I'd say any software patent is bad, simply because they're so ambiguous. It doesn't matter if the company in question is supposedly benevolent, or that they're not actively enforcing them: all it takes is a single lawyer with no scruples to cause a lot of pain. In any organization of significant size, you can rest assured they've got at least one bastardly lawyer.
Not only that, but there couldn't possibly be that many new, patentable techniques or technologies being discovered. Is it actually good practice to patent everything? While it might be "good" for open source with IBM supporting us and all, what's it do to the smaller companies that get (potentially) shafted by such absurdity? At the very least, it increases their cost of development due to necessary research.
what are the chances that this "standardization on difference" will lead to a single standardized LSB which all distros can comply with, honestly?
The best thing I can see coming from this is that every distro would be "required" to have a bunch of garbage packages to comply with the LSB now. Some distros (redhat for corporate reasons? debian for philosophical, minimalist reasons?) won't comply, I imagine, and we'll have a mess.
What was wrong with the plain LSB, anyway? Oh, that's right - pricks like RedHat decided they were the standard, and didn't need to comply with some piddly forum's decisions.
Not only that, but it takes a bit more than "common sense and attention to detail". It's fairly evident sometimes when an app has malware bundled, but installing it might be worth it if you can just wipe it out later. The spyware is getting on there, just the same.
It's times like these that I really wish I was a IP lawyer working for IBM. Or for that matter, for SCO, so I could fuck up the ship and still take home bank.
Get a RedHat support license to suit the boss, and use Debian (unless you've got proprietary software you must run, which requires RedHate). The boss will never know.
But seriously: I was just looking around for companies that solely support Linux on a contractual basis. What happened to them all? Weren't there 2 or 3 that were fairly prevailant about 3 years back?
This could all be solved if they had two development teams: one, the "main" team, and then two, a team full of non-members.
Ideally, this non-member team would be overseen by several "senior" ff developers that are dedicated more to improving ff than they are to improving their stance socially, so they'd actually be willing to work other people's code into the base. IE, they'd have to be mature emotional humans.
But, that's really quite a bit to be asking for. If this were to work, there'd be increased quality, the "non-members" would get their submissions added (if they're of quality), and ff would increase the pool of people available to be "invited" into membership. Ideally, the "non-member" group would be a fairly small, static group, as the good developers would become members, and the bad ones would become discouraged and go away.:P
of course. This hardly fixes all the technical and philosophical problems with MS products.
Not only that, but I'm betting that a full implimentation of this "microsoft XML standard" will in fact not work properly - I'm guessing Office2003 doesn't comply with them properly itself, based on previous experiences with Microsoft standards.
Personally, I think it would be more interesting if MS based an OS off of an "open VMS" - not OpenVMS, but An open implimentation of it. VMS is, after all, kind of what MS was trying to emulate with NT. But they failed, as it certainly doesn't perform as well as VMS.
That, I would pay for. Maybe even if it were closed and worked well (and compatibly) with VMS (using VMS as the benchmark for 'standard compliance'.
Damn, talk about sensible "mininum wage" laws. Paying a 45-year-old that just lost his job $5.25 (as is often the case in the US) for food prep work is uncivilized.
But then, I think most fast food places are fairly uncivilized in general.
After reading the scroller, I thought, "Gee, this scroller doesn't have half the epic prose that the other 2 from the 2nd trilogy have, let alone the original trilogy." I hope you know what I mean.
Even this fan film has a better, more "epic" feel to the scroller, IMO.
Not only that, but unlike the other 5 movies, there's no real distinction as to which side is "good" and which side is "bad". It's even more chaotic than ESB in that respect - much more so. It seems to me that, while the Jedi and Sith are seemingly on respective sides, both sides are portrayed as "evil" to some degree: whoever becomes "Emperor" (Palpatine? Palpatine's clone? Is Palpatine the clone?) seems to be in control of Doku, Separatists are controlled by a Sith, and Empire = Republic. Even the scroller says so much, with comments such as "Evil is everywhere."
