So I read that to mean the Mozilla still keeps developing despite anything MS may or may not want to do. Surely that's a good thing?
Yes, and yes. I mentioned it to contrast to Google's differing case.
Yes, but this isn't like the IE vs Netscape fight because Google is already entrenched as a search engine
When Microsoft started the Internet Explorer bundling Netscape was already entrenched with around 80% market share. It didn't help them much, because Microsoft gets to choose the default installed software and settings on more than 90% of new computers.
Besides, if MS come up with a search engine that's better than Google and is free for all to use, I don't see a problem with it.
That depends on whether your definition of "better" and the rest of the world's definition coincide, doesn't it? Especially if you're using Mozilla I wouldn't jump to this conclusion; to the rest of the world a big component of "better" is "preconfigured when I bought my PC and I didn't have to change it".
If Google dies through Microsoft pressure then there will be be a free replacement that MS won't be able to touch.
Maybe. But it won't be able to work like google; like I said, web spiders that regularly hit 3 billion pages aren't cheap to run.
The Open Directory Project has a long way to go but it's a foundation stone that'll probably get a lot more attention if Google disappears.
It's also an orange, in a conversation about apples. It lists 6 million hand-sorted pages that are searchable by title or category, not three billion pages with full text search. I tried repeating a web search of mine from last night, for example, and even after stripping it down to one work ("Jacobian") I got zero results from the Open Directory instead of thousands from Google.
FACT: Mozilla (Firebird) has switched to a development model that can continue (albeit at a reduced pace) even when the AOL funding stops and Microsoft has finished "cutting off their air supply".
FACT: Google is still depending on ad revenue to pay for the thousands of servers and fat bandwidth pipes with which they spider and serve the (still rapidly) growing internet.
PROBLEM: If Microsoft can cut off Google's ad revenue (say, by providing their own search engine that is preinstalled for their users and good enough to prevent most users from switching), then it won't matter if you can choose Google as your preferred search engine in Mozilla, because although Mozilla will still be around, google.com might not be.
I don't see any X11 libraries (or any widget libraries) in that list. Gnomevfs is just a "virtual filesystem" library, not part of their GUI code. I'm pretty surprised to see ORBit in there, but even that isn't X-specific, IIRC.
The only reason Darl and crew are able to take this stupid strategy is they've managed to convince some investors there is a chance they can pull it off. When it turns out to be a dismal, money losing failure for all investors, future greedy unscrupulous CEOs just won't have the backing to persue such a folly.
If AT&T's failed anti-open-source lawsuit didn't convince investors that the SCO lawsuit (which is far more clear cut) is unwinnable, what makes you think the SCO lawsuit will convince anyone that the next desperate company's threats are bunk? There's a potential SCO investor born every minute, you know.
The smart ones will realize that it doesn't matter what happens to the corporate name, as long as all the corporate insiders can make millions of dollars along the way. The only way future would-be SCO's will be deterred is if all the people who have been lying and dissembling to pump up their stock are fined well in excess of their profits and/or do prison time for their fraud. You can bet this won't happen.
The parent, if I must point it out myself, made a statement which was sympathetic to the Palestinians, didn't mention the Israelis, and made an analogy which fit in with the thread of discussion. Your posts ignore the thread of discussion (which is: "How do other groups deal with the danger of being associated with their most spectacularly immoral members?"), and as far as I can tell you were merely compelled by an urge to make sure that nobody mentions atrocities committed by Palestinians without also mentioning that atrocities have been committed by Israelis.
That's great, and I'm glad that you've proven that the Yooks are more evil than the Zooks, but nobody here wants to talk about Middle East politics right now except insofar as they relate to the on-topic question which, again, is: "How do other groups deal with the danger of being associated with their most spectacularly immoral members?".
You could probably make a contribution to that question (at least as a cautionary example, since your statement lumps "the Israelis" into one evil category just as I claimed other people do with "the Palestinians"), but you may have to "put down your agenda" first.
