has been up there on their to-do list for quite some time.
So why not scratch that itch instead?
Computer evolution is starting to look like biological evolution (sorry to all the Creationists...)
What do you mean?
On the sixth day (1986), God created a computer in his image.
The Amiga.
Everything in kanji (pictures) can be written in hiragana the "native" phonetic alphabet.
There is no real problem converting that
to romaji (English, ASCII etc). It is even be easier since there is no confusion caused by starting with a writing system similar to romaji.
I agree. There is no real problem for a japanese-speaker to convert to romaji.
It's almost impossible for them to use a computer without this knowledge.
Romaji translitterations are consistent, as well.. but the problem is that they are not always consistent with how a native english-speaker would translitterate.
(even translitterating an english word to katakana and then "back" to romaji doesn't really work say:"SevenEleven"-->"SebunElebun" in Japan)
But you are correct in pointing out that they do have rules for translitteration, which is a at least a good step in the right direction.
Usually the problem is that, as in your case, the name contains characters that are not native to other languages.. well.. get rid of the accents! That should fix everything. Use BOTH. (Of course, if such a thing were allowed.)
Of course, that's the obvious solution.
OTOH, the problem with this is that translitteration isn't easy, or consistent.
Swedish characters like å, ä, ö, for example:
English-speakers usually "brush the dirt off" and write a and o instead. But the correct translitteration is aa, ae and oe, respectively.
(With japanese it gets even worse..)
Not to mention names like München (Munich)..
Should the have www.münchen.de or www.munchen.de or www.muenchen.de or www.munich.de or all of them?
(Actually they do have all of these except the first, ironically..)
Ok.. now I have full understanding why people want
DNS adresses in their own language.
For instance, I live in Sweden, where the township of Mönsterås has to use the
URL "monsteras", which happens to mean "monster-carcass"..
But on the other hand, a big point of the internet is that it's supposed to be international,
how are for instance americans supposed to type unique swedish characters to find the web site?
Not to mention chinese and japanese sites..
then lackadaisically would mean "with a shortage of flowers"..
/usr/games/fortune)
(Yes, I get all my posts from