That's part of my point too. You can't accurately judge it, and if you don't, you punish exceptional student either at bad schools at good schools or at both.
What happens when an exceptional student goes to a poor school? Where I'm from, the state gives scholarships to the top SAT scorer at each school. In previous years at my school, that was usually in the 1300s -- one year it was 1180. My year was different. I got a 1560 and most of my friends were over 1300. Should my 4.0 (perfect) GPA have counted less than that of someone at another school just because the average student at my school didn't do well in previous years? Why should I have been punished for not wanting to go the the expensive and snobby private school were I live? I liked the people at the school I went to and it was very convenient to go there. Even if you evaluate it on a yearly basis (before application deadlines are due?), you still have the problem of a really good student in a really bad class.
The second problem comes more from college experience since I went to a small school (hence the lack of an exceptionally high student or two every single year to keep the top score from being so low). What happens if your GPA is lowered because you happened to get the shaft teacher that time around? It's shouldn't reflect on you that the two Biology teachers in your high school grade so differently. Student in one class would tend to have lower average GPAs while students in the other one would have higher average GPAs. This cannot be easily corrected due to new teachers arriving each year and teachers getting stuck teaching a class one time due to staff contraints. It would be a nightmare to track this nation-wide and couldn't be done correctly. I know that in college my GPA has gotten hit a couple of times from being stuck with professors that graded extremely harshly compared to others, who simply didn't teach the material they tested on, etc. In short, you can't accurately weigh the entire school because the data isn't fine-grained enough.
In short, with this system, how do you compare a 100% on a test at loser school A against a 100% on a test in the same class at super-tough school B without unfairly promoting students at loser school A who wouldn't have done nearly that well at super-tough school B and without panning perfectly good students who just happened to be stuck at loser school A and can't do any better than perfect?
Of course, this is just on the school level, not even the teacher level where you could just be unlucky enough to the get shaft professor who grades tougher than the others teaching the class at the same school.
(I just lost 20 minutes of typing my original response to this to Mozilla botching the submission. No bitterness here...)
To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.
Then, no "profit-driven" member will adopt the technology. The whole point of standards is to avoid having the industry big-wigs develop redundant, incompatible technologies that lock in customers. With things like DRAM, no one who isn't "profit-driven" can really benefit from the work of a standards committee. Just try and manufacture a new RAM standard in your garage.
Standards bodies are good, and it's essential to get the big companies on board to adopt the technologies created and to bring the experience in manufacturing and design that other entities just simply don't have.
While I have a very low opinion of corporations in general, especially profit-driven public corporations, the majority of companies realize that acting against a standards organization is counter-productive. The only people who can afford to are all near-monopolies, such as Microsoft, or little underhanded IP clearinghouses with no actual product like Rambus.
I'm just worried that companies like Rambus have spoiled the process for everyone else. Just like the article said, it's like a sporting event where you expect everyone to be playing fair. When someone doesn't, it casts doubt on all the other athletes and the event itself. The last thing we need is for Rambus's actions to destroy confidence in open standards organizations.
How so? Could you please point me to something (recent) comparing the two? I mean, those are pretty bold words. I've been using Mozilla on my Mac and Linux machines at home and my Windows box at work. It's been very stable and usable for me.
My only real problem has been that you get "Connect refused" errors a lot more than in Communicator 4.X and that it will mess with your back/forward list of sites visited when you do. So, I don't really see it as a "buggy piece of shit," but could you show me something about feature comparisons between the two?
All my user names that aren't variants of my real name are based on RPG characters. Valdrax is the name of my all-time favorite character, even though I only got to play it for 4 sessions, and the character cannot really be replayed outside of that game world. So, I use it as a screen name, in lieu of getting to play the character again.
Most of my passwords are also really obscure RPG references too -- with numbers thrown in because of draconic password requirements. I had to give that up on the public server at my college where they force you to change it every 90 days, they remember the last 5-6 passwords, and they won't let you change it twice in a 24-hr period. You just have to pick a consistent series at that point.
I had a friend who wrote a C program back in the DOS days to rename a directory from NAME to "NAME.space-DEL-space". He had a few other hidden utility programs to move in and out of those directories. Perfectly valid as far as any program and the OS was concerned, but truly impossible to type on the command line.
