I don't see anything obvious preventing you from using it (no license/support keys?), it's just not recommended since it's experimental. If you're crazy enough to use it on a production server, you better have a support contract so Sun/Oracle can fix any problems that come along. That seems reasonable.
Although it'd be better if they just said "don't use it for production, period."
Re:GPL'd code available only by request?
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
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· Score: 1
Per the GPL though, only one person would have to go through the trouble of requesting a copy -- you could then upload it to a public FTP repository. It could be inconvenient if they released updates often, but that's usually not the case for a BIOS.
Actually, that would probably fit in pretty well with Google's strategy.
They don't even need to display ads directly on twitter. Google would just treat Twitter as another source of information to mine for data, a source that's much more social than regular email or web searches.
You might mention that you went to a rock concert and that it was totally awesome. Then while you're on Youtube, Gmail, etc, you notice ads for that band and other rock bands. Google News offers to display news about that band.
Or you tweet that you're bored. Google offers up ads for movies, travel packages, antidepressants, and whatever else matches the top adwords. Google knows you better than your friends do. Google is the only friend you can tell everything.
Download is often abbreviated as DL, like "DL speed" or "# DLs".
Also, DC stands for a lot of other things, but if I see DLC I immediately think of games since there's no other notable meanings of DLC that I know of.
Personally, I don't like the large maps in Quake Wars. It's way too open (haven for snipers) and I either spend most of the time running around or clumsily crashing my vehicle.
I think the change in distances requiring people to be good at medium to long range combat really changed the nature of the game, and it doesn't really work for me.
It probably raised the difficulty bar too high. I'm a fairly average FPS player, and I could play respectably well in ET -- but I get pretty badly pwnd in ETQW (although not as badly as CoD4).
Serials have existed long before anyone came up with the term "digital rights management". I wouldn't even call cd/dvd checks "DRM" even if they fit the strict definition. I associate the term "DRM" with the more recent, often insidious copy protection systems that require online activation, won't run if they detect a virtual drive, rootkit into your system, etc.
Most people only own the land up to their driveway. From there on, it's usually owned by the city.
That's why if the water pipes break (due to an earthquake or something) in the middle of the street, it's not your responsibility to fix it. You'd have a hard time dividing up the bill, in any case.
And for obvious reasons, a company can't just dig up a road and install new pipes or cables. They need a permit, and the city doesn't want the road being dug up every other week so they grant exclusive rights for ONE group to do it once.
Now arguably since it's public land, the network connections ought to be owned and controlled by the city and leased out to any ISP that wants to hook you up, but that's much different from the homeowner owning the last mile.
IANAL, nor do I know much about patents (so correct me if I'm wrong), but that doesn't sound right. The claims are usually independent. I was under the impression that you could invalidate individual claims of the patent, making them effectively unenforceable, even if the patent itself isn't thrown out. As long as you can invalidate all the claims that you're being sued over, that's good enough.
Scenario (again, IANAL):
You can claim "1. Suppose there is a round, disc-shaped object that can rotate freely on one axis" (aka a wheel). Obviously you can't patent the wheel, but people usually throw in as many claims as possible, even if some are completely obvious, and they don't affect the validity of later claims. Next, suppose your main claim is "2. A method for optimizing wheel traction using unobtainium, whereas 3. the wheel is coated using alternating strips of unobtainium, and 4. etc". Finally, suppose you throw in a claim, "16. The wheel gains a slight performance boost by injecting it with ice cream."
Obvious, injecting the wheel with ice cream is a totally novel, if not particularly useful/practical, but most likely the claim you would try to enforce is the one about using unobtainium. If someone had to invalidate the ice cream claim too, it's highly unlikely they'd be able to kill the entire patent. But if only the ice cream claim remained, it wouldn't be a particularly useful patent.
Sure, the ER is required to treat you, but it's extremely expensive. If you don't have insurance, you'd on the hook for the bill, unless you're already broke in which case everyone else has to pay for it. Also, many forms of cancer are much less dangerous if detected early.
Getting everyone to visit the doctor at least once a year could potentially reduce health care costs by huge amounts in the long run.
Just give them as little information as possible. I think only your name and email address are required, and any personal info fields you fill out (which are pretty much all optional) can be restricted so they're only visible to your friends.
The wall is a little annoying privacy-wise because anyone you give access to your wall can see what everyone else has posted on your wall. You could still disable your wall and rely on private messaging though.
Essentially, if you keep an empty or locked-down profile, it's like having an entry in the phone book, except you don't have to give out your phone number. Of course, Facebook encourages totally random people you haven't seen in decades to try to "friend" you, so I guess if you'd rather not have any contact at all you might want to stay off Facebook. But otherwise it's not too bad.
It's important to note that Cisco is only buying Jabber Inc. XMPP is an open standard, so anyone can implement their own client or server, and lots of people have. That's not going to change, regardless of what Cisco does.
Furthermore, Jabber Inc's XCP server isn't even open source. I suspect that other Jabber servers such as the open source jabberd and ejabberd are much more commonly used in the open source community.
So Cisco's acquisition of Jabber Inc really has no impact on the Jabber/XMPP open source community. In fact, continuing to develop Jabber XCP as a commercial product can only help push the adoption of XMPP, which is good for everyone.
Personally, I have a few conditions for what I consider tolerable DRM:
Must work 100% of the time for paying customers. This should be a "duh". Your activation servers should not fall over on the day of the release.
Should not be active when I'm not playing a game. Steam is OK because it's highly visible and I can close it at any time. It should be easily uninstallable.
Should work offline. It's OK if it requires reconnecting after X days, where X is at least two weeks, although one-time activation is even better.
