Appearantly [sic] the law firm acted in a vile, repulsive, extortionist, and legal manner, given German law.
Unless I misread the explanation of the law given by Florian Gleisner at the end of the article, I don't think that's quite true:
"Several law firms in Germany have taken up the business of writing "Abmahnungen" to anyone who earns money with a product that can somehow be construed to infringe on somebody else's copyright." (my emphasis)
If that distinction is correct, since Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler gives away the software, he should be safe from this law firm's attack.
EpOX and ECS aside, who ever said that Apple supports ALL x86 hardware?
If (and I doubt this) they do, it would be wise for them to build a mac with specific x86 hardware components and support these only and rely on custom motherboard/bios designs to make sure that only their x86 harware is used. (forgive the run-on my english teacher) Then they can partner with nVidia and release a custom motherboard video card combo that beats normal x86 hardware, and is incompatible with other motherboards.
Does this sound crazy to anyone? I just ate alot of nachos so watch out.
Yes, it does sound crazy. The only reason for Apple to join the x86 rat race would be to take advantage of the low prices and huge installed base of all the commodity hardware out there, and hope many, many people will want to switch to OSX at $120 a pop. Why then saddle themselves by restricting their OS to a custom, proprietary (read expensive) x86 platform that customers would have to buy to run their OS. How is that different from their current situation? What will they call the machine, the MacPS/2? All this market risk and piss off Microsoft at the same time? That's just plain nuts. They might restrict themselves to certain popular motherboards, video cards, etc. and have some success, but that still brings with it the risk of pissing off Microsoft. And Apple badly needs Office and IE for the forseeable future. That said, I hope those nachos were tasty.
Um, not that I agreed with the clown, but he got pretty close (to within about 15% of your number) starting with a number (Theo's) that is probably just an educated guess. That's not too bad. Also, nowhere in the section you quoted does he put a cap on the number of FreeBSD users. He just says there are 'about' that many. And he is right. There are 'about' 40,000 users, if you round to the one sig. fig. he started with. That's a pretty impressive result, considering he was using only the relative number of usenet posts as his yardstick.
As for his contention that *BSD is dead, well, the code is out there, and people are working on it. So we all know better, don't we? Why let him get to you?
When word came out that the K7 (renamed to Athlon) would be using the EV6 bus, there was a lot of speculation that Compaq would be able to take advantage of commodity pricing on chipsets, and that one might even be able to run an Alpha on a K7 motherboard with something as simple as a BIOS upgrade. Now that would have been sweet, and would have made a lot of sense for Compaq, if their intention was to increase market share for Alpha systems. I wonder why it never materialized?
I cannot see how the GPL is incompatible with anti-plagiarism rules in universites. It's beyond trivial for students who wish to plagiarize to find examples of previous solutions in any topic, including Comp. Sci. In any cases, the students are free to re-submit the work whether thy got it in a GPL'd form from an ftp site, off of a friend's floppy disk, or from a summer employer's computer, and the university is free to fail and/or expell and/or prosecute them.
This whole meat eater vs. vegetarian thing is tiresome. Both sides invariable pull out the same arguments, based on the same shallow reasoning.
Humans are omnivores, meaning we require both animal and plant products for a healthy diet. If we were meant to be strictly vegetarian, our digestive tracts would be much longer - more like a cow's. If we were meant to be strict meat eaters, they would be shorter, like a lion's. Our tracts lie somewhere in between - just like our diets.
That said, it is true that mostWesterners eat much more meat than they require for a healthy diet.
Microsoft is not under any obligation to make their operating system to coexist with other, competing operating systems. Insisting that a corporation, which is in business to make money, should respect competing products is just plain lunacy.
False. As a monopoly, Microsoft has to be careful that its actions do not act exclude competitors from the marketplace. In this case they deviated from a long-time practise for no other reason than to make things more difficult for its competitors. It took EFFORT for Microsoft to make this change, a change that hardly affects anyone outside of Powerquest, the Linux distributions and the *BSD flavours. It is a clear-cut abuse of their market power, and yet another annoyance we can chalk up to them. But its not so big a deal, because it's a temporary annoyance. Red Hat, Debian et. al. will find some way to deal with it, and things will be back to normal.
