You grabbed one of my points and ran with it, but ignored the rest. Which version of a film should a studio be required to make available forever?
There is NO SUCH THING as an original when it comes to film. None. Doesn't exist. Stop thinking that there is.
There are hundreds of hours of film. That film is turned into a movie through the magic of editing. Sometimes the version released on the big screen differs per market in the U.S. The version released over-seas is NEVER the same. Take Highlander as an example. In Europe, they got a version that had scenes that, IMHO, made it a much better movie, and yet that version wasn't seen in the U.S. until the special edition LaserDisc nearly 10 years later! Would you rather have The Abyss as released in theaters? The one originally released on video (very different from eachother)? How about the one that introduced the public to the term, "Director's Cut"? The latter was the one that had an ending that made any sense at all!
I would argue that there are two things at play here: nostalgia and true cultural legacy. In the case of nostalgia, there's probably buck to be made, and I would argue that studios need to pay more attention to that (take as an example the failure of WB to release Babylon 5 when the series' fans were screaming for it and trying to explain that the series would have more appeal on video than it did on TV... now the DVDs are selling like hot-cakes 10 years later).
As for cultural legacy? That's not the artist's concern. Never has been. You don't tell a painter that he's required to turn over any originals that he might have lying around. Nor do you tell him that he's not allowed to make a limited print run! When collectors own a piece, you don't tell them that they MUST contribute it to a museum. Instead, we offer tax incentives for such charitable acts, and we praise those who do it. There's no requirement. None.
Back to film... Star Wars: A New Hope is another wonderful example. Do you want the movie called "Star Wars"? Sorry, it was destroyed before the movie even got to general release. The movie that hit theaters nation-wide was called "Star Wars: A New Hope" and given the sub-title "Episode IV" with some minor edits to content (I think that's when Biggs was removed from the beginning). Much later, it was re-released on LaserDisc and subtly altered. Much larger alterations happened when it was released as the "Special Edition" in the late 90s. Yet another version will be released in the mid 2000s that will sync with the first three movies.
Which version do you want? Which versions should a studio be required to archive for you? Should they also be required to spend money and resources on making it available to retail markets, or just in a museum of some sort? How exactly do you see the economics of this working out?
The comments in this paper about other systems ignore one of the oldest and largest SPAM filters: SpamAssassin.
SpamAssassin can also be used at the MTA-level, and while this tool might be an interesting test to integrate with SA, its claims that other systems cannot feed back to the sender that their mail has been blocked is flat-out wrong.
Most people do not do this because you are almost certainly getting this mail through a relay, and that relay is going to get the SMTP temporary error and try to send a warning to the user who sent it. Spammers regularly slam my home mail server by using my address as the "From" in an entire batch of spam. It's pretty seriously annoying to get that deluge of junk, and it's not really necessary. If your spam system just identifies spam and lets the user (or sysadmin) decide how to deal with it based on how "spamish" it is, you get a much more reasonable behavior.
I junk thousands of pieces of spam every week, and I *never* junk valid mail. Yes, I do have some spam in my inbox. Most of it is tagged as potential spam, and I delete that after cursory inspection of the from addresses. Some of it is missed, and the overhead that I suffer having to identify that myself is amazingly low compared to not being able to read my mail prior to SA.
Check out SA. The latest version is pretty impressive, and if this "new" technique (I don't think the idea of tracking connection quality is very new, it's certainly done in SA to some extent) turns out to be useful... well SA works on much the same principal as Perl: There's More Than One Way To Do It. Bayes, Blacklists, Whitelists, Obfuscation detection, Checksum trackers, you name it, SA uses it. None of these techniques gets to say "this is spam", they all just get to poke a message in the direction of being spam or non-spam. This leads to something far more reliable than any one techniqe.
There are no ways around good spam protection. I've seen a lot try, and I've talked to a few spammers that are sure the NEXT trick is gonna work....
The problem is that good spam protection is a) a learning system that detects, defines and then filters out noise, keeping signal.
This is a very hard problem, but spam is FAR from the first place that it has been necessary to solve it.
I'll have more comments in a top-level comment, since there are some massive innacuracies in this paper. It's essentially marketting copy, with all the veracity that that implies.
So GIF is free for all of the world except Canada now.
And it's aboot time.
Yep, it's about time Canada had to stand alone!;-)
Seriously, though I hope this fact will become widely recognized enough to spur Canada to fix it's patent system, if for no other reason than to spite the US by fixing theirs first.
Yeah, you can install reiserfs as boot under RH9, AFAICT from the documentation. Baby steps... a company that puts out a new filesystem the day it's released is not the company that I want to do business with. The reason that RH released ext3 when they did is that they had been using it in production for a year. Same goes for reiser. I'm pleased with that level of dedication to QA, and a little dissapointed at the distros that released reiser ASAP only to have massive problems with the FS (all of which are fixed now, as far as I know, so that's good).
That's insanity. First off, that's like saying that the copy of gcc 1.0 that's on prep.ai.mit.edu must never be altered because it's part of our culture. Popycock! It's on thousands of servers across the net. There's nothing special about THAT one.
Second, there's no "original" when it comes to a film. There's the version that's cut for the US opening. The one that's cut for the premeir. The one that's cut for the initial studio review. The one that's cut for the VHS market, DVD, TV (usually several are cut for TV).
Any given movie has dozens of versions and hundreds of hours of footage! If anything you should be arguing for a film museum that gets the raw footage, unedited for archival purposes... that I could get behind, but this idea that what you saw in a theater once is even likely to still exist is just plain silly.
If you feel that this is a just and good thing, then please don't yell at studios and directors for cutting new versions of classic films.
While it may be quite unreasonable (as Lucas has done, and as Turner did before him) to remove a film from distribution entirely after you have made a change, and only distributing the new version, I can't say that anyone has the right to tell such a studio or director to NOT be unreasonable. Certianly as fans, we can voice an opinion, but I've heard some people try to claim that there's some "right" that we have to old movies in the form in which they were released... that's just silly.