You mean it's and AD&D reference, and it's not from Grimtooth, the trollish author of the ever wonderful Grimtooth's Traps?
(Heh. I have a friend who goes by Four Skulls, after a character or his named after what he thought was the deadliest trap rating in Grimtooth Traps. It's actually five, but since he was a Chinese sorceror, and four is a homonym for death in Chinese and Japanese, it just fit too well....but I digress.)
If it's encrypted, how do you know it's a conversation until you've decrypted it?
I'd like to know exactly what kind of signal would go back and forth between a cell phone and cell tower that does not qualify as some sort of conversation. You can't reasonably defend listening in on scrambled phone conversations by saying that you were looking for the few that weren't conversations. It's a silly argument. You're still invading someone's privacy.
Not really. Movie studios make their money from controlling the distribution of a product. Modern technological advances make cost-free distribution and duplication of materials a possibility. To justify selling something with potentially $0 manufacturing cost beyond the original movie production, they have to have absolute control over its distribution so that they are the only source. If they have competition who can offer their product for less than them, they won't make up the original cost of production, much less the rich profits they rake in beyond it.
If they can go further and make sure that they not only control the hard copy distribution but also the individual viewings of the material they own, as they are moving to do, they can force even greater profits out of the pay-per-use model that companies are working towards.
Modern companies realize that they have 3 choices:
1) Compete with people offering their own products for free.
2) Squelch that competition and go about business as usual.
3) Squelch that competition and take advantage of the copy control schemes to squeeze even more profits than they have now out of users of their products.
Guess which one any publicly-owned corporation, who has nothing to answer to except their stock owners and the pockets of their executives, would pick?
I don't know about this, I guess it could just be me, but I dont think I could ever see a Crusoe inside a server. Now if they were doing some massively parallel stuff like 8 of them all in one box it might be feasible, but the whole reasoning behind it seems a bit shaky.
If you run the article through Babelfish and actually read it, you'll see that that's what they are talking about. In the same space you can fit 42 1U rack-mount dual-Pentium III boards (with requisite cooling) for a total of 84 processors, RLX will fit 750 Crusoe processors. 9X the CPUs with less power consumption and heat. Not bad in my opinion.
Technically, discoveries and solutions considered obvious to practicioners of the art/trade in question aren't patentable under current patent law. This should include existing genes and the brick under the tire you mentioned. It's just that the US patent office has forgotten their own rules.
A good thing too, since America was never intended to be a democracy, but rather a republic. Yes, there is a difference.
Straw man. A Republic is a form of democracy. It's not Athenian Democracy, if that's what you mean.
For the record, I am a well-educated college graduate in a high-population area and am quite glad that Al Gore did not win. Have you considered
that it may be possible for intelligent people to have a difference of opinion?
Why yes. I have differences of opinions with many Slashdotters in the realm of politics, particularly with the more Liberatarian inclined. Most of them are very intelligent. In fact, up until the end of this election, I had regular friendly arguments with a very conservative, very Republican best friend of mine.
He and others here are not who I am talking about. I am talking about family, old acquantances from high school, and my college roommates who have all acknowledged that they don't follow politics and who all voted for Bush. As a counterpoint, most uninformed big-city voters voted for Gore. This is the way it is. However, rural voters have more influence than inner-city voters. That's the electoral college.
This is the first time I've ever seen a Democrat complaining about uninformed people voting.
I'm not really a Democrat so much as I'm an anti-Big Business independent. That aside, I was just as disgusted by those campaigns. Once again, an uninformed electorate (of any sort) is just as destructive to democracies as self-interest and laziness are to Communist governments and non-governmental power abuses are to Liberatarian ideals.
I voted. In fact, I voted for a number of candidates that lost, including Vice-President Gore. In fact, I believe he actually had 300,000+ more votes than the guy who is getting the office. My vote did not count. I live in a conservative state that went 60-70% to Bush. My vote couldn't have counted under our electoral system, which is intended to give low population areas disproportionate say compared to high population areas.