Just to make things crystal clear:
Nobody wants to play "Whose side is more evil!" right now; not with abortion, not with Middle East conflict, not with anything. We are using these examples as analogies.
Everybody knows that people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict have done evil things.
Everybody (I hope including you) understands that many of the people on both sides have nothing to do with the self-appointed (and even in many cases the elected) representatives of their societies that commit those evils.
The topic of discussion is: how do the more rational members of a group prevent themselves from being unfairly associated with evil individuals in that group.
Can anyone think of other movements with similar problems that we should look into?
The Palestinians, maybe? They're not all suicide bombers, but some people don't seem to make the distinction. The lesson there seems to be to stay the hell away from morally questionable leaders (like Arafat), because your whole community will be tarred with the same brush.
Nothing, and that's the point. If Dell shipped Linux CDs, people might actually try to use them, and Dell would have to respond to tech support requests when people tried something that didn't work or that they couldn't figure out how to do. With FreeDOS people won't expect anything to work, and so won't cost Dell phone centers any money.
You forgot to add that the satellite transmitters these little boogers have are regulated by the FCC to be extremely weak. That adds to the latency.
Does it? Weak electromagnetic waves travel as fast as strong ones. I suppose a weaker signal might make the connection more likely to drop (and thus have to retransmit, after more latency) data.
Also what bearing does the speed of light have on microwave receivers/transmitters?
Microwaves are electromagnetic radiation just like visible light, and travel at the same speed.
Hey, is it racist to say that American Jews are better educated than the general population? No? Then how can it be racist to say that American blacks are less well-educated than the general population?
Both those statements are racist (and untrue) if interpreted literally (as a few people still do), which would imply that all American Jews are better educated and all American blacks are less educated than the general population. Versions of those statements which more pedantically express what you meant to say (e.g. "The average education level among American Jews is higher than among the general population" or "The average education level among American blacks is lower than among the general population") might not be racist, but they're similar enough to the racist versions that they still make many people uncomfortable.
Just call it Special Delivery and you've got a little more room to work around with. Start as a paper boy, go on to small parcel delivery, or if you choose the darker path, drugs, or even Mafia involvement! It's genius!
You're a delivery boy in a decent sized consistent city, delivering parcels from place to place while doing other mini-adventures along the way. You can't miss with this!:D
Sounds like a good game, but a little familiar. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be "Grand Theft Bicycle".
Go ahead and see if you can find anything orginal or non-obvious in them
I never would have thought of filing such stupid claims (all of which boil down to "using XML for a word processor file", and nearly all of which have been implemented in OpenOffice for years); does that count as "non-obvious"?
Most large companies have portfolios of patents that they have no intention of enforcing, unless pushed into doing so (eg someone sues them for infringing on one of their patents, etc).
Microsoft isn't one of those companies. See their licensing program for the vfat patent for a "Microsoft using patents to squeeze money out of people who want compatibility with their formats" example, and do a Google search for virtualdub asf for a "Microsoft using patents to prevent free software from being compatible with their formats" example.
I know this is the zillionth time this exchange has taken place here, but just because you don't use a combination of apps for which it doesn't work doesn't mean that those of us who need to paste from, say, Kate to rxvt are making up stories.
What if I open Kate (from KDE 3.1), open rxvt (v2.7.10), type some text into Kate, select it, then middle click in rxvt, and the text appears? That doesn't necessarily mean you're making up stories, but it suggests that whatever bug you found has since been fixed. Do you have a more current example?
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?
You already have the ability to edit posts: you hit the "Reply to This" link, and type any corrections into the text box. This lets normal posters correct themselves or change their minds without letting trolls remove the context from people who reply to them.