I might mourn that I can't get the old version of a film, but I have no right to expect Hollywood to BE the collectables market or an archive for such....
As for companies that do this sort of modification, I respect them. They provide a service that people want, and while I do not think that people should rely on such a service to shelter themselves or their children, I can see the point of letting your kids see The Matrix: Reloaded while not keeping the "She wasn't kissing your face, love" sceene.
Yep, exactly so. You cannot reasonably be expected to avoid downloading something when you don't know if it's legal or illegal, however, if you download 300GB of pr0n, war3z, mu51k and 489281 and then share it back out to the world while simultaneously burning it all to DVD-ROM and selling it at conventions... well, I think you've finished walking the thin-line and have jumped completely into the abyss!;-)
Your assessment of addiction is a bit simplistic, but that might just be because you were "dumbing it down" for the Slashdot audience, not sure.
I've had various reasons for investigating addiction from lots of angles throughout my life, from being addicted to caffine (which is, as you point out primarily a physical addiction) to having a grandfather who was an alcohol addict (recovering for the last 20 years), etc....
My addiction to adderall (AKA D-Amphetamine Salt Combo) is currently only physical as far as I know, so I'm not too worried, I was just noting the concern that psychological addiction *is* possoible with this drug (just ask a "speed freak") and of course, I'll have to suffer the relative discomfort of physical withdrawral if I ever choose to stop.
The real concern is that it doesn't fix anything. All it does is reduce the symptoms, but that leaves me with decades of bad habits, and it has negative side effects.
If I manage to break those habits, I think it would be well worth losing the side effects (of which loss of appetite is the only benificial one, since I used to be obese enough that I had some pretty serious complications due to sleep apnia, and though I lost the weight on my own, Adderall has helped me to keep it off since I've been using it) in order to see if I can get away from those and still keep the benefits of my now-broken bad habits.
This code is too old to matter. Yes, if there were common bits in Linux, they should be removed, but SCO is claiming that code that came into UnixWare in the time frame of late-80s to mid-90s was coppied into Linux by IBM. Code like the SMP work done by Sequent will not appear in any of that source code (though I find it heartening that it still exists on the Net).
If Sequent developed their SMP handling as a separate product that just did processor scheduling and shared resource management, and then built a SysV port *around* it, then I think they're ok. I *think* that that is what they did, given that in the early days of their OS, you could install either a BSD or SysV variant which means that they had at least two versions of that code applied to the wildly different source trees.
If they made the changes to BSD and then IBM incorporated those changes into AIX and Linux while USL applied them to UnixWare, then the code that went into Linux is not a derivative of SysV any more so than BSD is, and THAT fight has been shown to be pathalogically complex to the point that 2 or 3 legal teams have given up.
I agree with pretty much all your points. Yes, most of these chemicals have subtly different effects, and depending on what they are used to treat, that may result in failur or success for specific cases.
Yes also, ADHD is not one problem (AFAIK, no "disorder" has a single cause, a disorder is simply a collection of symptoms that appear in predictable clusters in a large population sample). So, ADHD might well have many root causes including brain defects, chemical damage, environmental influence, etc.
For my part, I think my ADHD was mostly environmental. My home life as a child was a neurotic combination of intense drama and intense lonliness which trained me to entertain myself while grasping quickly and without noticable transition onto any external source of stimulus. I think you'll find that 90% of dorks (or "Door Key Kids") are like this in later life. Being home alone all day, left to entertain themselves and then quickly switching to a social mode when others are around seems to be a sure-fire recipie for this sort of problem. I *know* I've gotten somewhat better since I began a long-term relationship 10 years ago, but I still have 23 years of bad habits and fairlure to develop good habits as a foundation, and the Adderall helps me to focus enough to start breaking those.
Then of course, I'll have to break my addiction to Adderall, but that doesn't seem too bad. The few times I've failed to take it, I have gotten caffine-like withdrawral, but I can cope with that. Psychological addiction would be more of a problem....
It is generally accepted in most countries that I know of that putting a copyrighted document in a public place is tacit permission to view it and copy it in accordance with the local interpretation of fair use.
I don't think there's a court in the world that would interpret this law to mean that I cannot grant permission to download license files for my own works. Your interpretation is rather silly in that respect.
However, I would argue that this law has the far more sinister effect of quashing fair use in the case of modified works (e.g. clips used for reviewing or educational purposes from text or other media as well as works of parody).
Killing fair use is the current top priority of all major media companies. Why? Because not killing fair use means that in the near future when everyones appliances are networked together, no one will bother buyng a CD/DVD/book-on-[media]/etc. that someone they know owns. Even if nominally broadcast media like global filesharing systems are unusable, current fair use certainly would seem to allow for my DVD player sharing a movie with a friend to watch on his TV, as long as the transfer is simply streamed from my player to his TV in the same way that it would be between my DVD player and my TV. After all, that's the same thing as loaning the DVD to my friend, right?
That puts the fear of god into these companies, and that fear (plus the possible increase in revenue if no one can share in the first place) is the sole motivating factor here. Piracy has been a smoke-screen since day one.
In the example that you give, the college helpdesk a) does not lose customers if they can't solve your problem b) does not have to QA everything that they support.
Those two factors should be answer enough to the question of why Red Hat doesn't just support "stuff that runs on my box".
$ rpm -qi kernel Name : kernel Relocations: (not relocateable) Version : 2.4.20 Vendor: Red Hat, Inc. Release : 8 Build Date: Thu Mar 13 18:01:52 2003Install Date: Wed Jun 11 17:18:16 2003 Build Host: porky.devel.redhat.com Group : System Environment/Kernel Source RPM: kernel-2.4.20-8.src.rpm Size : 31954258 License: GPL Signature : DSA/SHA1, Thu Mar 13 18:20:14 2003, Key ID 219180cddb42a60e Packager : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla> Summary&nbs p; : The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system) Description: The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of your Red Hat Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device input and output, etc. $ rpm -ql kernel | grep reiser /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/fs/reiserfs /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/kernel/fs/reiserfs/reiserfs. o
And you didn't get laughed out of the room? Must be a pretty clueless board.