My vote was meaningless. However, it was not as bad as it could've been. If you live in North Dakota, your vote counts nearly 3 times as much as the vote of someone in California. You vote for 1 representative + 2 senators worth of electoral seats while a Californian (with about 57 or so electoral votes) votes for 1 and 2/57ths of an electoral seat when you spread it all out. Look at a map, by county, of which candidate won. High population areas voted for Gore, while the vast geographic majority or the nation, low-population rural areas, went to Bush. Pity, then, the minority voice of any state, for it is mute.
In essence, country bumpkins who probably don't follow politics unless its dictated to them by conservative talk radio shows shape the future of the nation far more than me, an educated college student living in a high-population area.
Why shouldn't I be apathetic? I've cared passionately about issues in politics ever since I was in middle school. I've debated, argued, and tried to convince people around me that there are serious issues going on in the government that will effect the rest of our lives. Have I made any differences? Maybe, in one or two people who would've been inclined to vote for the candidate that's most likely to take the right stand anyway. I've just given people who have made up their mind more reasons to vote the way they wanted and more reasons for others to simply think I'm wrong or to avoid politics further.
People don't care about facts anymore. The cornerstone of a democracy is the informed electorate. We don't have one anymore. Maybe we never did really, but history is not a thing that I can touch and see all around me like I can the willful ignorance of the people surrounding me. It's not without irony that our next president is quoted as saying the following about his opponent:
"The fact that he relies on facts--says things that are not factual--are going to undermine his campaign." --New York Times, March 4, 2000
We laugh at it when we take it at face value, but GWB was absolutely right. Al Gore was hurt by the non-factual things in the campaign -- the subjective perceptions of the voters. American voters put far more stock in charisma. All of GWB's bumbling and digs at Gore's intellectualism only endeared him more in the hearts of the American people. You remember them. They're the same ones who always picked on the smart kids at school -- the same ones who laughed when those kids were tormented for success. America has earned the succession of loser presidents that it has had since the 50s.
People like myself don't have a say anymore. People like myself don't have a chance in politics anymore. It's not about how passionate you are about positive change or how informed and creative you are anymore. It's about how well you can smile and lie through your teeth about how much you love your fellow man and how well you will defend the things they all care about out of the goodness of your heart in spite of proffered money for doing the opposite. As long as you can encourage the uninformed to vote, and you've got the heart of those who don't understand what interests you really represent, you can win -- even if you don't have the most votes.
This is why I no longer care. American democracy is a lie.
Obviously you care so much about this issue that you didn't bother to follow the link or read the other posts about it not going to anything.
By the way, who says that it's not alright to rip off GPL'ed software, but it is alright for GPL'ed software to rip off the works of commercial companies? Yeah, X fonts suck, but as the inventor of TrueType fonts, Apple has the right to choose to ask for money for its patents. So far, Apple has declined to do so -- not that you'd know since Slashdot headlines are the cannonical truth to many Slashdot readers. So what if they did? It's their right, and the FreeType project has gone in with eyes wide open that they are in violation of several decade old patents.
But, whatever... Anti-Mac trolls have never been ones to give a damn about facts.
Somewhat related to 5:
6a) I build a closed-source application that makes use of a library that provides a set of services for which there is a GPL'ed implementation. I don't build against the GPL'ed version, but it is binary compatible. I don't distribute a copy of the library -- maybe the commercial versions are expensive. What if I suggest that the GPL'ed version may be a solution for users but don't include it in my distribution, so that users choose to dynamically link with that GPL'ed library with my approval.
6b) What if I don't endorse it, and a user does it anyway?
Oh, hey, that's a great idea. My code can't be used to help my nation, even if I want it to because I'm forced by some other code to GPL it, but it can be used to help out my nation's enemies because they don't respect me.
Yeah, let me discourage my military from using technology that peopl around the world work to make the best so that they'll be forced to use something like Windows. We've all seen how well that worked out for the Navy.
Okay, I'll admit that I apparently don't understand the GPL at all.
Are the following situations illegal under the GPL?
1) I write a GPL'ed application that links to a closed-source, proprietary library, such as Motif, and distribute just my application's source.
2) In updating the code of a commercial, closed-source package at work, I take advantage of a GPL'ed library. I make no changes to the library, and I include the source of the library in the distribution, but due to not wanting to have my company not sue my ass off, I don't include the source to the entire project. The library is not statically linked into the program -- it is installed seperately.