Actually taking a look at the historical surroundings of famous figures sheds light onto their beliefs. It just forces us to realize that these men were extraordinary in their discoveries, not their convictions.
If I had points, I'd mod this post up for this observation alone.
Re:wtf should he need to be a "big fan" of that Po
on
The Art Of The Matrix
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· Score: 1
Also, the human battery idea is a tad lame. Doesn't it waste tremendous amounts of energy growing a human?
I agree. Even if you assume that it isn't lame, and that mammals would make good batteries, why would they choose humans? Why not an animal with a higher metabolism and surface area to volume ratio, like a mouse? Why not just choose simple vengeance as a motive? It's kind of an odd choice of vehicle, really, but it did keep the movie rolling along.
fuckhead, it's 60 70 80 KILOhertz, how many thousands of times a line is drawn.
Um, vertical refresh rates are usually from 60-100 Hertz. That means the screen is redrawn around 80 times a second. The guy was saying there's no point in having higher framerates if the monitor can only draw 80% of them (which is why you turn vsync off for gaming). Of course there are other issues involving fewer dropped frames in graphically intensive maps, multiplayer gaming , etc., that make these high framerates desirable.
While I like the browser, and even the mail client, it does have some major hurdles to overcome. I'm still waiting for all of the javascript to be completed so I can access my online hockey pool, and I've found that a lot of web sites like espn.com don't render properly, probably due to IE-specific code. These might seem like somewhat minor annoyances, I know, but they are what's keeping NS 4.7x on my computer - and that's a major pain.
At RedHat and VA Linux's burn rate of investment capital... Will they still be in existence in 3 years?
I don't know about VA, but according to RedHat their analysts predict profitability by 2002, and a 5 year growth rate of 50%. Their future sounds pretty good to me.
I agree totally. I also have issues with the 'medusa index' cron job that comes as a part of the Nautilus package. Near as I can tell, the program creates an XML snapshot of the file system. I don't run my box 24/7, so anacron usually starts it up when I boot up. Even fully niced, this program takes a good 10 minutes to run on my celermine 850/256/2.2.17 and seriously affects system responsiveness to user input. Yes, I could get rid of it (and did), but it was a pain while it lasted...
As for all you weenies saying they should be prosecuted or forced to pay for all the time lost, just go ahead and subtract that from the $200 million+ your state has stolen from our province.
Um.. I'm from BC. What the hell are you talking about?
Ah... yes... but I bet your soda can entered the water directly. Those boys merely hung the car off the bridge. It was the authorities who completed the process by cutting it loose - thereby becoming accessories in the crime. Very clever of those students, don't you think?
I'm a UBC engineering alumnus. The 'bug stunts' began there in the late 1960's when a beetle was placed on top of the library's clock tower. They've been thinking of new and exciting places to put them ever since.
UBC's engineers have long had a rivalry with the forestry students. The rivalry often extended to demolishing the forestry students' beater of a car that they used to ride around campus with a bullhorn promoting their parties, etc. My favourate stunt was when the engineers stole the car, cut it up, and rebuilt it - around a tree. Beautiful.
That's not loads to work with for a 5-channel audiophile A/V system. Heck, you won't get much change from 4 PSB Alpha's and a decent sub.
Bottom line for you would be to go to your nearest audio/video mart, see what's in your price range, and give them a listen. If you like one, that's all that matters.
The real point is that de Jaeger wasn't really a doomsayer. He was saying for two years PRIOR to 2000 that the problem was basically licked. If he was really a shyster he could have spent those two years making a @^*%-load of money and REALLY cashing in.
*shrug* He should have sold the web site. This crap he's taking now would be a lot more tolerable with a few more zeroes at the end of his bank account.
A closer one would be if this was a lock-smithing class and he was told he would get a reward if he could pick the front door lock to the school, went ahead and did it - after hours when the school door is actually locked - then got busted for letting them know that he did it. A student makes little distinction among the authority figures in his school, so ends up being perceived as more than a little deceptive, and of course, completely unfair.
