Aren't DVD and HDTV 16:9? I was pretty sure that they were, because I found it interesting (but meaningless) that they went from 4:3 to 16:9, squaring both of the numbers. So why are computer monitors going 16:10 and not 16:9? Won't this cause black top and bottom borders still when viewing DVDs and HDTV?
I also find the ads on Slashdot to already be fairly well targeted to my tastes. However, I would love to be able to set my preferences to make the targeting even more fine-grained.
In fact, all the ideas listed except for ad karma sounded quite good to me.
One other point. I'd like to specify what speed connection I have, so I can get fancy animated ads only when I'm connected via a high-bandwidth connection.
I'm not sure about KDE, but I know that GNOME (actually the underlying GTK widget set) already allows for multiple theme engines. In fact, even the Sawfish window manager allows multiple theme engines.
I'm guessing that there should be enough prior art to overturn this patent, or at least to make it an obvious technology.
You should have done a better job using your leverage. You should have gone through with the interview and then let him decide if he wanted to have you as an employee. At that point, you would have greater negotiating power, and may have been able to convince him that he should hire you with a modified NDA.
SAIR also partners with Wave to provide training material.
Actually, Wave bought Sair about a year ago. But due to some licensing issues, Wave is not able to use the material Sair wrote.
That material basically spoon feeds you the answers. After taking the exams my wife and I both looked over the Wave books and just picked out the answers to the questions word for word.
That sounds like the Sair material. I read the Sair material after I took their exams. I wasn't impressed by either. Some of the questions were really dumb, and I couldn't figure out the answers until I read their material. The Wave material (the last version that I saw, at least) targets LPI, Sair, and RHCE, and is much more comprehensive.
Disclosure: I used to help write the training materials for Wave. Now I work for Linuxgruven. My opinions belong to neither.
Actually, as I understand it, TurboLinux has been considering dropping their own distribution, at least for the desktop. That makes a lot of sense to me. It takes a lot of people to update packages and do QA and everything. They'd be better off focusing on products and services for the enterprise. Better yet, they could spin off their TurboTools configuration program as an add-on to Red Hat Linux. That way they could let Red Hat do the dirty work of maintaining the distribution, but still sell something as their own, along with support.
I think that there is an argument for some degree of affirmitive action to be in place, recognizing that the full weight of the historical injustice done to blacks can never be adequately adressed, and that at some point we must put the issue behind us.
How can we "put the issue behind us" while still "having some degree of affirmitive action... in place"? Eventually we do need to get to a place where we can put the issue behind us completely, which means no longer having a need for affirmative action. We need to give minorities a fishing pole and some bait, not a lifetime supply of fish. Once they've gotten themselves on their feet, we can take off the training wheels. (Enough metaphors yet?)
As stated in several other threads, most of the damages are punitive, to punish Microsoft and to make them remember not to do it again. Also, it will probably turn into a class action suit.
I wonder about such high punitive damages though. Why should the lawyers and plaintiffs receive all that? I'd like to see the judge give the majority of the punitive damages to some non-profit organization that helps minorities. (Assuming the plaintiffs win, but I doubt that they have a leg to stand on.)
professors... didn't think that I deserved to be here, assuming that I was only here because of Affirmative Action (I've got that in the workplace as well).
Sounds like a good case against Affirmative Action. It causes minorities who actually tried hard, excelled, and earned their position to be looked at as if they don't belong there. It seems like a disincentive to even try, thus repressing the minorities it was supposed to pull up.
I'm not saying that ending Afirmative Action would make white people respect minorities. And I don't know if there's anything that will really help, except for time, and people trying to respect each other. I'm just saying that Affirmative Action has negative consequences as well as positive, and we should question its effectiveness. It sounds like you would be where you are today without Affirmative Action, and would be able to command more respect.
That said, I try to practice my own "affirmative action" and give women and minorities a bigger benefit of the doubt, because I know that others have held them back or otherwise looked at them as less than they are. Also as a conscious effort to possibly offset any sexism/racism within my own mind. Actually, I find it nice to see some diversity in the field, and try to encourage it as much as I can.
It seems like you can sue for any amount of money that you like!
That's because you can! The amount you sue for has very little to do with the amount you get if you win. Just because you ask for something doesn't mean you get it. And the US court system isn't an all-or-nothing gamble. The judge can say he agrees with the people suing, but give them less than they are asking. In some cases, the judge will actually give them more than they ask for.
Also remember that a large portion of lawsuits are settled out of court before they go to trial, and the amount is almost always less than was initially asked for.
Some of the money requested is also meant to punish Microsoft to prevent them from doing things like this again. Also remember that people are greedy, especially lawyers.
If the US were no longer the "best" country, or "number 1", how long would it take us to notice? I'm willing to bet that it would take us (in the US) a long time to notice, and that our pride would get in the way of us noticing. That said, how can we be sure that we still are "number 1"? Maybe we should start thinking about this now, before the day comes when we finally realize it, and it will be too late to do anything about it.