3a) For this same piece of software, I include several shell scripts to do parts of the functionality with customized versions of a few GPL'ed utilities. I include the source for the GPL'ed utilities, but I do not include to source for the larger package that includes and actually invokes these shell scripts to do certain tasks. The shell scripts are not GPL'ed.
3b) The shell scripts are GPL'ed, but the app that calls them still isn't.
4a) I build the closed application with a hacked up version of bison. I include that bison and it's source code, but not the application's.
4b) I do not include that version of bison or its source.
5) My closed-source package talks to a CORBA object that defines a well-known interface. That object is replaced with a GPL'ed version on some user's machine.
If any of these are illegal, then isn't this extremely unfriendly to every known license other than the GPL, including the BSD licenses and public domain licenses?
Umm.. That press release link says absolutely nothing about Alpha processors. It's highly doubtful that IBM would help one of its major competitors against its new Power4 chip by giving them a leg-up on finding a better manufacturing process.
'Course, it could be true. They have been fabbing chips for AMD and letting AMD use their copper interconnect technology. (They and Motorola seem to be making it abundantly clear that they don't care about the desktop market, much to my frustration.) I just doubt that IBM would help a competitor in the server market.
"I see, sir. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. This man's name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
(I couldn't resist a good Fight Club reference here.)
Yeah. It scares them so much that these customization features magically appeared in their software without being written.
Apple has usually been pretty indifferent about UI customization programs like Kaleidoscope. Apple keeps the UI consistent for newbies, but quietly writes in hooks for more advanced users to play with the system. Why do you think they released ResEdit as freeware years and years ago? They don't advertise what you can do, but it's all there. Apple seems to quietly approve of Mac users who like to tweak their system.
It's the blindness of people who are reliant on text files and CLIs to configure their system that leads to the Mac having a reputation of being uncustomizeable. Read any old Mac publication back-issues for a span of 3-4 months if you want to find an article on customizing your system. It was a pretty common thing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's part of my point too. You can't accurately judge it, and if you don't, you punish exceptional student either at bad schools at good schools or at both.
Two problems, both from personal experience:
What happens when an exceptional student goes to a poor school? Where I'm from, the state gives scholarships to the top SAT scorer at each school. In previous years at my school, that was usually in the 1300s -- one year it was 1180. My year was different. I got a 1560 and most of my friends were over 1300. Should my 4.0 (perfect) GPA have counted less than that of someone at another school just because the average student at my school didn't do well in previous years? Why should I have been punished for not wanting to go the the expensive and snobby private school were I live? I liked the people at the school I went to and it was very convenient to go there. Even if you evaluate it on a yearly basis (before application deadlines are due?), you still have the problem of a really good student in a really bad class.
The second problem comes more from college experience since I went to a small school (hence the lack of an exceptionally high student or two every single year to keep the top score from being so low). What happens if your GPA is lowered because you happened to get the shaft teacher that time around? It's shouldn't reflect on you that the two Biology teachers in your high school grade so differently. Student in one class would tend to have lower average GPAs while students in the other one would have higher average GPAs. This cannot be easily corrected due to new teachers arriving each year and teachers getting stuck teaching a class one time due to staff contraints. It would be a nightmare to track this nation-wide and couldn't be done correctly. I know that in college my GPA has gotten hit a couple of times from being stuck with professors that graded extremely harshly compared to others, who simply didn't teach the material they tested on, etc. In short, you can't accurately weigh the entire school because the data isn't fine-grained enough.
In short, with this system, how do you compare a 100% on a test at loser school A against a 100% on a test in the same class at super-tough school B without unfairly promoting students at loser school A who wouldn't have done nearly that well at super-tough school B and without panning perfectly good students who just happened to be stuck at loser school A and can't do any better than perfect?
Of course, this is just on the school level, not even the teacher level where you could just be unlucky enough to the get shaft professor who grades tougher than the others teaching the class at the same school.
(I just lost 20 minutes of typing my original response to this to Mozilla botching the submission. No bitterness here...)
To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.
Then, no "profit-driven" member will adopt the technology. The whole point of standards is to avoid having the industry big-wigs develop redundant, incompatible technologies that lock in customers. With things like DRAM, no one who isn't "profit-driven" can really benefit from the work of a standards committee. Just try and manufacture a new RAM standard in your garage.