Nope, sounds reasonable to me. He's got his facts right, and his sense of panic in check... smarter than a lot of folks these days.
Your first comparison regarding programming talent is absurdly stupid
Your assertion about the absolute stupidity of the prior assertion is absolutely stupid. This phrase is here to inform you that the previous phrase was stupid, and has been sacked.
whether or not the Linux peer review system could be implemented in a corporate setting is irrelevant
Actually, it's not irrelevant at all. At the heart of many fears is the idea that there's a funnel coming from any tom-dick-and-harry directly into the Linux kernel. Those fears are backed up by just how easy it is in most corporate environments to get a change in to critical code.
The fact that this is impossible in the Linux world and the reasons for that are not well understood, and it bears pointing out. It's not that no one can make a change, it's just that no one can make a change without a hell of a lot of eyes on it and an approval process that would make most politicians blanch. That said, I have to agree with you that it's not relevant to the patent concern directly. It's just a very important piece of anti-FUD in this maelstrom of debate.
So on to patents:
Linus's argument is that the development team shouldn't worry about patent violation
Not exactly what he's saying, I think. Linus' comment is that he and other developers should let the people who own patents bring up their concerns over accidental infringement. At that point, the code should be removed if the team agrees that it infringes. The key thing is that if the developers don't pay any attention to patents, then all infringement is, by definition, accidental.
Linus is simply nodding to the reality that an OS is huge and complex and probably violates dozens of patents (at least enough to be argued in court) without even trying. A well funded company would need years of research and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund that research in order to determine if a closed-source OS violates any patents, and by the time they were done, the code would have changed enough that they would have to start over. The same is true for Linux, only it's changing faster and has less legal resources.
Thus Linus makes the valid point that it's an impossible task, and those who actually care (e.g. the patent holders) should be allowed to make the first move.
Accidental patent infringement is different from willful infringement. Linux would be forced to purchase a license or dump the code, but (IANAL) I don't think they would be required to pay for a license for any previous distributed works. Certainly a company like Red Hat that continues to make money off of those old releases might be forced to fork over a percentage of those future earnings until they EOL the old version or produce a patch that removes the offending code, but to be harsh, that's not Linus' concern, and it doesn't hurt Linux any of Red Hat has to cough up fees from their support revenue for a short time....
According to SCO, yes, but I've seen SCO's idea of "trying to talk". It ammounts to an invoice and a threat for legal action. I'm sure if the communication had begun with a civil request to review IBM's contributions to Linux in light of the licensing agreement over UNIX, IBM would have been willing to talk.
IBM has been quite consistent in this process, and has been very willing to talk to all parties, but unwilling to accept the assertion that they put code from UNIX into Linux. That claim is what they think is without basis, and if SCO simply made that assertion and asked IBM to pay up, why on earth would IBM respond any way other than to tell them to get lost?
You are responding to something I didn't say, and you're wrong to boot.
First off, no it was *exactly* 18 months from when UnixWare first shipped a production release with SMP to when Linux first shipped a production release with SMP. There's no debating those facts, as they are simply facts. it was not 4-5 years, it was 18 months.
Now, as for the "BFL" problem in 2.0 (single locking in the kernel for those who aren't aware of the term, I won't expand the actual acronym), it wasn't a problem. That's one way to do SMP, and it has advantages and disadvantages. The largest and most obvious disadvantage is performance. The largest and most obvious advantage is simplicity of design. A fully preemptable SMP kernel without problems introduced by its design is essentially impossible. Every attempt I've ever seen had massive problems due to the complexities of hardware that have to be exposed all the way up, sometimes even as far as user-land (through the threading model), and any compromise (e.g. the 2.4 series Linux kernel which employs finer granularity locking without full preemptability) is frought with even more difficulty in predicting process responsiveness (as 2.4 has seen). These problems and design trade-offs have been seen since the dawn of symetric multi-processing, and are not at all unique to Linux.
Of course, Linux is now going down the complex, but high-performance route. Personally I prefer the 2.0 series for its rock-solid performance which, while less responsive than one would like from SMP, did manage to be more reasonable for highly interactive high-load tasks such as sorting large mailboxes in a threaded mail reader.
To say that Linux has been "far behind commercial OSes the whole way" is just outright wrong.
Linux did SMP on alpha far better than NT, and while not as well as True64, the earlier encarnation of OSF/1 on Alpha had worse problems. It still has the best HTTP acceleration, packet filtering (barring BSD's, which as of current is about as good as netfilter, and was better for a good long time) and broad range of filesystem support in the business. Linux has been far behind market leaders in R&D like Sequent in some specific areas until very recently in development kernels when IBM started putting Sequent techniques into Linux (probably prompting the SCO suit, since SCO also got those techniques from Sequent). I would agree with that, and I was not saying that UnixWare 2.0 (which benefitted from 10 years of Sequent R&D) had the same level of SMP support as Linux. I simply said it was the first production release of both OSes' SMP offering, which I said in response to the claim that at the time of UnixWare 2.0, Linux wasn't stable SMP-wise. I take a cetain amount of heart in the capatalist system that there are such high-quality R&D shops that produced results that out-live even the company that created them!
Linux is, IMHO, the best all-around kernel ever produced. It's not the best (and sometimes by a long shot) in many areas, but nothing is even in its league when it comes to covering all of the modern bases. Windows NT (in whatever current form) is probably second on that list, but as I've noted elsewhere, that OS has to rely on hardware vendors taking a lot of the development load off of Microsoft, and its still lagging badly in many high-end areas such as specialized networking tasks.
I myself find R helpful for controlling the symptoms of ADHD, and coffee not at all. On the other hand I get a pleasant buzz from a cup of strong coffee, but no direct change of mood from Ritalin at all.
That's about right, I don't know why your doctor told you this was atypical (perhaps not the most common response, but certianly not atypical; read up on it in the PDR for more info on common effects and side effects).