The teacher obviously didn't believe any of his students could pull off the crack, and is too spineless to step up for his students when one of them gets into trouble as a direct result of his teaching. The example this teacher is presenting for his students is appalling. What ever happened to integrity?
While it would be nice to have Free drivers that worked, I see no problem with using the binary only drivers, if they are of higher quality. After all, if you have work to get done, which is worse, having to use binary-only drivers, or using Free drivers of marginal quality?
NVidia has done a good service providing high quality drivers that WORK NOW. While I applaud ATi with their support of the XFree driver writers, the quality of the drivers has been lagging far behind their Windows cousins.
Like you I suspect a great deal of the GNU/Linux popularity comes from the "wow, you can sure get a lot of cool stuff for free on the net" mentality. If there is a way to determine how large this factor is, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in the result.
It isn't surprising at all that it is the producers of Free Software who receive the least benefit from it. That's how capitalism works. There will always be disparing views on the values of things, and people ready, willing and able to exploit these variations. The system couldn't work otherwise. It would be nice if more hackers worked for themselves, reaping more of the benefits from their work, but there are always going to be those willing to sacrifice a little economic gain for security.
I enjoyed your thoughts on the BIOS issue. I had a long, meandering paragraph written here prior to previwing, but then managed to distill the ideas down to a single sentence: I don't know either.
Slashdot Mirror
"Several law firms in Germany have taken up the business of writing "Abmahnungen" to anyone who earns money with a product that can somehow be construed to infringe on somebody else's copyright." (my emphasis)
If that distinction is correct, since Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler gives away the software, he should be safe from this law firm's attack.
are powerlines copper? :)
I think they're usually aluminum (copper is 'spensive).
Um, not that I agreed with the clown, but he got pretty close (to within about 15% of your number) starting with a number (Theo's) that is probably just an educated guess. That's not too bad. Also, nowhere in the section you quoted does he put a cap on the number of FreeBSD users. He just says there are 'about' that many. And he is right. There are 'about' 40,000 users, if you round to the one sig. fig. he started with. That's a pretty impressive result, considering he was using only the relative number of usenet posts as his yardstick.
As for his contention that *BSD is dead, well, the code is out there, and people are working on it. So we all know better, don't we? Why let him get to you?
When word came out that the K7 (renamed to Athlon) would be using the EV6 bus, there was a lot of speculation that Compaq would be able to take advantage of commodity pricing on chipsets, and that one might even be able to run an Alpha on a K7 motherboard with something as simple as a BIOS upgrade. Now that would have been sweet, and would have made a lot of sense for Compaq, if their intention was to increase market share for Alpha systems. I wonder why it never materialized?
I cannot see how the GPL is incompatible with anti-plagiarism rules in universites. It's beyond trivial for students who wish to plagiarize to find examples of previous solutions in any topic, including Comp. Sci. In any cases, the students are free to re-submit the work whether thy got it in a GPL'd form from an ftp site, off of a friend's floppy disk, or from a summer employer's computer, and the university is free to fail and/or expell and/or prosecute them.
This whole meat eater vs. vegetarian thing is tiresome. Both sides invariable pull out the same arguments, based on the same shallow reasoning.
Humans are omnivores, meaning we require both animal and plant products for a healthy diet. If we were meant to be strictly vegetarian, our digestive tracts would be much longer - more like a cow's. If we were meant to be strict meat eaters, they would be shorter, like a lion's. Our tracts lie somewhere in between - just like our diets.
That said, it is true that mostWesterners eat much more meat than they require for a healthy diet.
False. As a monopoly, Microsoft has to be careful that its actions do not act exclude competitors from the marketplace. In this case they deviated from a long-time practise for no other reason than to make things more difficult for its competitors. It took EFFORT for Microsoft to make this change, a change that hardly affects anyone outside of Powerquest, the Linux distributions and the *BSD flavours. It is a clear-cut abuse of their market power, and yet another annoyance we can chalk up to them. But its not so big a deal, because it's a temporary annoyance. Red Hat, Debian et. al. will find some way to deal with it, and things will be back to normal.