This means that each pound of helium-3 would cost $7,692.31
And when you combine it with two thirds of a pound of deuterium, converting.39% of their mass to energy at 10% efficiency gives you 4.4 gigawatt-hours of energy, for a He3 fuel cost of 0.17 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Of course, that's ignoring the fact that the Shuttle doesn't go to the moon and that it's hardly a paragon of cost-efficiency, but I'm sure some other nerds will go into details there.
Kind of surprised the lawyers have not muzzled that moron yet.
I would have agreed with you, back when SCO was pretending it's lawyers were just working on contingency. In that case, the lawyers would be paid only if SCO won the IBM case, and so it would make sense for them to do everything possible (including shutting up Darl) to ensure a victory.
Now that we know that SCO's lawyers are getting paid even if they lose, we can no longer be certain that they're expecting (or even hoping) to win. In fact, it's possible that SCO's lawyers are quite aware of how they're gettingpaid and understand that Darl's media circus is more likely to extend those paychecks than to curtail them.
Re:I'm sort of working on this same problem.
on
RIAA Files 532 Lawsuits
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The big thinng here is, you have to stop worrying about the student and users rights. They have NONE. The only holder of rights in your situation is the University. If the University chose to hand that information over to RIAA, and no binding agfreement prohibited them from doing so, they can.
If there's justice in this world, your landlord reads Slashdot and will be installing hidden cameras in your bathroom while you're at work tomorrow.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Forbes doesn't get their profits from journalistic credibility, they get them from advertising dollars, and the most basic thing they sell to advertisers is circulation numbers. In the long run perhaps articles like these will erode their readers' respect and hurt their income, but that's in the distant future. For now, they may have just discovered that putting geek flamebait on the internet is a great way to get a lot of page views in a hurry.
The thread scheduling code has been rewritten, repeatedly IIRC. I suspect if there were any problems there, Red Hat would just revert to a previous scheduler, and take any performance hit in exchange for the security of using an already-tested chunk of code.
If you look at the examples SCO has actually brought up as "copyright infringement", things get even better. Linux's SGI malloc had already been deleted for technical reasons by the time they pointed it out, Linux's BSD packet filter was an original reimplementation of code that wasn't SCO's to begin with, and Linux's ABI code, if it turns out to be copyrightable and copied (Linus says no) at all, could be mostly replaced by randomizing a list of numbers and recompiling everything.
SCO's big claim is that IBM-written code is somehow a SCO trade secret because it was once linked to System V, but even if they were to win that it would just mean a fine for IBM, not any sort of problem for those users of the code who don't have any contracts with SCO.
You'd think people savvy enough to have read this story would be bright enough to understand why they absolutely HAVE to take the computers, not sit there dicking around trying to pull hard drives out.
Well, I'm apparantly not that bright, so could you explain it to me? The only reason I can see is that the FBI (perhaps appropriately) places a higher value on their agents' time than on their suspects' property, and so they find it more efficient to take a $1000 computer than to hire someone to remove the $100 hard drive on-site. They should want to remove the hard drive off-site anyway, to analyze it from another computer rather than booting into it's own operating system.
Of course, if the suspects were really guilty and were prepared for a raid, it would be risky to take the computer at all: how do you know that all your evidence isn't on a RAM drive (or on a "rubber hose" filesystem with cryptographic keys on a RAM drive) that has to be manually saved to disk before a shutdown?
But assuming you aren't, just find a sound card with a digital output (I think all the higher end cards have SPDIF now) and plug it in to your home theater.
It's far harder to accidentally corrupt a plastic disc than it is to have a transfer error screw up an application.
If you have a scratch on your plastic disc, you'd better hope that the disc specifications put enough error correction data on at manufacturing time to fix the problem. If you're transferring data over a network, during most of the transfer you only need enough data to reliably perform error detection, since over a noisy link the client can re-request corrupted blocks and the server can increase the percentage of ECC data dynamically.
Look, anyone who thinks strapping them self to a piece of hardware that is thousands of tons and 90% fuel will ever be safe.. I have a bridge to sell them.