Ritalin, Amphetamines (yes, D-Amphetamine Salt Combo, AKA Adderall is more commonly known as speed, and is the second most perscribed drug for ADHD, especially in more severe cases such as mine, and almost exclusively in adults, as I understand it) and Caffine have roughly the same effect on someone with ADHD. The effect that you perceive as a "stimulant" seems to combat the primary simptom of ADHD: being easily distracted.
So, on to why you get different effects from coffee and Ritalin... Coffee is perhaps the most well-known example of a drug cocktail that is so complex that modern pharmacology is required to nail down all of the mind-altering drugs involved. There are four primary compounds, all stimulants, with Caffine of course being one of them. How the other three impact your ADHD present three additional variables that you are not accounting for, and might vary greatly throughout the population.
If you want a fair assessment of how Caffine may or may not help your condition, try going off Ritalin for about 3 weeks, and then taking an over-the-counter caffine pill as often as you need to keep the "buzz" going throughout the day (not too late, of course). Do this for about 2 weeks and write down your experiences throughout the period. At the end of that period, evaluate what you wrote, and see if you think it's working for you.
Caffine is at least cheaper (probably even if you have a perscription plan) than Ritalin, but you should discuss such a change in medication with your Psychiatrist. There may be good reasons not to switch.
Either way, you can't judge the effect on ADHD based on one coffee or even a day of coffee drinking. It's simply too complex a disorder to be impacted that quickly. If you think Ritalin has such an instant effect, I sugges that it's probably a placebo effect combined with the mild mind-altering properties of the drug making it hard to judge.
PLEASE NOTE, I'm saying all of this because I suffer from severe ADHD, and have studdied up quite a bit, not because I'm trained professional. Do your own research and contact a doctor, don't just act on my suggestions, please.
As for your response to the receptor comment, you're responding way out of context.
The original poster had in fact made it quite clear that this was not a hard certainty, but a possible explanation. Let me quote that original text in case you responded without reading it closely enough:
It's worth noting that (at least according to the Jargon File) caffeine bonds to the same neural receptors as Ritalin. That may or may not have something to do with why coffee helps soothe your ADHD.
So, I'm confused about your response. It's true, caffine does bond to the same receptors, and it's true that that might indicate why it has the same effect on certain disorders in certain people. What was it you were suggesting was "a large degree of bullshit"?
Heh, ok, I missed this comment because it was modded down. I think it's a fair question.
"hundreds of features that Windows does not"
Huh? Name three.
Ok, let's give that a go:
ReiserFS/EXT3/JFS options for journaling filesystems. Don't think you need all of those? Fine. Still that kind of flexibility is high on my list of features that I choose Linux for.
Serial or printer (via parallel) console and text-based display management in general.
Support for MCA (dropped by Windows long ago, still valuable to Linux in older environments)
TUX
Packet tagging, logging, filtering and routing based on stateful inspection and special-case understanding of high-level protocols such as FTP.
Multi-user display management (virtual console)
Network-based loopback device access.
Core support for arbitrary executables (e.g. Java) without needing an end-user file-association system.
Channel bonding
Robust POSIX support (which Windows claims, but does not deliver)
But those are all red-herrings. The most important features of the Linux Kernel that Windows doesn't have are the hundreds of products that are supported, which Windows only has support for by virtue of a hardware manufacturer maintaining them.
This leaves Windows a house of cards that cannot withstand a major shift in market conditions. That is to say: if MacOS or Linux became the primary platform for some type of computing, hardware vendors in that arena might stop sending Microsoft drivers for their hardware!
Linux has always been the underdog that had to roll its own support, almost always without support from hardware vendors, for everything from Don Becker's Ethernet drivers to the SCSI controlers that were supported nearly from day one to the video devices that are supported today.
If vendors begin to see a shift in the market, Windows engineers may end up having to either de-support major manufacturers or grow their in-house staff monsterously to begin maintaining their own versions of these drivers! That's where Linux's features are the glowing best-choice for any sort of critical function.
For home and desktop use, there's no urgent need to be able to support new hardware other than the sorts that will likely be in Windows camp for at least another 5 years or so.
Just to make the obvious point, the "test at your own risk" system went production in June of '96 which is about a year and a half after UnixWare 2.0's Jan '95 release that was the first production release of *that* OS to support SMP. Were there SMP UNIXen before that? Sure! Sequent had SMP working under their UNIX-variant back in '86 or '87! But that has little berring on this conversation. When comparing UnixWare and Linux, they both developed SMP capabilities in a production release within 18 months of eachother, and Linux had been in use as an SMP platform for quite a while before the production release, but it would have been, IMHO, unwise to rely on it at that point. Still, Alphas were popular and the 1.3.x series was your gateway to the (then) huge performance gains of running an Alpha with Linux. Once 2.0 came out it was about a year before it settled down into a "non-dot-oh" release.
I have no idea how reliable UnixWare 2.0 was at it's FCS, but I imagine they had a similar set of fixes to make and time to shake out all of the bugs customers would eventually find.
Not really trying to OS-war here, as I think that's kind of moot nearly a decade later. I'm just pointing out that you made it sound like there was a giant stability and technology gap where there really was only a fairly small one. Linux grew stunningly fast, and the development and release model that it employed seems to have produced a system capable of innovating *and* playing catch-up with the big boys that had decades on Linux within a fairly short time.
This is quite contrary to SCO's claim that Linux cannot possibly have developed into a mature OS as rapidly as it did without benefitting from UNIX source code. Clearly, long before IBM contributed and code at all, it was doing just that.
It seems like SCO is suffering from having to play catch-up on what Novell did or did not get from Bell Labs and/or get from BSD and/or get from contributing companies like Sequent and/or create. They may well have no idea who generated the code that they are concerned about!
