You want to fight something? How about stopping face-recognition software being used in public places to run a "ID check" on everyone without even their knowledge.
What's new and bad about that? I'm sorry, but I simply don't understand why that should be considered a violation of anyone's rights.
Think about it. Consider a small town with a local policeman who knows most of the residents. That policeman stands in the town square looking around him.
OMG!!! HE'S USING FACE-RECOGNITION SOFTWARE TO RUN AN ID CHECK ON EVERYONE!!!
I've always felt that if you put enough monkeys into the statehouse they could end up making laws that may actually do some good (just like the joke that enough monkeys in front of a typewriter could make a work as good as shakepeare).
That's not such a bad idea. Maybe they'd actually tap out some Shakespeare and it would become law? I can think of some choice passages that I'd like to see on the statute books... "let's kill all the lawyers", for example.
I see absolutely no difference between this and RMS's insistance on GNU/Linux -- except the fact that what the XFree project wants is far less obnoxious.
The difference is that the XFree project is requiring people to include the new clause in their documentation; RMS is merely requesting that people use the term GNU/Linux.
One of them can sue you if you decline to do what they're asking, the other cannot.
I don't know about you, but I personally find being ordered to do something far more obnoxious than being asked to do it.
What are the chances someone will take 4.3 and fork it, and carrying on development as free software?
XFree86 4.4 is still free software. Yes, that's Free as in GNU. The XFree86 4.4 license is less restrictive than the old-style BSD license with advertising clause, and that license is included in the Free Software Foundation's list of Free licenses.
The problem isn't that it's no longer free, it's that it appears to be incompatible with the GPL. Different thing, different problem.
Hey, they're only following the precedent set by the US Government itself.
Since Linux contains such dangerously advanced technology (stolen from SCO, remember), it would endanger national security for SCO to reveal whom they're suing. Of course, if the defendant fails to turn up in court SCO will win by default, but hey, that's just life.
Cue courtroom scene taken straight out of Spartacus: a million Linux users gather outside the court and shout with one voice "I AM THE DEFENDANT!"
Even the GPL does not claim that linking to GPL'ed libraries makes your program GPL...
Wrong. The Free Software Foundation make exactly that claim: see the GPL FAQ here....so I don't think linking to Xfree86-licensed libraries makes your program XFree86-licensed.
Correct. However, since a GPL program cannot use libraries that are not under a GPL-compatible license, you would not be able to link to these libraries from a GPL program.
Whatever the shortcomings of Windows and Macs, neither have this problem.
Maybe not that one, but they have other similar problems. For example, boot up a Mac with OS X. Open a window. Now resize that window. Notice how beautifully swift and smooth that operation isn't?
And on my Windows box, whenever I move a window it takes half a second to blank the thing and redraw it before beginning to drag. Although I suspect that one's something to do with my graphics drivers, as I haven't seen it on any other machines.
Words don't have different spellings. A word can be written in hiragana (phonetically) or in a combination of kanji and kana, and that's it. Words don't change spellings, because they have either their kanji or the phonetic spelling, which doesn't change.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. For example, when writing "muzukashii" in kana, should one use "zu" or "du"? I do believe you can use either.
What about the "ka" in "ikkagetsu" - is that a small katakana "ke", U+500B, or a hiragana "ka"? I do believe all three are acceptable.
What about a word as simple as "neko"? Should I write that in kanji, hiragana, or katakana? I've seen texts where all three are used within a few lines of each other.
Then there are all the variations in okurigana, all the variant kanji (which don't always carry nuances of meaning)...
Re:AMD have been better than Intel for some time..
on
AMD Back in the Black
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Bob renderfarm knows low clocked P4's out render high clocked AMD's.
Figures, please. Assertions like that without any evidence to support them are what we normally call "trolls".
Tricky. I use JEdit, jDiskReport, and Tile Molester a lot (the last is a graphics editor for tile-based console systems), but I imagine you'd counter that none of those are "significant" applications. And you've already ruled out Eclipse, presumably on the grounds that it's incestuous.
How about this lot? Is there nothing significant among that lot?
So let's tell these designers: Linux is customisable.