Standards bodies are good, and it's essential to get the big companies on board to adopt the technologies created and to bring the experience in manufacturing and design that other entities just simply don't have.
While I have a very low opinion of corporations in general, especially profit-driven public corporations, the majority of companies realize that acting against a standards organization is counter-productive. The only people who can afford to are all near-monopolies, such as Microsoft, or little underhanded IP clearinghouses with no actual product like Rambus.
I'm just worried that companies like Rambus have spoiled the process for everyone else. Just like the article said, it's like a sporting event where you expect everyone to be playing fair. When someone doesn't, it casts doubt on all the other athletes and the event itself. The last thing we need is for Rambus's actions to destroy confidence in open standards organizations.
How so? Could you please point me to something (recent) comparing the two? I mean, those are pretty bold words. I've been using Mozilla on my Mac and Linux machines at home and my Windows box at work. It's been very stable and usable for me.
My only real problem has been that you get "Connect refused" errors a lot more than in Communicator 4.X and that it will mess with your back/forward list of sites visited when you do. So, I don't really see it as a "buggy piece of shit," but could you show me something about feature comparisons between the two?
All my user names that aren't variants of my real name are based on RPG characters. Valdrax is the name of my all-time favorite character, even though I only got to play it for 4 sessions, and the character cannot really be replayed outside of that game world. So, I use it as a screen name, in lieu of getting to play the character again.
Most of my passwords are also really obscure RPG references too -- with numbers thrown in because of draconic password requirements. I had to give that up on the public server at my college where they force you to change it every 90 days, they remember the last 5-6 passwords, and they won't let you change it twice in a 24-hr period. You just have to pick a consistent series at that point.
I had a friend who wrote a C program back in the DOS days to rename a directory from NAME to "NAME.space-DEL-space". He had a few other hidden utility programs to move in and out of those directories. Perfectly valid as far as any program and the OS was concerned, but truly impossible to type on the command line.
You mean it's and AD&D reference, and it's not from Grimtooth, the trollish author of the ever wonderful Grimtooth's Traps?
...but I digress.)
(Heh. I have a friend who goes by Four Skulls, after a character or his named after what he thought was the deadliest trap rating in Grimtooth Traps. It's actually five, but since he was a Chinese sorceror, and four is a homonym for death in Chinese and Japanese, it just fit too well.
If it's encrypted, how do you know it's a conversation until you've decrypted it? I'd like to know exactly what kind of signal would go back and forth between a cell phone and cell tower that does not qualify as some sort of conversation. You can't reasonably defend listening in on scrambled phone conversations by saying that you were looking for the few that weren't conversations. It's a silly argument. You're still invading someone's privacy.
Not really. Movie studios make their money from controlling the distribution of a product. Modern technological advances make cost-free distribution and duplication of materials a possibility. To justify selling something with potentially $0 manufacturing cost beyond the original movie production, they have to have absolute control over its distribution so that they are the only source. If they have competition who can offer their product for less than them, they won't make up the original cost of production, much less the rich profits they rake in beyond it.
If they can go further and make sure that they not only control the hard copy distribution but also the individual viewings of the material they own, as they are moving to do, they can force even greater profits out of the pay-per-use model that companies are working towards.
Modern companies realize that they have 3 choices:
1) Compete with people offering their own products for free.
2) Squelch that competition and go about business as usual.
3) Squelch that competition and take advantage of the copy control schemes to squeeze even more profits than they have now out of users of their products.
Guess which one any publicly-owned corporation, who has nothing to answer to except their stock owners and the pockets of their executives, would pick?
I don't know about this, I guess it could just be me, but I dont think I could ever see a Crusoe inside a server. Now if they were doing some massively parallel stuff like 8 of them all in one box it might be feasible, but the whole reasoning behind it seems a bit shaky. If you run the article through Babelfish and actually read it, you'll see that that's what they are talking about. In the same space you can fit 42 1U rack-mount dual-Pentium III boards (with requisite cooling) for a total of 84 processors, RLX will fit 750 Crusoe processors. 9X the CPUs with less power consumption and heat. Not bad in my opinion.
Nope. I'm getting it too. It looks like, once again, the Slashdot editors posted a link without bothering to follow it themselves.