Man, oh man, that's just ugly. Imagine a world where you own the copyright on a work, but can't tell if another work (which contains exact copies of portions of yours) is infringing on your copyright or not.... It's enough to make me come within 20 miles or so of feeling for SCO!;-)
Then again, they're trying to make a fast buck, rather than sitting down with IBM and going over the facts to everyone's satisfaction. Wanna bet that if the current UNIX copyright holder had asked to be given details on how IBM is making sure UNIX IP doesn't end up in Linux that IBM would have been more than happy to help? Guess we'll never know now...
I believe that's exactly what I was asking above. Perhaps I was unclear, but certainly any shred of hope that SCO would have would have to rest on the agreements between SCO (pre-Caldera, *probably* post-Novell) and Sequent over this code....
Slashdot Mirror
You grabbed one of my points and ran with it, but ignored the rest. Which version of a film should a studio be required to make available forever?
There is NO SUCH THING as an original when it comes to film. None. Doesn't exist. Stop thinking that there is.
There are hundreds of hours of film. That film is turned into a movie through the magic of editing. Sometimes the version released on the big screen differs per market in the U.S. The version released over-seas is NEVER the same. Take Highlander as an example. In Europe, they got a version that had scenes that, IMHO, made it a much better movie, and yet that version wasn't seen in the U.S. until the special edition LaserDisc nearly 10 years later! Would you rather have The Abyss as released in theaters? The one originally released on video (very different from eachother)? How about the one that introduced the public to the term, "Director's Cut"? The latter was the one that had an ending that made any sense at all!
I would argue that there are two things at play here: nostalgia and true cultural legacy. In the case of nostalgia, there's probably buck to be made, and I would argue that studios need to pay more attention to that (take as an example the failure of WB to release Babylon 5 when the series' fans were screaming for it and trying to explain that the series would have more appeal on video than it did on TV... now the DVDs are selling like hot-cakes 10 years later).
As for cultural legacy? That's not the artist's concern. Never has been. You don't tell a painter that he's required to turn over any originals that he might have lying around. Nor do you tell him that he's not allowed to make a limited print run! When collectors own a piece, you don't tell them that they MUST contribute it to a museum. Instead, we offer tax incentives for such charitable acts, and we praise those who do it. There's no requirement. None.
Back to film... Star Wars: A New Hope is another wonderful example. Do you want the movie called "Star Wars"? Sorry, it was destroyed before the movie even got to general release. The movie that hit theaters nation-wide was called "Star Wars: A New Hope" and given the sub-title "Episode IV" with some minor edits to content (I think that's when Biggs was removed from the beginning). Much later, it was re-released on LaserDisc and subtly altered. Much larger alterations happened when it was released as the "Special Edition" in the late 90s. Yet another version will be released in the mid 2000s that will sync with the first three movies.
Which version do you want? Which versions should a studio be required to archive for you? Should they also be required to spend money and resources on making it available to retail markets, or just in a museum of some sort? How exactly do you see the economics of this working out?
The comments in this paper about other systems ignore one of the oldest and largest SPAM filters: SpamAssassin.
SpamAssassin can also be used at the MTA-level, and while this tool might be an interesting test to integrate with SA, its claims that other systems cannot feed back to the sender that their mail has been blocked is flat-out wrong.
Most people do not do this because you are almost certainly getting this mail through a relay, and that relay is going to get the SMTP temporary error and try to send a warning to the user who sent it. Spammers regularly slam my home mail server by using my address as the "From" in an entire batch of spam. It's pretty seriously annoying to get that deluge of junk, and it's not really necessary. If your spam system just identifies spam and lets the user (or sysadmin) decide how to deal with it based on how "spamish" it is, you get a much more reasonable behavior.
I junk thousands of pieces of spam every week, and I *never* junk valid mail. Yes, I do have some spam in my inbox. Most of it is tagged as potential spam, and I delete that after cursory inspection of the from addresses. Some of it is missed, and the overhead that I suffer having to identify that myself is amazingly low compared to not being able to read my mail prior to SA.
Check out SA. The latest version is pretty impressive, and if this "new" technique (I don't think the idea of tracking connection quality is very new, it's certainly done in SA to some extent) turns out to be useful... well SA works on much the same principal as Perl: There's More Than One Way To Do It. Bayes, Blacklists, Whitelists, Obfuscation detection, Checksum trackers, you name it, SA uses it. None of these techniques gets to say "this is spam", they all just get to poke a message in the direction of being spam or non-spam. This leads to something far more reliable than any one techniqe.
There are no ways around good spam protection. I've seen a lot try, and I've talked to a few spammers that are sure the NEXT trick is gonna work....
The problem is that good spam protection is a) a learning system that detects, defines and then filters out noise, keeping signal.
This is a very hard problem, but spam is FAR from the first place that it has been necessary to solve it.
I'll have more comments in a top-level comment, since there are some massive innacuracies in this paper. It's essentially marketting copy, with all the veracity that that implies.
Seriously, though I hope this fact will become widely recognized enough to spur Canada to fix it's patent system, if for no other reason than to spite the US by fixing theirs first.
Yeah, you can install reiserfs as boot under RH9, AFAICT from the documentation. Baby steps... a company that puts out a new filesystem the day it's released is not the company that I want to do business with. The reason that RH released ext3 when they did is that they had been using it in production for a year. Same goes for reiser. I'm pleased with that level of dedication to QA, and a little dissapointed at the distros that released reiser ASAP only to have massive problems with the FS (all of which are fixed now, as far as I know, so that's good).
That's insanity. First off, that's like saying that the copy of gcc 1.0 that's on prep.ai.mit.edu must never be altered because it's part of our culture. Popycock! It's on thousands of servers across the net. There's nothing special about THAT one.
Second, there's no "original" when it comes to a film. There's the version that's cut for the US opening. The one that's cut for the premeir. The one that's cut for the initial studio review. The one that's cut for the VHS market, DVD, TV (usually several are cut for TV).
Any given movie has dozens of versions and hundreds of hours of footage! If anything you should be arguing for a film museum that gets the raw footage, unedited for archival purposes... that I could get behind, but this idea that what you saw in a theater once is even likely to still exist is just plain silly.
If you feel that this is a just and good thing, then please don't yell at studios and directors for cutting new versions of classic films.