While I like the browser, and even the mail client, it does have some major hurdles to overcome. I'm still waiting for all of the javascript to be completed so I can access my online hockey pool, and I've found that a lot of web sites like espn.com don't render properly, probably due to IE-specific code. These might seem like somewhat minor annoyances, I know, but they are what's keeping NS 4.7x on my computer - and that's a major pain.
I think it just stores information on the various files, so Nautilus will know how to handle them.
As for why it takes so long... couldn't tell you.
I agree totally. I also have issues with the 'medusa index' cron job that comes as a part of the Nautilus package. Near as I can tell, the program creates an XML snapshot of the file system. I don't run my box 24/7, so anacron usually starts it up when I boot up. Even fully niced, this program takes a good 10 minutes to run on my celermine 850/256/2.2.17 and seriously affects system responsiveness to user input. Yes, I could get rid of it (and did), but it was a pain while it lasted...
Ah... yes... but I bet your soda can entered the water directly. Those boys merely hung the car off the bridge. It was the authorities who completed the process by cutting it loose - thereby becoming accessories in the crime. Very clever of those students, don't you think?
I'm a UBC engineering alumnus. The 'bug stunts' began there in the late 1960's when a beetle was placed on top of the library's clock tower. They've been thinking of new and exciting places to put them ever since.
UBC's engineers have long had a rivalry with the forestry students. The rivalry often extended to demolishing the forestry students' beater of a car that they used to ride around campus with a bullhorn promoting their parties, etc. My favourate stunt was when the engineers stole the car, cut it up, and rebuilt it - around a tree. Beautiful.
That's not loads to work with for a 5-channel audiophile A/V system. Heck, you won't get much change from 4 PSB Alpha's and a decent sub.
Bottom line for you would be to go to your nearest audio/video mart, see what's in your price range, and give them a listen. If you like one, that's all that matters.
The real point is that de Jaeger wasn't really a doomsayer. He was saying for two years PRIOR to 2000 that the problem was basically licked. If he was really a shyster he could have spent those two years making a @^*%-load of money and REALLY cashing in.
*shrug* He should have sold the web site. This crap he's taking now would be a lot more tolerable with a few more zeroes at the end of his bank account.
Nope.
Honors Phys/Math->Engr->Csc->Bus->Poli Sci->Psych->Phil
How many angels have you counted today? Did you notice which ones were dancing?
Brutal analogy.
A closer one would be if this was a lock-smithing class and he was told he would get a reward if he could pick the front door lock to the school, went ahead and did it - after hours when the school door is actually locked - then got busted for letting them know that he did it. A student makes little distinction among the authority figures in his school, so ends up being perceived as more than a little deceptive, and of course, completely unfair.
The teacher obviously didn't believe any of his students could pull off the crack, and is too spineless to step up for his students when one of them gets into trouble as a direct result of his teaching. The example this teacher is presenting for his students is appalling. What ever happened to integrity?
While it would be nice to have Free drivers that worked, I see no problem with using the binary only drivers, if they are of higher quality. After all, if you have work to get done, which is worse, having to use binary-only drivers, or using Free drivers of marginal quality?
NVidia has done a good service providing high quality drivers that WORK NOW. While I applaud ATi with their support of the XFree driver writers, the quality of the drivers has been lagging far behind their Windows cousins.
Like you I suspect a great deal of the GNU/Linux popularity comes from the "wow, you can sure get a lot of cool stuff for free on the net" mentality. If there is a way to determine how large this factor is, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in the result.
It isn't surprising at all that it is the producers of Free Software who receive the least benefit from it. That's how capitalism works. There will always be disparing views on the values of things, and people ready, willing and able to exploit these variations. The system couldn't work otherwise. It would be nice if more hackers worked for themselves, reaping more of the benefits from their work, but there are always going to be those willing to sacrifice a little economic gain for security.
I enjoyed your thoughts on the BIOS issue. I had a long, meandering paragraph written here prior to previwing, but then managed to distill the ideas down to a single sentence: I don't know either.
Hmmm... I think you read that correctly.
Doesn't it then follow that naturalized citizens are then by definition sort of 'second-class citizens'. How comforting.