Can I have a plane instead? Some of those are close to a thousand tons, and nearly 50% fuel, and safer than driving.
Slashdot Mirror
So I read that to mean the Mozilla still keeps developing despite anything MS may or may not want to do. Surely that's a good thing?
Yes, and yes. I mentioned it to contrast to Google's differing case.
Yes, but this isn't like the IE vs Netscape fight because Google is already entrenched as a search engine
When Microsoft started the Internet Explorer bundling Netscape was already entrenched with around 80% market share. It didn't help them much, because Microsoft gets to choose the default installed software and settings on more than 90% of new computers.
Besides, if MS come up with a search engine that's better than Google and is free for all to use, I don't see a problem with it.
That depends on whether your definition of "better" and the rest of the world's definition coincide, doesn't it? Especially if you're using Mozilla I wouldn't jump to this conclusion; to the rest of the world a big component of "better" is "preconfigured when I bought my PC and I didn't have to change it".
If Google dies through Microsoft pressure then there will be be a free replacement that MS won't be able to touch.
Maybe. But it won't be able to work like google; like I said, web spiders that regularly hit 3 billion pages aren't cheap to run.
The Open Directory Project has a long way to go but it's a foundation stone that'll probably get a lot more attention if Google disappears.
It's also an orange, in a conversation about apples. It lists 6 million hand-sorted pages that are searchable by title or category, not three billion pages with full text search. I tried repeating a web search of mine from last night, for example, and even after stripping it down to one work ("Jacobian") I got zero results from the Open Directory instead of thousands from Google.
FACT: Mozilla (Firebird) has switched to a development model that can continue (albeit at a reduced pace) even when the AOL funding stops and Microsoft has finished "cutting off their air supply".
FACT: Google is still depending on ad revenue to pay for the thousands of servers and fat bandwidth pipes with which they spider and serve the (still rapidly) growing internet.
PROBLEM: If Microsoft can cut off Google's ad revenue (say, by providing their own search engine that is preinstalled for their users and good enough to prevent most users from switching), then it won't matter if you can choose Google as your preferred search engine in Mozilla, because although Mozilla will still be around, google.com might not be.
GAH, PUT A WARNING ON THAT LINK!
He titled his post "Monkey porn". What exactly were you expecting to see when you clicked on it?
I don't see any X11 libraries (or any widget libraries) in that list. Gnomevfs is just a "virtual filesystem" library, not part of their GUI code. I'm pretty surprised to see ORBit in there, but even that isn't X-specific, IIRC.
The only reason Darl and crew are able to take this stupid strategy is they've managed to convince some investors there is a chance they can pull it off. When it turns out to be a dismal, money losing failure for all investors, future greedy unscrupulous CEOs just won't have the backing to persue such a folly.
If AT&T's failed anti-open-source lawsuit didn't convince investors that the SCO lawsuit (which is far more clear cut) is unwinnable, what makes you think the SCO lawsuit will convince anyone that the next desperate company's threats are bunk? There's a potential SCO investor born every minute, you know.
The smart ones will realize that it doesn't matter what happens to the corporate name, as long as all the corporate insiders can make millions of dollars along the way. The only way future would-be SCO's will be deterred is if all the people who have been lying and dissembling to pump up their stock are fined well in excess of their profits and/or do prison time for their fraud. You can bet this won't happen.
The parent, if I must point it out myself, made a statement which was sympathetic to the Palestinians, didn't mention the Israelis, and made an analogy which fit in with the thread of discussion. Your posts ignore the thread of discussion (which is: "How do other groups deal with the danger of being associated with their most spectacularly immoral members?"), and as far as I can tell you were merely compelled by an urge to make sure that nobody mentions atrocities committed by Palestinians without also mentioning that atrocities have been committed by Israelis.