While it may be quite unreasonable (as Lucas has done, and as Turner did before him) to remove a film from distribution entirely after you have made a change, and only distributing the new version, I can't say that anyone has the right to tell such a studio or director to NOT be unreasonable. Certianly as fans, we can voice an opinion, but I've heard some people try to claim that there's some "right" that we have to old movies in the form in which they were released... that's just silly.
I might mourn that I can't get the old version of a film, but I have no right to expect Hollywood to BE the collectables market or an archive for such....
As for companies that do this sort of modification, I respect them. They provide a service that people want, and while I do not think that people should rely on such a service to shelter themselves or their children, I can see the point of letting your kids see The Matrix: Reloaded while not keeping the "She wasn't kissing your face, love" sceene.
Yep, exactly so. You cannot reasonably be expected to avoid downloading something when you don't know if it's legal or illegal, however, if you download 300GB of pr0n, war3z, mu51k and 489281 and then share it back out to the world while simultaneously burning it all to DVD-ROM and selling it at conventions... well, I think you've finished walking the thin-line and have jumped completely into the abyss! ;-)
Your assessment of addiction is a bit simplistic, but that might just be because you were "dumbing it down" for the Slashdot audience, not sure.
I've had various reasons for investigating addiction from lots of angles throughout my life, from being addicted to caffine (which is, as you point out primarily a physical addiction) to having a grandfather who was an alcohol addict (recovering for the last 20 years), etc....
My addiction to adderall (AKA D-Amphetamine Salt Combo) is currently only physical as far as I know, so I'm not too worried, I was just noting the concern that psychological addiction *is* possoible with this drug (just ask a "speed freak") and of course, I'll have to suffer the relative discomfort of physical withdrawral if I ever choose to stop.
The real concern is that it doesn't fix anything. All it does is reduce the symptoms, but that leaves me with decades of bad habits, and it has negative side effects.
If I manage to break those habits, I think it would be well worth losing the side effects (of which loss of appetite is the only benificial one, since I used to be obese enough that I had some pretty serious complications due to sleep apnia, and though I lost the weight on my own, Adderall has helped me to keep it off since I've been using it) in order to see if I can get away from those and still keep the benefits of my now-broken bad habits.
One step at a time, as they say....
Hmm... you're right, we need a defense against this once the case shows up in court... any chance we can get Maddog and Alan Cox to show up naked? ;-)
This code is too old to matter. Yes, if there were common bits in Linux, they should be removed, but SCO is claiming that code that came into UnixWare in the time frame of late-80s to mid-90s was coppied into Linux by IBM. Code like the SMP work done by Sequent will not appear in any of that source code (though I find it heartening that it still exists on the Net).
That's not a problem.... "if".
If Sequent developed their SMP handling as a separate product that just did processor scheduling and shared resource management, and then built a SysV port *around* it, then I think they're ok. I *think* that that is what they did, given that in the early days of their OS, you could install either a BSD or SysV variant which means that they had at least two versions of that code applied to the wildly different source trees.
If they made the changes to BSD and then IBM incorporated those changes into AIX and Linux while USL applied them to UnixWare, then the code that went into Linux is not a derivative of SysV any more so than BSD is, and THAT fight has been shown to be pathalogically complex to the point that 2 or 3 legal teams have given up.
I agree with pretty much all your points. Yes, most of these chemicals have subtly different effects, and depending on what they are used to treat, that may result in failur or success for specific cases.
Yes also, ADHD is not one problem (AFAIK, no "disorder" has a single cause, a disorder is simply a collection of symptoms that appear in predictable clusters in a large population sample). So, ADHD might well have many root causes including brain defects, chemical damage, environmental influence, etc.
For my part, I think my ADHD was mostly environmental. My home life as a child was a neurotic combination of intense drama and intense lonliness which trained me to entertain myself while grasping quickly and without noticable transition onto any external source of stimulus. I think you'll find that 90% of dorks (or "Door Key Kids") are like this in later life. Being home alone all day, left to entertain themselves and then quickly switching to a social mode when others are around seems to be a sure-fire recipie for this sort of problem. I *know* I've gotten somewhat better since I began a long-term relationship 10 years ago, but I still have 23 years of bad habits and fairlure to develop good habits as a foundation, and the Adderall helps me to focus enough to start breaking those.
Then of course, I'll have to break my addiction to Adderall, but that doesn't seem too bad. The few times I've failed to take it, I have gotten caffine-like withdrawral, but I can cope with that. Psychological addiction would be more of a problem....
It is generally accepted in most countries that I know of that putting a copyrighted document in a public place is tacit permission to view it and copy it in accordance with the local interpretation of fair use.
I don't think there's a court in the world that would interpret this law to mean that I cannot grant permission to download license files for my own works. Your interpretation is rather silly in that respect.
However, I would argue that this law has the far more sinister effect of quashing fair use in the case of modified works (e.g. clips used for reviewing or educational purposes from text or other media as well as works of parody).
Killing fair use is the current top priority of all major media companies. Why? Because not killing fair use means that in the near future when everyones appliances are networked together, no one will bother buyng a CD/DVD/book-on-[media]/etc. that someone they know owns. Even if nominally broadcast media like global filesharing systems are unusable, current fair use certainly would seem to allow for my DVD player sharing a movie with a friend to watch on his TV, as long as the transfer is simply streamed from my player to his TV in the same way that it would be between my DVD player and my TV. After all, that's the same thing as loaning the DVD to my friend, right?
That puts the fear of god into these companies, and that fear (plus the possible increase in revenue if no one can share in the first place) is the sole motivating factor here. Piracy has been a smoke-screen since day one.
In the example that you give, the college helpdesk a) does not lose customers if they can't solve your problem b) does not have to QA everything that they support.
Those two factors should be answer enough to the question of why Red Hat doesn't just support "stuff that runs on my box".
And you didn't get laughed out of the room? Must be a pretty clueless board.
Nope, sounds reasonable to me. He's got his facts right, and his sense of panic in check... smarter than a lot of folks these days.