Unfortunately these ANTS are missing one of the most important features of their organic predecessors: massive reproduction. That's what makes an individual ant so disposable -- it's easy to make a new one. Not so with the mechanical variety, even if they are made on an assembly line.
Where does the MP3 get decompressed then? On the client? That doesn't seem right, but what the hell do I know.
Yes. You want to make the stream as small as possible to allow it to travel over the network taking as little bandwidth as possible. So the stream is encoded by the server and decoded by the client. Generally the stream is made up of pre-encoded MP3 files, because encoding is more compute-intensive than decoding, and a 486 couldn't handle that. Basically, all streaming servers do is read from disk and write to a network pipe.
Here is a project that is putting a streaming server onto a floppy distribution. It's alpha right now, but kind of cool that you can run such a thing off of a floppy disk and a 486.
If MC and Visa aren't already doing it, I would expect them to start including a clause in their merchant contracts (which allow merchants to process credit cards) that if the merchant has a large number of credit card numbers stolen, the merchant will have to pay some sort of damages.
You don't have to make the CPUID identical to the predecessor (duh!), just predicatable. That was one of the big problems. The ID numbers were previously sequential, but Intel decided that it would be cool to skip to 15 for this CPU. I guess 4=IV=15 in Roman-numeral coded decimal.
Some of the other problems were actaully due to the chipset, not the CPU.
I know what a CPUID is. In fact, I looked at the kernel code that pertains to the CPUID before I posted. There isn't much there. It just turns some features off and on depending upon the CPU. And CPUID is in fact somewhat backwards-compatible: the feature bits for the Penitum still apply to the Pentium III.
The problem is that the kernel on the boot disk has to be able to run on the system. You can't compile a kernel if you can't get the distribution's boot disk to run on the system. The distributions will have to come out with new boot disks. (Although I did see a possible work-around that you can just type at the Linux boot prompt.)
Is Intel really responsible to contact EVERY OS manufacturer for x86 and let them know that they are releasing a new CPU
No, but they should do some due diligence to make sure that new systems will work with existing OSes. At keast if they want to claim that the CPU is backwards-compatbile with x86.
The article makes it sound like there is this big database (like the size of the Windows registry or something). In reality, there is just some code that makes some comparisons of a few numbers to determine the capabilities of a given CPU. Unfortunately, the kernel doesn't know about the Pentium IV yet.
The theory about what to put into a kernel is "only what is completely necessary, and nothing more". The reason for that is that kernel code runs with special priveleges, and if it gets out of control it can take down your whole system. Therefore we want to put as little in the kernel so that we have less chance of the system crashing. So if something can be done in user-space, that's where it should be done.
Actually, most widget sets in X also create a separate window for each widget (button, menu,...). I'm pretty sure Xt, Motif, GTK+, and Qt all use windows for most widgets. I recall that Xt/Motif called windowless widgets gadgets instead of widgets, but they were rarely used.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. If you read the link, it says 85 degrees viewing left, right, top, and bottom.
Aren't DVD and HDTV 16:9? I was pretty sure that they were, because I found it interesting (but meaningless) that they went from 4:3 to 16:9, squaring both of the numbers. So why are computer monitors going 16:10 and not 16:9? Won't this cause black top and bottom borders still when viewing DVDs and HDTV?
I also find the ads on Slashdot to already be fairly well targeted to my tastes. However, I would love to be able to set my preferences to make the targeting even more fine-grained.
In fact, all the ideas listed except for ad karma sounded quite good to me.
One other point. I'd like to specify what speed connection I have, so I can get fancy animated ads only when I'm connected via a high-bandwidth connection.
I'm not sure about KDE, but I know that GNOME (actually the underlying GTK widget set) already allows for multiple theme engines. In fact, even the Sawfish window manager allows multiple theme engines.
I'm guessing that there should be enough prior art to overturn this patent, or at least to make it an obvious technology.
You should have done a better job using your leverage. You should have gone through with the interview and then let him decide if he wanted to have you as an employee. At that point, you would have greater negotiating power, and may have been able to convince him that he should hire you with a modified NDA.
Not exactly showing friendly community spirit, now are we?
Actually, Wave bought Sair about a year ago. But due to some licensing issues, Wave is not able to use the material Sair wrote.
That sounds like the Sair material. I read the Sair material after I took their exams. I wasn't impressed by either. Some of the questions were really dumb, and I couldn't figure out the answers until I read their material. The Wave material (the last version that I saw, at least) targets LPI, Sair, and RHCE, and is much more comprehensive.
Disclosure: I used to help write the training materials for Wave. Now I work for Linuxgruven. My opinions belong to neither.
Actually, as I understand it, TurboLinux has been considering dropping their own distribution, at least for the desktop. That makes a lot of sense to me. It takes a lot of people to update packages and do QA and everything. They'd be better off focusing on products and services for the enterprise. Better yet, they could spin off their TurboTools configuration program as an add-on to Red Hat Linux. That way they could let Red Hat do the dirty work of maintaining the distribution, but still sell something as their own, along with support.