That's great, and I'm glad that you've proven that the Yooks are more evil than the Zooks, but nobody here wants to talk about Middle East politics right now except insofar as they relate to the on-topic question which, again, is: "How do other groups deal with the danger of being associated with their most spectacularly immoral members?".
You could probably make a contribution to that question (at least as a cautionary example, since your statement lumps "the Israelis" into one evil category just as I claimed other people do with "the Palestinians"), but you may have to "put down your agenda" first.
Just to make things crystal clear:
Can anyone think of other movements with similar problems that we should look into?
The Palestinians, maybe? They're not all suicide bombers, but some people don't seem to make the distinction. The lesson there seems to be to stay the hell away from morally questionable leaders (like Arafat), because your whole community will be tarred with the same brush.
Yes but what can you honestly do with FreeDOS?
Nothing, and that's the point. If Dell shipped Linux CDs, people might actually try to use them, and Dell would have to respond to tech support requests when people tried something that didn't work or that they couldn't figure out how to do. With FreeDOS people won't expect anything to work, and so won't cost Dell phone centers any money.
You forgot to add that the satellite transmitters these little boogers have are regulated by the FCC to be extremely weak. That adds to the latency.
Does it? Weak electromagnetic waves travel as fast as strong ones. I suppose a weaker signal might make the connection more likely to drop (and thus have to retransmit, after more latency) data.
Also what bearing does the speed of light have on microwave receivers/transmitters?
Microwaves are electromagnetic radiation just like visible light, and travel at the same speed.
Hey, is it racist to say that American Jews are better educated than the general population? No? Then how can it be racist to say that American blacks are less well-educated than the general population?
Both those statements are racist (and untrue) if interpreted literally (as a few people still do), which would imply that all American Jews are better educated and all American blacks are less educated than the general population. Versions of those statements which more pedantically express what you meant to say (e.g. "The average education level among American Jews is higher than among the general population" or "The average education level among American blacks is lower than among the general population") might not be racist, but they're similar enough to the racist versions that they still make many people uncomfortable.
Just call it Special Delivery and you've got a little more room to work around with. Start as a paper boy, go on to small parcel delivery, or if you choose the darker path, drugs, or even Mafia involvement! It's genius!
:D
You're a delivery boy in a decent sized consistent city, delivering parcels from place to place while doing other mini-adventures along the way. You can't miss with this!
Sounds like a good game, but a little familiar. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be "Grand Theft Bicycle".
Go ahead and see if you can find anything orginal or non-obvious in them
I never would have thought of filing such stupid claims (all of which boil down to "using XML for a word processor file", and nearly all of which have been implemented in OpenOffice for years); does that count as "non-obvious"?
Most large companies have portfolios of patents that they have no intention of enforcing, unless pushed into doing so (eg someone sues them for infringing on one of their patents, etc).
Microsoft isn't one of those companies. See their licensing program for the vfat patent for a "Microsoft using patents to squeeze money out of people who want compatibility with their formats" example, and do a Google search for virtualdub asf for a "Microsoft using patents to prevent free software from being compatible with their formats" example.
I know this is the zillionth time this exchange has taken place here, but just because you don't use a combination of apps for which it doesn't work doesn't mean that those of us who need to paste from, say, Kate to rxvt are making up stories.
What if I open Kate (from KDE 3.1), open rxvt (v2.7.10), type some text into Kate, select it, then middle click in rxvt, and the text appears? That doesn't necessarily mean you're making up stories, but it suggests that whatever bug you found has since been fixed. Do you have a more current example?
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?
You already have the ability to edit posts: you hit the "Reply to This" link, and type any corrections into the text box. This lets normal posters correct themselves or change their minds without letting trolls remove the context from people who reply to them.
This means that each pound of helium-3 would cost $7,692.31
.39% of their mass to energy at 10% efficiency gives you 4.4 gigawatt-hours of energy, for a He3 fuel cost of 0.17 cents per kilowatt-hour.