Technically, discoveries and solutions considered obvious to practicioners of the art/trade in question aren't patentable under current patent law. This should include existing genes and the brick under the tire you mentioned. It's just that the US patent office has forgotten their own rules.
A good thing too, since America was never intended to be a democracy, but rather a republic. Yes, there is a difference.
Straw man. A Republic is a form of democracy. It's not Athenian Democracy, if that's what you mean.
For the record, I am a well-educated college graduate in a high-population area and am quite glad that Al Gore did not win. Have you considered
that it may be possible for intelligent people to have a difference of opinion?
Why yes. I have differences of opinions with many Slashdotters in the realm of politics, particularly with the more Liberatarian inclined. Most of them are very intelligent. In fact, up until the end of this election, I had regular friendly arguments with a very conservative, very Republican best friend of mine.
He and others here are not who I am talking about. I am talking about family, old acquantances from high school, and my college roommates who have all acknowledged that they don't follow politics and who all voted for Bush. As a counterpoint, most uninformed big-city voters voted for Gore. This is the way it is. However, rural voters have more influence than inner-city voters. That's the electoral college.
This is the first time I've ever seen a Democrat complaining about uninformed people voting.
I'm not really a Democrat so much as I'm an anti-Big Business independent. That aside, I was just as disgusted by those campaigns. Once again, an uninformed electorate (of any sort) is just as destructive to democracies as self-interest and laziness are to Communist governments and non-governmental power abuses are to Liberatarian ideals.
I voted. In fact, I voted for a number of candidates that lost, including Vice-President Gore. In fact, I believe he actually had 300,000+ more votes than the guy who is getting the office. My vote did not count. I live in a conservative state that went 60-70% to Bush. My vote couldn't have counted under our electoral system, which is intended to give low population areas disproportionate say compared to high population areas.
My vote was meaningless. However, it was not as bad as it could've been. If you live in North Dakota, your vote counts nearly 3 times as much as the vote of someone in California. You vote for 1 representative + 2 senators worth of electoral seats while a Californian (with about 57 or so electoral votes) votes for 1 and 2/57ths of an electoral seat when you spread it all out. Look at a map, by county, of which candidate won. High population areas voted for Gore, while the vast geographic majority or the nation, low-population rural areas, went to Bush. Pity, then, the minority voice of any state, for it is mute.
In essence, country bumpkins who probably don't follow politics unless its dictated to them by conservative talk radio shows shape the future of the nation far more than me, an educated college student living in a high-population area.
Why shouldn't I be apathetic? I've cared passionately about issues in politics ever since I was in middle school. I've debated, argued, and tried to convince people around me that there are serious issues going on in the government that will effect the rest of our lives. Have I made any differences? Maybe, in one or two people who would've been inclined to vote for the candidate that's most likely to take the right stand anyway. I've just given people who have made up their mind more reasons to vote the way they wanted and more reasons for others to simply think I'm wrong or to avoid politics further.
People don't care about facts anymore. The cornerstone of a democracy is the informed electorate. We don't have one anymore. Maybe we never did really, but history is not a thing that I can touch and see all around me like I can the willful ignorance of the people surrounding me. It's not without irony that our next president is quoted as saying the following about his opponent:
"The fact that he relies on facts--says things that are not factual--are going to undermine his campaign."
--New York Times, March 4, 2000
We laugh at it when we take it at face value, but GWB was absolutely right. Al Gore was hurt by the non-factual things in the campaign -- the subjective perceptions of the voters. American voters put far more stock in charisma. All of GWB's bumbling and digs at Gore's intellectualism only endeared him more in the hearts of the American people. You remember them. They're the same ones who always picked on the smart kids at school -- the same ones who laughed when those kids were tormented for success. America has earned the succession of loser presidents that it has had since the 50s.
People like myself don't have a say anymore. People like myself don't have a chance in politics anymore. It's not about how passionate you are about positive change or how informed and creative you are anymore. It's about how well you can smile and lie through your teeth about how much you love your fellow man and how well you will defend the things they all care about out of the goodness of your heart in spite of proffered money for doing the opposite. As long as you can encourage the uninformed to vote, and you've got the heart of those who don't understand what interests you really represent, you can win -- even if you don't have the most votes.
This is why I no longer care. American democracy is a lie.