How can we "put the issue behind us" while still "having some degree of affirmitive action ... in place"? Eventually we do need to get to a place where we can put the issue behind us completely, which means no longer having a need for affirmative action. We need to give minorities a fishing pole and some bait, not a lifetime supply of fish. Once they've gotten themselves on their feet, we can take off the training wheels. (Enough metaphors yet?)
As stated in several other threads, most of the damages are punitive, to punish Microsoft and to make them remember not to do it again. Also, it will probably turn into a class action suit.
I wonder about such high punitive damages though. Why should the lawyers and plaintiffs receive all that? I'd like to see the judge give the majority of the punitive damages to some non-profit organization that helps minorities. (Assuming the plaintiffs win, but I doubt that they have a leg to stand on.)
Sounds like a good case against Affirmative Action. It causes minorities who actually tried hard, excelled, and earned their position to be looked at as if they don't belong there. It seems like a disincentive to even try, thus repressing the minorities it was supposed to pull up.
I'm not saying that ending Afirmative Action would make white people respect minorities. And I don't know if there's anything that will really help, except for time, and people trying to respect each other. I'm just saying that Affirmative Action has negative consequences as well as positive, and we should question its effectiveness. It sounds like you would be where you are today without Affirmative Action, and would be able to command more respect.
That said, I try to practice my own "affirmative action" and give women and minorities a bigger benefit of the doubt, because I know that others have held them back or otherwise looked at them as less than they are. Also as a conscious effort to possibly offset any sexism/racism within my own mind. Actually, I find it nice to see some diversity in the field, and try to encourage it as much as I can.
That's because you can! The amount you sue for has very little to do with the amount you get if you win. Just because you ask for something doesn't mean you get it. And the US court system isn't an all-or-nothing gamble. The judge can say he agrees with the people suing, but give them less than they are asking. In some cases, the judge will actually give them more than they ask for.
Also remember that a large portion of lawsuits are settled out of court before they go to trial, and the amount is almost always less than was initially asked for.
Some of the money requested is also meant to punish Microsoft to prevent them from doing things like this again. Also remember that people are greedy, especially lawyers.
If the US were no longer the "best" country, or "number 1", how long would it take us to notice? I'm willing to bet that it would take us (in the US) a long time to notice, and that our pride would get in the way of us noticing. That said, how can we be sure that we still are "number 1"? Maybe we should start thinking about this now, before the day comes when we finally realize it, and it will be too late to do anything about it.
Unfortunately these ANTS are missing one of the most important features of their organic predecessors: massive reproduction. That's what makes an individual ant so disposable -- it's easy to make a new one. Not so with the mechanical variety, even if they are made on an assembly line.
Yes. You want to make the stream as small as possible to allow it to travel over the network taking as little bandwidth as possible. So the stream is encoded by the server and decoded by the client. Generally the stream is made up of pre-encoded MP3 files, because encoding is more compute-intensive than decoding, and a 486 couldn't handle that. Basically, all streaming servers do is read from disk and write to a network pipe.
Here is a project that is putting a streaming server onto a floppy distribution. It's alpha right now, but kind of cool that you can run such a thing off of a floppy disk and a 486.
If MC and Visa aren't already doing it, I would expect them to start including a clause in their merchant contracts (which allow merchants to process credit cards) that if the merchant has a large number of credit card numbers stolen, the merchant will have to pay some sort of damages.
You don't have to make the CPUID identical to the predecessor (duh!), just predicatable. That was one of the big problems. The ID numbers were previously sequential, but Intel decided that it would be cool to skip to 15 for this CPU. I guess 4=IV=15 in Roman-numeral coded decimal.
Some of the other problems were actaully due to the chipset, not the CPU.
I'm just curious -- is this the second edition of Sun Microsystems, or the second edition of Eve Maler?
I know what a CPUID is. In fact, I looked at the kernel code that pertains to the CPUID before I posted. There isn't much there. It just turns some features off and on depending upon the CPU. And CPUID is in fact somewhat backwards-compatible: the feature bits for the Penitum still apply to the Pentium III.
The problem is that the kernel on the boot disk has to be able to run on the system. You can't compile a kernel if you can't get the distribution's boot disk to run on the system. The distributions will have to come out with new boot disks. (Although I did see a possible work-around that you can just type at the Linux boot prompt.)
No, but they should do some due diligence to make sure that new systems will work with existing OSes. At keast if they want to claim that the CPU is backwards-compatbile with x86.
The article makes it sound like there is this big database (like the size of the Windows registry or something). In reality, there is just some code that makes some comparisons of a few numbers to determine the capabilities of a given CPU. Unfortunately, the kernel doesn't know about the Pentium IV yet.
The theory about what to put into a kernel is "only what is completely necessary, and nothing more". The reason for that is that kernel code runs with special priveleges, and if it gets out of control it can take down your whole system. Therefore we want to put as little in the kernel so that we have less chance of the system crashing. So if something can be done in user-space, that's where it should be done.
Actually, most widget sets in X also create a separate window for each widget (button, menu, ...). I'm pretty sure Xt, Motif, GTK+, and Qt all use windows for most widgets. I recall that Xt/Motif called windowless widgets gadgets instead of widgets, but they were rarely used.