I'll likely see it on opening night myself, simply because I want to find out about the whole Emporer/Palpatine/Clone? confusion and how the various Sith power structures and betrayals play out. That's what's interesting about EpIII, not "Anie is Vader". That's been clear since Ep1 and ESB/RotJ.
I noticed the existence of this technology several weeks ago while when I passed by the TV while it was on. HP had an ad that said something like, "Now with LightScribe, so you can put labels on your CD!"
Since the ad wasn't really clear, I thought it was talking about a simple label maker, like the POS things you can buy for $5 at BestBuy. Then I thought about it for a while, and realized even HP isn't dumb enough to market something like that as a major feature, and came to the (correct) conclusion that there was something within the burner which painted the disk's upper side.
My wonder is - how much will the cartridges cost? Coming from HP, the ink used is likely to cost a bundle and a half.
"We should legislate gun control to prevent crime, because criminals have guns."
Why? Because criminals, by nature, break laws. Some foolhardy law saying they can't buy a gun isn't going to prevent them from getting a gun. They get most of their guns from non-traditional sources as it is (ie, not gun shops, sporting goods stores, or pawn shops). They won't consider gun legislation any more than they consider laws that make it illegal for them to push over the local 7-11.
No, the reality is that gun control laws are fairly sinister in intent. If you look at gun control and gun statistics around the world - and in the US - you'll see that localities that have the highest gun-related crime also have the highest gun regulation (and low gun ownership). Locations with high legal gun ownership also have the lower instances of crime (and violent crime specifically).
Likewise, countries that have a revocation of rights which are granted to Americans by the 2nd Ammendment quite frequently quickly fall into police-controlled dictatorships.
Makes a person wonder what the liberal agenda really is, as there's no benefit (other than the sedation of aggrevated fears) to society by getting rid of guns at all.
Take a look at - its got quite a few interesting statistics. Hideous web design, but intresting info.
Cranks or corrupt they might be, but at least they don't appear to be wrong.
If we'd been listening to the "global warming is going to kill us!" camp, we'd be dead many times over had their predictions come true. None of them have. We're supposed to be living in a dystopia now with famine and war over things like water - all throughout the world. Deserts are supposed to have replaced most of the forest in the world.
Why has none of this happened? Because its the same people prophesying doom now.
Only something like 5% of the US is considered "developed" land. Only 30% of New Jersey is "developed", and its the most densely populated state.
Looks like you've bought into the "the world is over populated" argument. I've got news for you - there's 25% more food per individual now than there was in 1960, on a world average.
I thought America was founded by *scientists*, non?
No, actually. Sure, there were a couple scientists amongst the mix of founding fathers, but first they were radicals with a very strong philosophical bent towards personal freedoms.
Not all that different than many of the people in Montana right now, really. The problem is that there are too many people that have been impacted by the demoralizing putridity that is the American public school system. This degredation of self-thought combined with religious dogmatics results in a pretty nasty brew.
It's not a business operating as a business. It's a corporation acting as a corporation. Businesses look out for their employees, as they're valueable assets. Corporations don't give a fuck. They're big enough that they're visible and able to bring in the brightest/best/most.
It makes sense. Murder and violent crime are the same - only 13% of violent crime (or was it murder? I don't recall) is committed against a stranger.
Goes to show, people always hurt the ones they love. (Or are supposed to love...)
Makes a person wonder how it all works together, what with the "sphere of familiarity" that people are supposed to have, where people have more empathy towards those they're most alike (or close to socially).
I'd personally thought that Doom 3 was supposed to have such advanced AI. It didn't, unfortunately. Instead, it simply had monsters spawning behind you and in predictable locations.
I mean, you'd think that "imps" would be a bit more crafty.
They might fall in between, but there isn't really an "in between" support option: you either have it, or you don't. Should RedHat (et al) provide preferential treatment towards small companies?