Obviously you care so much about this issue that you didn't bother to follow the link or read the other posts about it not going to anything.
By the way, who says that it's not alright to rip off GPL'ed software, but it is alright for GPL'ed software to rip off the works of commercial companies? Yeah, X fonts suck, but as the inventor of TrueType fonts, Apple has the right to choose to ask for money for its patents. So far, Apple has declined to do so -- not that you'd know since Slashdot headlines are the cannonical truth to many Slashdot readers. So what if they did? It's their right, and the FreeType project has gone in with eyes wide open that they are in violation of several decade old patents.
But, whatever... Anti-Mac trolls have never been ones to give a damn about facts.
Somewhat related to 5: 6a) I build a closed-source application that makes use of a library that provides a set of services for which there is a GPL'ed implementation. I don't build against the GPL'ed version, but it is binary compatible. I don't distribute a copy of the library -- maybe the commercial versions are expensive. What if I suggest that the GPL'ed version may be a solution for users but don't include it in my distribution, so that users choose to dynamically link with that GPL'ed library with my approval. 6b) What if I don't endorse it, and a user does it anyway?
Oh, hey, that's a great idea. My code can't be used to help my nation, even if I want it to because I'm forced by some other code to GPL it, but it can be used to help out my nation's enemies because they don't respect me.
Yeah, let me discourage my military from using technology that peopl around the world work to make the best so that they'll be forced to use something like Windows. We've all seen how well that worked out for the Navy.
Okay, I'll admit that I apparently don't understand the GPL at all.
Are the following situations illegal under the GPL?
1) I write a GPL'ed application that links to a closed-source, proprietary library, such as Motif, and distribute just my application's source.
2) In updating the code of a commercial, closed-source package at work, I take advantage of a GPL'ed library. I make no changes to the library, and I include the source of the library in the distribution, but due to not wanting to have my company not sue my ass off, I don't include the source to the entire project. The library is not statically linked into the program -- it is installed seperately.
3a) For this same piece of software, I include several shell scripts to do parts of the functionality with customized versions of a few GPL'ed utilities. I include the source for the GPL'ed utilities, but I do not include to source for the larger package that includes and actually invokes these shell scripts to do certain tasks. The shell scripts are not GPL'ed.
3b) The shell scripts are GPL'ed, but the app that calls them still isn't.
4a) I build the closed application with a hacked up version of bison. I include that bison and it's source code, but not the application's.
4b) I do not include that version of bison or its source.
5) My closed-source package talks to a CORBA object that defines a well-known interface. That object is replaced with a GPL'ed version on some user's machine.
If any of these are illegal, then isn't this extremely unfriendly to every known license other than the GPL, including the BSD licenses and public domain licenses?
Umm.. That press release link says absolutely nothing about Alpha processors. It's highly doubtful that IBM would help one of its major competitors against its new Power4 chip by giving them a leg-up on finding a better manufacturing process.
'Course, it could be true. They have been fabbing chips for AMD and letting AMD use their copper interconnect technology. (They and Motorola seem to be making it abundantly clear that they don't care about the desktop market, much to my frustration.) I just doubt that IBM would help a competitor in the server market.
A weasel... with a joint and a porno mag.
More innovation has come out of development on Linux than from M$ and crApple combined.
Okay. Let's play a game. You name something innovative done on Linux and I'll tell you the source it originally came from or was inspired by.
"I see, sir. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. This man's name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
"His name is Robert Paulson."
(I couldn't resist a good Fight Club reference here.)
Wonderful. Copyright violation. Just what Slashdot needs more of. Are you out to get them sued?
Yeah. It scares them so much that these customization features magically appeared in their software without being written.
Apple has usually been pretty indifferent about UI customization programs like Kaleidoscope. Apple keeps the UI consistent for newbies, but quietly writes in hooks for more advanced users to play with the system. Why do you think they released ResEdit as freeware years and years ago? They don't advertise what you can do, but it's all there. Apple seems to quietly approve of Mac users who like to tweak their system.
It's the blindness of people who are reliant on text files and CLIs to configure their system that leads to the Mac having a reputation of being uncustomizeable. Read any old Mac publication back-issues for a span of 3-4 months if you want to find an article on customizing your system. It was a pretty common thing.