And when you combine it with two thirds of a pound of deuterium, converting
Of course, that's ignoring the fact that the Shuttle doesn't go to the moon and that it's hardly a paragon of cost-efficiency, but I'm sure some other nerds will go into details there.
Kind of surprised the lawyers have not muzzled that moron yet.
I would have agreed with you, back when SCO was pretending it's lawyers were just working on contingency. In that case, the lawyers would be paid only if SCO won the IBM case, and so it would make sense for them to do everything possible (including shutting up Darl) to ensure a victory.
Now that we know that SCO's lawyers are getting paid even if they lose, we can no longer be certain that they're expecting (or even hoping) to win. In fact, it's possible that SCO's lawyers are quite aware of how they're getting paid and understand that Darl's media circus is more likely to extend those paychecks than to curtail them.
The big thinng here is, you have to stop worrying about the student and users rights. They have NONE. The only holder of rights in your situation is the University. If the University chose to hand that information over to RIAA, and no binding agfreement prohibited them from doing so, they can.
If there's justice in this world, your landlord reads Slashdot and will be installing hidden cameras in your bathroom while you're at work tomorrow.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Forbes doesn't get their profits from journalistic credibility, they get them from advertising dollars, and the most basic thing they sell to advertisers is circulation numbers. In the long run perhaps articles like these will erode their readers' respect and hurt their income, but that's in the distant future. For now, they may have just discovered that putting geek flamebait on the internet is a great way to get a lot of page views in a hurry.
The thread scheduling code has been rewritten, repeatedly IIRC. I suspect if there were any problems there, Red Hat would just revert to a previous scheduler, and take any performance hit in exchange for the security of using an already-tested chunk of code.
If you look at the examples SCO has actually brought up as "copyright infringement", things get even better. Linux's SGI malloc had already been deleted for technical reasons by the time they pointed it out, Linux's BSD packet filter was an original reimplementation of code that wasn't SCO's to begin with, and Linux's ABI code, if it turns out to be copyrightable and copied (Linus says no) at all, could be mostly replaced by randomizing a list of numbers and recompiling everything.
SCO's big claim is that IBM-written code is somehow a SCO trade secret because it was once linked to System V, but even if they were to win that it would just mean a fine for IBM, not any sort of problem for those users of the code who don't have any contracts with SCO.
You'd think people savvy enough to have read this story would be bright enough to understand why they absolutely HAVE to take the computers, not sit there dicking around trying to pull hard drives out.
Well, I'm apparantly not that bright, so could you explain it to me? The only reason I can see is that the FBI (perhaps appropriately) places a higher value on their agents' time than on their suspects' property, and so they find it more efficient to take a $1000 computer than to hire someone to remove the $100 hard drive on-site. They should want to remove the hard drive off-site anyway, to analyze it from another computer rather than booting into it's own operating system.
Of course, if the suspects were really guilty and were prepared for a raid, it would be risky to take the computer at all: how do you know that all your evidence isn't on a RAM drive (or on a "rubber hose" filesystem with cryptographic keys on a RAM drive) that has to be manually saved to disk before a shutdown?
But assuming you aren't, just find a sound card with a digital output (I think all the higher end cards have SPDIF now) and plug it in to your home theater.
It's far harder to accidentally corrupt a plastic disc than it is to have a transfer error screw up an application.
If you have a scratch on your plastic disc, you'd better hope that the disc specifications put enough error correction data on at manufacturing time to fix the problem. If you're transferring data over a network, during most of the transfer you only need enough data to reliably perform error detection, since over a noisy link the client can re-request corrupted blocks and the server can increase the percentage of ECC data dynamically.
Look, anyone who thinks strapping them self to a piece of hardware that is thousands of tons and 90% fuel will ever be safe.. I have a bridge to sell them.
Can I have a plane instead? Some of those are close to a thousand tons, and nearly 50% fuel, and safer than driving.