Just do the math. $10k for a small company, while only having to hire one or two tech employees, is insignificant compared to the cost of $6k, and having to hire even 3 or 4 employees to do the support: those 3 or 4 employees will be more expensive - indvididually - than the 2 or 3 employees with our $10k option, because they'll not only have to know more, but they'll also have a much broader responsibility: essentially building and maintaining distros themselves, with nobody to fall back on except the original package managers.
Maybe for you - the geek in his parent's basement and a nervous caffine twitch preventing from typing properly - things like a $10k price gap between sun hardware and tigerdirect hardware is an issue. But not for anyone that needs reliability and support.
Yes, things like cooperation are a part of why various open-source based companies are doing well. You know why else they're doing well? They've got sound support, sound development, and a good record to back up their word.
Oh, and the first two lines of your post make about as much sense as this string: asdlfkj23ksdlds.
Thank you for your coherrent discertation. The citizens of slashdot salute you.
No, it is not a good thing that Gates has done that. Vaccinations, while preventing children from getting the disease, can and often does cause hearing and resperatory problems, child arthritis, and a slew of other things - including death.
Vaccinations such as DTaP contain various chemicals such as aluminum sulfate, formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, and preservatives such as 2-phenyoxyethanol and polysorbate-80. There are some vaccines which contain tissue from aborted fetuses. Vaccines simply aren't good for your body or mind.
Now, if there's an epedemic and threat to one's life, it's understandable to offer voluntary vaccinations. But first get the people involved food, shelter, and a clean living environment. $750K is a trivial amount of money, really, if you look at what could be done with it for such a purpose. That doesn't demean the honorability of donating the money, but I do wonder what Gates' motivation is. He doesn't seem like a terribly humanitarian type.
I can just see the shit hitting the fan in the abortion/pro-life debate now. This will have quite a few implications which quite a few people in this discussion will likely continue to ignore, though, I fear.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say any software patent is bad, simply because they're so ambiguous. It doesn't matter if the company in question is supposedly benevolent, or that they're not actively enforcing them: all it takes is a single lawyer with no scruples to cause a lot of pain. In any organization of significant size, you can rest assured they've got at least one bastardly lawyer.
Not only that, but there couldn't possibly be that many new, patentable techniques or technologies being discovered. Is it actually good practice to patent everything? While it might be "good" for open source with IBM supporting us and all, what's it do to the smaller companies that get (potentially) shafted by such absurdity? At the very least, it increases their cost of development due to necessary research.
what are the chances that this "standardization on difference" will lead to a single standardized LSB which all distros can comply with, honestly?
The best thing I can see coming from this is that every distro would be "required" to have a bunch of garbage packages to comply with the LSB now. Some distros (redhat for corporate reasons? debian for philosophical, minimalist reasons?) won't comply, I imagine, and we'll have a mess.
What was wrong with the plain LSB, anyway? Oh, that's right - pricks like RedHat decided they were the standard, and didn't need to comply with some piddly forum's decisions.
Sounds like object oriented databases to me...
It's not possible if you use IE, however.
Not only that, but it takes a bit more than "common sense and attention to detail". It's fairly evident sometimes when an app has malware bundled, but installing it might be worth it if you can just wipe it out later. The spyware is getting on there, just the same.
It's times like these that I really wish I was a IP lawyer working for IBM. Or for that matter, for SCO, so I could fuck up the ship and still take home bank.
Talk about job security.
Get a RedHat support license to suit the boss, and use Debian (unless you've got proprietary software you must run, which requires RedHate). The boss will never know.
But seriously: I was just looking around for companies that solely support Linux on a contractual basis. What happened to them all? Weren't there 2 or 3 that were fairly prevailant about 3 years back?
This could all be solved if they had two development teams: one, the "main" team, and then two, a team full of non-members.
:P
Ideally, this non-member team would be overseen by several "senior" ff developers that are dedicated more to improving ff than they are to improving their stance socially, so they'd actually be willing to work other people's code into the base. IE, they'd have to be mature emotional humans.