Your Mac looks just like everyone else's Mac - except for the background picture. An Apple desktop looks the way Apple want it to look; if they suddenly decide the Finder should be brushed metal, the Finder is brushed metal. Don't like brushed metal? Deal with it. You're only a graphic designer, what do you know about style?
On Linux, though, your desktop can look like anything. You can customise it completely. You can change the way it behaves to match your working preferences. You can make your own skins, so your desktop fits in with your personal graphic style. Is the problem the old "PC == beige box" thing? What, haven't you heard of case modding? It's Apples that all look the same. A PC can look like whatever you want.
Give Linux the same apps as the Mac has, and we'll see whether Apple's design dictatorship is really as appealing to creative professionals as you say.
Uh.. your ignorance of swing is showing. On my mac, it uses apple-like widgets. On windows, it looks like windows. If you want to, develop your own widget faces and make your own swing style stuff.
Uh... your ignorance of Swing is showing. It does provide some support for looking vaguely like the target platform, if the developer remembers to write the code that detects the platform and switches to an appropriate L&F.
However, the majority seem to prefer using the default theme, on the grounds that it looks the same on all platforms so they can predict how their application will appear; this has portability advantages, but is widely acknowledged to be aesthetically deficient.
Sun trys to seem all buddy-buddy when around the Linux community but in a lot of their press releases and documentation they bash Linux.
These would be the press releases and documentation about their own Linux distro, would they? My God - look, they're describing Linux as "the first viable Microsoft Windows alternative"! Man, I hate those Sun people, always bashing Linux!
If all someone does is check an MD5 on the executable they produce, they wasted their time and might as well have fetched the binary because nothing they build on their own is likely to match the official binary's MD5 anyway.
Indeed, even if they built their executable on the very computer the official binary was produced on, by executing the exact same commands as those used to produce the official binary, straight after the official binary was made, their binary's MD5 might well not match the official one, since many systems include the build time in their object files...
it was the first really successful game to give more context to a FPS level outside of blue key/blue door. the story wasn't great, but compared to its FPS contemporaries (particularly on the consoles) it was pretty darn good. and it felt like a bond movie (with actual voice acting, music, celebrity textures, etc).
You must have missed Dark Forces. Best Doom-class FPS ever made, featuring incredibly complex architecture and some of the most ingenious puzzles in any 20th century FPS; it never became amazingly popular because they stupidly decided to leave out multiplayer, but it sold well enough to justify three or four sequels so far.
I'm really not interested in any company, technology, or development group that's within a couple hops away from SCO.
Ever heard of "six degrees of separation"? Yup, that means Linus Torvalds is within a half dozen hops away from Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. I sure hope you don't use Linux.
I have to agree. Storyless games can be fun for a quick blast, but the only games that have ever kept me up late at night have been the ones with very strong stories.
In fact, though I suspect I'm about to place myself in a tiny minority, I'll go so far as to say that even gameplay is unnecessary. The last action-based title I played to death was Deus Ex - and the aspects I liked of that didn't involve the much-hyped "emergent gameplay" of the sequel. Most of my gaming time these days goes to "visual novels" - basically nothing but story, music, and (static) visuals, with the gameplay limited to making the occasional choice.
A lot of people say things like "give me action; if I wanted to read a lot of text I'd get a book". Well, to each his own, but all I can say is that if I wanted to do a lot of mindless hacking and slashing I'd get a sword, and I turn to my computer to exercise my mind and imagination, not my mouse hand.
Maybe the companies quoted in the story don't want my money anyway, but if they do they'd be well advised to change their opinions...
And firebird^H^H^H^Hfox does it for google... it could be argued that's even worse than Microsoft, since there you get shot off on an I'm Feeling Lucky, while microsoft gives you a list of close matches and lets you choose one. I've had too many times when I mistyped a URL, got shot off to another page entirely, and then had to go back and do a "google URL" to find what I was looking for.
If you don't like it, change the setting. Go to about:config, and either change keyword.url to something you find more congenial than Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky", or just flip keyword.enabled to false to turn the feature off altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I never...
You want to fight something? How about stopping face-recognition software being used in public places to run a "ID check" on everyone without even their knowledge.
What's new and bad about that? I'm sorry, but I simply don't understand why that should be considered a violation of anyone's rights.
Think about it. Consider a small town with a local policeman who knows most of the residents. That policeman stands in the town square looking around him.