Your first comparison regarding programming talent is absurdly stupid
Your assertion about the absolute stupidity of the prior assertion is absolutely stupid. This phrase is here to inform you that the previous phrase was stupid, and has been sacked.
whether or not the Linux peer review system could be implemented in a corporate setting is irrelevant
Actually, it's not irrelevant at all. At the heart of many fears is the idea that there's a funnel coming from any tom-dick-and-harry directly into the Linux kernel. Those fears are backed up by just how easy it is in most corporate environments to get a change in to critical code.
The fact that this is impossible in the Linux world and the reasons for that are not well understood, and it bears pointing out. It's not that no one can make a change, it's just that no one can make a change without a hell of a lot of eyes on it and an approval process that would make most politicians blanch. That said, I have to agree with you that it's not relevant to the patent concern directly. It's just a very important piece of anti-FUD in this maelstrom of debate.
So on to patents:
Linus's argument is that the development team shouldn't worry about patent violation
Not exactly what he's saying, I think. Linus' comment is that he and other developers should let the people who own patents bring up their concerns over accidental infringement. At that point, the code should be removed if the team agrees that it infringes. The key thing is that if the developers don't pay any attention to patents, then all infringement is, by definition, accidental.
Linus is simply nodding to the reality that an OS is huge and complex and probably violates dozens of patents (at least enough to be argued in court) without even trying. A well funded company would need years of research and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund that research in order to determine if a closed-source OS violates any patents, and by the time they were done, the code would have changed enough that they would have to start over. The same is true for Linux, only it's changing faster and has less legal resources.
Thus Linus makes the valid point that it's an impossible task, and those who actually care (e.g. the patent holders) should be allowed to make the first move.
Accidental patent infringement is different from willful infringement. Linux would be forced to purchase a license or dump the code, but (IANAL) I don't think they would be required to pay for a license for any previous distributed works. Certainly a company like Red Hat that continues to make money off of those old releases might be forced to fork over a percentage of those future earnings until they EOL the old version or produce a patch that removes the offending code, but to be harsh, that's not Linus' concern, and it doesn't hurt Linux any of Red Hat has to cough up fees from their support revenue for a short time....
According to SCO, yes, but I've seen SCO's idea of "trying to talk". It ammounts to an invoice and a threat for legal action. I'm sure if the communication had begun with a civil request to review IBM's contributions to Linux in light of the licensing agreement over UNIX, IBM would have been willing to talk.
IBM has been quite consistent in this process, and has been very willing to talk to all parties, but unwilling to accept the assertion that they put code from UNIX into Linux. That claim is what they think is without basis, and if SCO simply made that assertion and asked IBM to pay up, why on earth would IBM respond any way other than to tell them to get lost?
You are responding to something I didn't say, and you're wrong to boot.
First off, no it was *exactly* 18 months from when UnixWare first shipped a production release with SMP to when Linux first shipped a production release with SMP. There's no debating those facts, as they are simply facts. it was not 4-5 years, it was 18 months.
Now, as for the "BFL" problem in 2.0 (single locking in the kernel for those who aren't aware of the term, I won't expand the actual acronym), it wasn't a problem. That's one way to do SMP, and it has advantages and disadvantages. The largest and most obvious disadvantage is performance. The largest and most obvious advantage is simplicity of design. A fully preemptable SMP kernel without problems introduced by its design is essentially impossible. Every attempt I've ever seen had massive problems due to the complexities of hardware that have to be exposed all the way up, sometimes even as far as user-land (through the threading model), and any compromise (e.g. the 2.4 series Linux kernel which employs finer granularity locking without full preemptability) is frought with even more difficulty in predicting process responsiveness (as 2.4 has seen). These problems and design trade-offs have been seen since the dawn of symetric multi-processing, and are not at all unique to Linux.
Of course, Linux is now going down the complex, but high-performance route. Personally I prefer the 2.0 series for its rock-solid performance which, while less responsive than one would like from SMP, did manage to be more reasonable for highly interactive high-load tasks such as sorting large mailboxes in a threaded mail reader.
To say that Linux has been "far behind commercial OSes the whole way" is just outright wrong.
Linux did SMP on alpha far better than NT, and while not as well as True64, the earlier encarnation of OSF/1 on Alpha had worse problems. It still has the best HTTP acceleration, packet filtering (barring BSD's, which as of current is about as good as netfilter, and was better for a good long time) and broad range of filesystem support in the business. Linux has been far behind market leaders in R&D like Sequent in some specific areas until very recently in development kernels when IBM started putting Sequent techniques into Linux (probably prompting the SCO suit, since SCO also got those techniques from Sequent). I would agree with that, and I was not saying that UnixWare 2.0 (which benefitted from 10 years of Sequent R&D) had the same level of SMP support as Linux. I simply said it was the first production release of both OSes' SMP offering, which I said in response to the claim that at the time of UnixWare 2.0, Linux wasn't stable SMP-wise. I take a cetain amount of heart in the capatalist system that there are such high-quality R&D shops that produced results that out-live even the company that created them!
Linux is, IMHO, the best all-around kernel ever produced. It's not the best (and sometimes by a long shot) in many areas, but nothing is even in its league when it comes to covering all of the modern bases. Windows NT (in whatever current form) is probably second on that list, but as I've noted elsewhere, that OS has to rely on hardware vendors taking a lot of the development load off of Microsoft, and its still lagging badly in many high-end areas such as specialized networking tasks.
That's about right, I don't know why your doctor told you this was atypical (perhaps not the most common response, but certianly not atypical; read up on it in the PDR for more info on common effects and side effects).
Ritalin, Amphetamines (yes, D-Amphetamine Salt Combo, AKA Adderall is more commonly known as speed, and is the second most perscribed drug for ADHD, especially in more severe cases such as mine, and almost exclusively in adults, as I understand it) and Caffine have roughly the same effect on someone with ADHD. The effect that you perceive as a "stimulant" seems to combat the primary simptom of ADHD: being easily distracted.