But, that's really quite a bit to be asking for. If this were to work, there'd be increased quality, the "non-members" would get their submissions added (if they're of quality), and ff would increase the pool of people available to be "invited" into membership. Ideally, the "non-member" group would be a fairly small, static group, as the good developers would become members, and the bad ones would become discouraged and go away.
of course. This hardly fixes all the technical and philosophical problems with MS products.
Not only that, but I'm betting that a full implimentation of this "microsoft XML standard" will in fact not work properly - I'm guessing Office2003 doesn't comply with them properly itself, based on previous experiences with Microsoft standards.
Personally, I think it would be more interesting if MS based an OS off of an "open VMS" - not OpenVMS, but An open implimentation of it. VMS is, after all, kind of what MS was trying to emulate with NT. But they failed, as it certainly doesn't perform as well as VMS.
That, I would pay for. Maybe even if it were closed and worked well (and compatibly) with VMS (using VMS as the benchmark for 'standard compliance'.
Damn, talk about sensible "mininum wage" laws. Paying a 45-year-old that just lost his job $5.25 (as is often the case in the US) for food prep work is uncivilized.
But then, I think most fast food places are fairly uncivilized in general.
Yeah, I'd have to agree.
After reading the scroller, I thought, "Gee, this scroller doesn't have half the epic prose that the other 2 from the 2nd trilogy have, let alone the original trilogy." I hope you know what I mean.
Even this fan film has a better, more "epic" feel to the scroller, IMO.
Not only that, but unlike the other 5 movies, there's no real distinction as to which side is "good" and which side is "bad". It's even more chaotic than ESB in that respect - much more so. It seems to me that, while the Jedi and Sith are seemingly on respective sides, both sides are portrayed as "evil" to some degree: whoever becomes "Emperor" (Palpatine? Palpatine's clone? Is Palpatine the clone?) seems to be in control of Doku, Separatists are controlled by a Sith, and Empire = Republic. Even the scroller says so much, with comments such as "Evil is everywhere."
I'll likely see it on opening night myself, simply because I want to find out about the whole Emporer/Palpatine/Clone? confusion and how the various Sith power structures and betrayals play out. That's what's interesting about EpIII, not "Anie is Vader". That's been clear since Ep1 and ESB/RotJ.
I noticed the existence of this technology several weeks ago while when I passed by the TV while it was on. HP had an ad that said something like, "Now with LightScribe, so you can put labels on your CD!"
Since the ad wasn't really clear, I thought it was talking about a simple label maker, like the POS things you can buy for $5 at BestBuy. Then I thought about it for a while, and realized even HP isn't dumb enough to market something like that as a major feature, and came to the (correct) conclusion that there was something within the burner which painted the disk's upper side.
My wonder is - how much will the cartridges cost? Coming from HP, the ink used is likely to cost a bundle and a half.
Exactly. I fail to see the logic behind:
"We should legislate gun control to prevent crime, because criminals have guns."
Why? Because criminals, by nature, break laws. Some foolhardy law saying they can't buy a gun isn't going to prevent them from getting a gun. They get most of their guns from non-traditional sources as it is (ie, not gun shops, sporting goods stores, or pawn shops). They won't consider gun legislation any more than they consider laws that make it illegal for them to push over the local 7-11.
No, the reality is that gun control laws are fairly sinister in intent. If you look at gun control and gun statistics around the world - and in the US - you'll see that localities that have the highest gun-related crime also have the highest gun regulation (and low gun ownership). Locations with high legal gun ownership also have the lower instances of crime (and violent crime specifically).
Likewise, countries that have a revocation of rights which are granted to Americans by the 2nd Ammendment quite frequently quickly fall into police-controlled dictatorships.
Makes a person wonder what the liberal agenda really is, as there's no benefit (other than the sedation of aggrevated fears) to society by getting rid of guns at all.
Take a look at - its got quite a few interesting statistics. Hideous web design, but intresting info.
Cranks or corrupt they might be, but at least they don't appear to be wrong.