OMG!!! HE'S USING FACE-RECOGNITION SOFTWARE TO RUN AN ID CHECK ON EVERYONE!!!
How utterly evil that isn't.
I've always felt that if you put enough monkeys into the statehouse they could end up making laws that may actually do some good (just like the joke that enough monkeys in front of a typewriter could make a work as good as shakepeare).
That's not such a bad idea. Maybe they'd actually tap out some Shakespeare and it would become law? I can think of some choice passages that I'd like to see on the statute books... "let's kill all the lawyers", for example.
What, you mean that bit at the top of the /. page isn't the article?
Google does not have a link page to every other search engine.
Maybe not every other search engine, but they do link to quite a lot of them...
I see absolutely no difference between this and RMS's insistance on GNU/Linux -- except the fact that what the XFree project wants is far less obnoxious.
The difference is that the XFree project is requiring people to include the new clause in their documentation; RMS is merely requesting that people use the term GNU/Linux.
One of them can sue you if you decline to do what they're asking, the other cannot.
I don't know about you, but I personally find being ordered to do something far more obnoxious than being asked to do it.
What are the chances someone will take 4.3 and fork it, and carrying on development as free software?
XFree86 4.4 is still free software. Yes, that's Free as in GNU. The XFree86 4.4 license is less restrictive than the old-style BSD license with advertising clause, and that license is included in the Free Software Foundation's list of Free licenses.
The problem isn't that it's no longer free, it's that it appears to be incompatible with the GPL. Different thing, different problem.
Hey, they're only following the precedent set by the US Government itself.
Since Linux contains such dangerously advanced technology (stolen from SCO, remember), it would endanger national security for SCO to reveal whom they're suing. Of course, if the defendant fails to turn up in court SCO will win by default, but hey, that's just life.
Cue courtroom scene taken straight out of Spartacus: a million Linux users gather outside the court and shout with one voice "I AM THE DEFENDANT!"
Please remember to use SI units.
Even the GPL does not claim that linking to GPL'ed libraries makes your program GPL...
...so I don't think linking to Xfree86-licensed libraries makes your program XFree86-licensed.
Wrong. The Free Software Foundation make exactly that claim: see the GPL FAQ here.
Correct. However, since a GPL program cannot use libraries that are not under a GPL-compatible license, you would not be able to link to these libraries from a GPL program.
Whatever the shortcomings of Windows and Macs, neither have this problem.
Maybe not that one, but they have other similar problems. For example, boot up a Mac with OS X. Open a window. Now resize that window. Notice how beautifully swift and smooth that operation isn't?
And on my Windows box, whenever I move a window it takes half a second to blank the thing and redraw it before beginning to drag. Although I suspect that one's something to do with my graphics drivers, as I haven't seen it on any other machines.
Words don't have different spellings. A word can be written in hiragana (phonetically) or in a combination of kanji and kana, and that's it. Words don't change spellings, because they have either their kanji or the phonetic spelling, which doesn't change.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. For example, when writing "muzukashii" in kana, should one use "zu" or "du"? I do believe you can use either.
What about the "ka" in "ikkagetsu" - is that a small katakana "ke", U+500B, or a hiragana "ka"? I do believe all three are acceptable.
What about a word as simple as "neko"? Should I write that in kanji, hiragana, or katakana? I've seen texts where all three are used within a few lines of each other.
Then there are all the variations in okurigana, all the variant kanji (which don't always carry nuances of meaning)...
Bob renderfarm knows low clocked P4's out render high clocked AMD's.
Figures, please. Assertions like that without any evidence to support them are what we normally call "trolls".
sonnets are constrained
not by syntax but by form
show me rhyming perl
What apps? Please name a significant one.
Tricky. I use JEdit, jDiskReport, and Tile Molester a lot (the last is a graphics editor for tile-based console systems), but I imagine you'd counter that none of those are "significant" applications. And you've already ruled out Eclipse, presumably on the grounds that it's incestuous.
How about this lot? Is there nothing significant among that lot?
If not, then please define significant.
So let's tell these designers: Linux is customisable.