So, on to why you get different effects from coffee and Ritalin... Coffee is perhaps the most well-known example of a drug cocktail that is so complex that modern pharmacology is required to nail down all of the mind-altering drugs involved. There are four primary compounds, all stimulants, with Caffine of course being one of them. How the other three impact your ADHD present three additional variables that you are not accounting for, and might vary greatly throughout the population.
If you want a fair assessment of how Caffine may or may not help your condition, try going off Ritalin for about 3 weeks, and then taking an over-the-counter caffine pill as often as you need to keep the "buzz" going throughout the day (not too late, of course). Do this for about 2 weeks and write down your experiences throughout the period. At the end of that period, evaluate what you wrote, and see if you think it's working for you.
Caffine is at least cheaper (probably even if you have a perscription plan) than Ritalin, but you should discuss such a change in medication with your Psychiatrist. There may be good reasons not to switch.
Either way, you can't judge the effect on ADHD based on one coffee or even a day of coffee drinking. It's simply too complex a disorder to be impacted that quickly. If you think Ritalin has such an instant effect, I sugges that it's probably a placebo effect combined with the mild mind-altering properties of the drug making it hard to judge.
PLEASE NOTE, I'm saying all of this because I suffer from severe ADHD, and have studdied up quite a bit, not because I'm trained professional. Do your own research and contact a doctor, don't just act on my suggestions, please.
As for your response to the receptor comment, you're responding way out of context.
The original poster had in fact made it quite clear that this was not a hard certainty, but a possible explanation. Let me quote that original text in case you responded without reading it closely enough:So, I'm confused about your response. It's true, caffine does bond to the same receptors, and it's true that that might indicate why it has the same effect on certain disorders in certain people. What was it you were suggesting was "a large degree of bullshit"?
- ReiserFS/EXT3/JFS options for journaling filesystems. Don't think you need all of those? Fine. Still that kind of flexibility is high on my list of features that I choose Linux for.
- Serial or printer (via parallel) console and text-based display management in general.
- Support for MCA (dropped by Windows long ago, still valuable to Linux in older environments)
- TUX
- Packet tagging, logging, filtering and routing based on stateful inspection and special-case understanding of high-level protocols such as FTP.
- Multi-user display management (virtual console)
- Network-based loopback device access.
- Core support for arbitrary executables (e.g. Java) without needing an end-user file-association system.
- Channel bonding
- Robust POSIX support (which Windows claims, but does not deliver)
But those are all red-herrings. The most important features of the Linux Kernel that Windows doesn't have are the hundreds of products that are supported, which Windows only has support for by virtue of a hardware manufacturer maintaining them.This leaves Windows a house of cards that cannot withstand a major shift in market conditions. That is to say: if MacOS or Linux became the primary platform for some type of computing, hardware vendors in that arena might stop sending Microsoft drivers for their hardware!
Linux has always been the underdog that had to roll its own support, almost always without support from hardware vendors, for everything from Don Becker's Ethernet drivers to the SCSI controlers that were supported nearly from day one to the video devices that are supported today.
If vendors begin to see a shift in the market, Windows engineers may end up having to either de-support major manufacturers or grow their in-house staff monsterously to begin maintaining their own versions of these drivers! That's where Linux's features are the glowing best-choice for any sort of critical function.
For home and desktop use, there's no urgent need to be able to support new hardware other than the sorts that will likely be in Windows camp for at least another 5 years or so.
I think you missed something. I wasn't arguing the point you argued against. I was in fact making the same point you did.
Just to make the obvious point, the "test at your own risk" system went production in June of '96 which is about a year and a half after UnixWare 2.0's Jan '95 release that was the first production release of *that* OS to support SMP. Were there SMP UNIXen before that? Sure! Sequent had SMP working under their UNIX-variant back in '86 or '87! But that has little berring on this conversation. When comparing UnixWare and Linux, they both developed SMP capabilities in a production release within 18 months of eachother, and Linux had been in use as an SMP platform for quite a while before the production release, but it would have been, IMHO, unwise to rely on it at that point. Still, Alphas were popular and the 1.3.x series was your gateway to the (then) huge performance gains of running an Alpha with Linux. Once 2.0 came out it was about a year before it settled down into a "non-dot-oh" release.
I have no idea how reliable UnixWare 2.0 was at it's FCS, but I imagine they had a similar set of fixes to make and time to shake out all of the bugs customers would eventually find.
Not really trying to OS-war here, as I think that's kind of moot nearly a decade later. I'm just pointing out that you made it sound like there was a giant stability and technology gap where there really was only a fairly small one. Linux grew stunningly fast, and the development and release model that it employed seems to have produced a system capable of innovating *and* playing catch-up with the big boys that had decades on Linux within a fairly short time.
This is quite contrary to SCO's claim that Linux cannot possibly have developed into a mature OS as rapidly as it did without benefitting from UNIX source code. Clearly, long before IBM contributed and code at all, it was doing just that.
True enough, the SCO buyout was around '95 and 2.0+smp was there around that time, so I was incorrect.
;-)
It seems like SCO is suffering from having to play catch-up on what Novell did or did not get from Bell Labs and/or get from BSD and/or get from contributing companies like Sequent and/or create. They may well have no idea who generated the code that they are concerned about!
Man, oh man, that's just ugly. Imagine a world where you own the copyright on a work, but can't tell if another work (which contains exact copies of portions of yours) is infringing on your copyright or not.... It's enough to make me come within 20 miles or so of feeling for SCO!
Then again, they're trying to make a fast buck, rather than sitting down with IBM and going over the facts to everyone's satisfaction. Wanna bet that if the current UNIX copyright holder had asked to be given details on how IBM is making sure UNIX IP doesn't end up in Linux that IBM would have been more than happy to help? Guess we'll never know now...
I believe that's exactly what I was asking above. Perhaps I was unclear, but certainly any shred of hope that SCO would have would have to rest on the agreements between SCO (pre-Caldera, *probably* post-Novell) and Sequent over this code....