If we'd been listening to the "global warming is going to kill us!" camp, we'd be dead many times over had their predictions come true. None of them have. We're supposed to be living in a dystopia now with famine and war over things like water - all throughout the world. Deserts are supposed to have replaced most of the forest in the world.
Why has none of this happened? Because its the same people prophesying doom now.
That's rediculous.
Only something like 5% of the US is considered "developed" land. Only 30% of New Jersey is "developed", and its the most densely populated state.
Looks like you've bought into the "the world is over populated" argument. I've got news for you - there's 25% more food per individual now than there was in 1960, on a world average.
I thought America was founded by *scientists*, non?
No, actually. Sure, there were a couple scientists amongst the mix of founding fathers, but first they were radicals with a very strong philosophical bent towards personal freedoms.
Not all that different than many of the people in Montana right now, really. The problem is that there are too many people that have been impacted by the demoralizing putridity that is the American public school system. This degredation of self-thought combined with religious dogmatics results in a pretty nasty brew.
It's not a business operating as a business. It's a corporation acting as a corporation. Businesses look out for their employees, as they're valueable assets. Corporations don't give a fuck. They're big enough that they're visible and able to bring in the brightest/best/most.
It makes sense. Murder and violent crime are the same - only 13% of violent crime (or was it murder? I don't recall) is committed against a stranger.
Goes to show, people always hurt the ones they love. (Or are supposed to love...)
Makes a person wonder how it all works together, what with the "sphere of familiarity" that people are supposed to have, where people have more empathy towards those they're most alike (or close to socially).
I'd personally thought that Doom 3 was supposed to have such advanced AI. It didn't, unfortunately. Instead, it simply had monsters spawning behind you and in predictable locations.
I mean, you'd think that "imps" would be a bit more crafty.
They might fall in between, but there isn't really an "in between" support option: you either have it, or you don't. Should RedHat (et al) provide preferential treatment towards small companies?
Just do the math. $10k for a small company, while only having to hire one or two tech employees, is insignificant compared to the cost of $6k, and having to hire even 3 or 4 employees to do the support: those 3 or 4 employees will be more expensive - indvididually - than the 2 or 3 employees with our $10k option, because they'll not only have to know more, but they'll also have a much broader responsibility: essentially building and maintaining distros themselves, with nobody to fall back on except the original package managers.
Isn't it prior art if something is common knowledge?
What of those of us that can, and have been, doing such IP -> rough geographical area translations in our mind for years?
You've got no idea what you're talking about.
Maybe for you - the geek in his parent's basement and a nervous caffine twitch preventing from typing properly - things like a $10k price gap between sun hardware and tigerdirect hardware is an issue. But not for anyone that needs reliability and support.
Yes, things like cooperation are a part of why various open-source based companies are doing well. You know why else they're doing well? They've got sound support, sound development, and a good record to back up their word.
Oh, and the first two lines of your post make about as much sense as this string: asdlfkj23ksdlds.
Thank you for your coherrent discertation. The citizens of slashdot salute you.
No, it is not a good thing that Gates has done that. Vaccinations, while preventing children from getting the disease, can and often does cause hearing and resperatory problems, child arthritis, and a slew of other things - including death.
Vaccinations such as DTaP contain various chemicals such as aluminum sulfate, formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, and preservatives such as 2-phenyoxyethanol and polysorbate-80. There are some vaccines which contain tissue from aborted fetuses. Vaccines simply aren't good for your body or mind.
Now, if there's an epedemic and threat to one's life, it's understandable to offer voluntary vaccinations. But first get the people involved food, shelter, and a clean living environment. $750K is a trivial amount of money, really, if you look at what could be done with it for such a purpose. That doesn't demean the honorability of donating the money, but I do wonder what Gates' motivation is. He doesn't seem like a terribly humanitarian type.
This is why I shoot anything that comes through the server room door.
I make the boss come in through the air vent.
I can just see the shit hitting the fan in the abortion/pro-life debate now. This will have quite a few implications which quite a few people in this discussion will likely continue to ignore, though, I fear.