Your Mac looks just like everyone else's Mac - except for the background picture. An Apple desktop looks the way Apple want it to look; if they suddenly decide the Finder should be brushed metal, the Finder is brushed metal. Don't like brushed metal? Deal with it. You're only a graphic designer, what do you know about style?
On Linux, though, your desktop can look like anything. You can customise it completely. You can change the way it behaves to match your working preferences. You can make your own skins, so your desktop fits in with your personal graphic style. Is the problem the old "PC == beige box" thing? What, haven't you heard of case modding? It's Apples that all look the same. A PC can look like whatever you want.
Give Linux the same apps as the Mac has, and we'll see whether Apple's design dictatorship is really as appealing to creative professionals as you say.
Uh.. your ignorance of swing is showing. On my mac, it uses apple-like widgets. On windows, it looks like windows. If you want to, develop your own widget faces and make your own swing style stuff.
Uh... your ignorance of Swing is showing. It does provide some support for looking vaguely like the target platform, if the developer remembers to write the code that detects the platform and switches to an appropriate L&F.
However, the majority seem to prefer using the default theme, on the grounds that it looks the same on all platforms so they can predict how their application will appear; this has portability advantages, but is widely acknowledged to be aesthetically deficient.
Sun trys to seem all buddy-buddy when around the Linux community but in a lot of their press releases and documentation they bash Linux.
These would be the press releases and documentation about their own Linux distro, would they? My God - look, they're describing Linux as "the first viable Microsoft Windows alternative"! Man, I hate those Sun people, always bashing Linux!
Perhaps it got into the computer (from MS) as a zip file? And... they kept the original.
Microsoft distributes source code with core dumps (generated by the people they're distributing the source to) already present? I doubt it somehow.
If all someone does is check an MD5 on the executable they produce, they wasted their time and might as well have fetched the binary because nothing they build on their own is likely to match the official binary's MD5 anyway.
Indeed, even if they built their executable on the very computer the official binary was produced on, by executing the exact same commands as those used to produce the official binary, straight after the official binary was made, their binary's MD5 might well not match the official one, since many systems include the build time in their object files...
I wouldn't be suprised if emacs had something like clippy tho.
I don't know about emacs, but vi does.
it was the first really successful game to give more context to a FPS level outside of blue key/blue door.
the story wasn't great, but compared to its FPS contemporaries (particularly on the consoles) it was pretty darn good. and it felt like a bond movie (with actual voice acting, music, celebrity textures, etc).
You must have missed Dark Forces. Best Doom-class FPS ever made, featuring incredibly complex architecture and some of the most ingenious puzzles in any 20th century FPS; it never became amazingly popular because they stupidly decided to leave out multiplayer, but it sold well enough to justify three or four sequels so far.
I'm really not interested in any company, technology, or development group that's within a couple hops away from SCO.
Ever heard of "six degrees of separation"? Yup, that means Linus Torvalds is within a half dozen hops away from Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. I sure hope you don't use Linux.
I have to agree. Storyless games can be fun for a quick blast, but the only games that have ever kept me up late at night have been the ones with very strong stories.
In fact, though I suspect I'm about to place myself in a tiny minority, I'll go so far as to say that even gameplay is unnecessary. The last action-based title I played to death was Deus Ex - and the aspects I liked of that didn't involve the much-hyped "emergent gameplay" of the sequel. Most of my gaming time these days goes to "visual novels" - basically nothing but story, music, and (static) visuals, with the gameplay limited to making the occasional choice.
A lot of people say things like "give me action; if I wanted to read a lot of text I'd get a book". Well, to each his own, but all I can say is that if I wanted to do a lot of mindless hacking and slashing I'd get a sword, and I turn to my computer to exercise my mind and imagination, not my mouse hand.
Maybe the companies quoted in the story don't want my money anyway, but if they do they'd be well advised to change their opinions...
And firebird^H^H^H^Hfox does it for google ... it could be argued that's even worse than Microsoft, since there you get shot off on an I'm Feeling Lucky, while microsoft gives you a list of close matches and lets you choose one. I've had too many times when I mistyped a URL, got shot off to another page entirely, and then had to go back and do a "google URL" to find what I was looking for.
If you don't like it, change the setting. Go to about:config, and either change keyword.url to something you find more congenial than Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky", or just flip keyword.enabled to false to turn the feature off altogether.