Should not discriminate against programs like Daemon Tools. Aside from non-gaming uses, it's useful for playing games without swapping discs. I'm talking in particular about when I'm trying to play game X and I actually have the DVD for game X in the physical drive, but since SecureROM detects Daemon Tools running it refuses to start.
It'd also be nice if companies promised to remove DRM when they no longer wish to support it -- e.g., if years later the DRM no longer works on Windows XP, they should release a patch to disable the DRM. Ideally, they'd just disable DRM entirely within a year after release, but I have a hard time seeing the industry commit to either solution -- aside from the few companies that already do something like this.
I'm not sure what the grandparent poster was thinking, but the common concern about availability isn't that stem cell research will take off, but that cures developed using stem cells will demand a large supply of stem cells. Society would then have to decide whether it's ethically justifiable to use discarded embryos to treat people with life-threatening diseases on a large scale -- think "take two embryos and call me in the morning".
The people opposing stem cell research (and cloning research) would rather take that option completely off the table, by not developing it at all, or delaying it as long as possible hoping that some alternate form of treatment takes off first. Of course, as you point out, the U.S. isn't the only country doing stem cell research.
In addition to the "it could lead to widespread use" argument, some people are just opposed to stem cell research in general, just as some people are opposed to animal testing in general.
The really neat thing about it is that you can just load the module and call some functions, and it'll start JIT compiling your Python code for some moderate speedups (particularly string and number crunching). It doesn't need a special version of CPython or anything.
The original author is no longer developing it though -- he's working on PyPy, the Python interpreter/JIT written in Python. I think they're up to about half the speed of CPython, which is pretty impressive considering how slow Python is.
So, really the memory access will be a bottle neck, you can never hope to have your program in cache and it will be much slower than C.
That's not always a given. If we go by the old rule of thumb that 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code, we could stick that 20% in one place to maximize cache usage. You can even optimize so that if branches that are taken are kept in the cache, and infrequently executed branches are moved out of the way, maybe in a separate page so they can be swapped to disk.
You can do this to a certain degree at compile time, but often you don't know in advance what paths are going to be hot (it might be based on the data) and it may even change as the program runs.
In practice, if someone tells you that Java is faster that C, they're speaking mostly in hypotheticals. Java and another high-level languages encourage so many layers of abstraction that the sheer amount of code that needs to run will probably make it slower than your typical C program. There's also a lot of things, particularly anything that needs to be dynamic, that you can't easily/efficiently compile.
What's interesting is LLVM and.NET, where you can run C/C++ code in an interpreted/JIT-compiled environment. Potentially, with the optimizations mentioned above, you could have C code running in a virtual machine that's faster than statically-compiled C code.
VMWare Server 1.0 works pretty well for basic desktop use, and has a number of useful features that VMWare Player doesn't.
I'd stay away from 2.0 unless you really want to run a server though. They replaced the nice, intuitive admin GUI with an ugly, buggy, and barely usable web browser based interface. To add insult to injury, the Tomcat instance takes 100+ megs of RAM.
Actually, there's an even stronger obligation: if Trolltech (Nokia) stops releasing new GPL versions of Qt, then all previous versions of Qt become BSD licensed. The KDE Free QT Foundation board (two Trolltech reps, two KDE reps, KDE decides ties) can vote to decide whether Trolltech is meeting its part of the agreement.
This probably won't happen for a long, long time though. Qt was bought out by Nokia which has plenty of resources and may be interested in developing mobile apps with it. KDE has an interest in Qt continuing commercial development by Trolltech, which has added lots of useful features/optimizations to Qt in coordination with KDE, that the KDE project probably couldn't do on their own on the same timescale on a purely volunteer effort.
There was a pretty cool looking proof of concept graphical history viewer called Trailblazer using Webkit/Safari written by some UIUC students back in 2004. It even shows thumbnails of each of the pages in a directed graph. Would be great if someone ported it to Firefox.
This shouldn't go in the HTTP protocol though. You only really need this for large files, otherwise there's more overhead coordinating the P2P than time spent actually downloading the images.
I think there's already too much of a push to put non-essential features into HTML and the web browser in general. Especially ones that mandate specific technologies where there might be better or different approaches. You're better off using a plugin or launching an external app in that case.
Yeah, if you aren't incompetent, you should be able to survive a disgruntled employee torching your corporate headquarters too, because you have backups and insurance, right? Just because it's survivable doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. The Chinese company may be late to market and with a cheap knockoff, but since they didn't have to pay for millions in stolen R&D, they can sell it for less and cut into your margins.
So yes, it's great if your company is flexible enough to deal with bad situations, but unless you're in an industry with no secrets, any leak is going to hurt at least a bit. And in high tech, ideas -- especially if you have all the nitty details worked out -- can be worth a lot.
You actually get "tactical aid" points that accumulate based on how many capture points you own and some other factors. These let you fire things ranging from artillery strikes to tactical nukes, which can have a big effect on the gameplay, although you're right, the game is pretty drawn out typically.
Classic MacOS, possibly all the way back to the original Macintosh, had cmd-c (copy), cmd-v (paste), cmd-z (undo), and cmd-x (cut). Given that Windows 3.1 used nonsense like Shift-Ins, Windows 95 probably copied the keybindings from the Mac or somewhere else.
That's pretty unlikely to happen, for reasons ranging from licensing to ideological disagreements to technical limitations of making one product do everything for everyone. Fortunately, many areas of open-source software have closer to two major products (e.g. Firefox/Webkit, GNOME/KDE) which provides for some degree of choice while not quite being as fragmented as having a dozen products.
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I don't see anything obvious preventing you from using it (no license/support keys?), it's just not recommended since it's experimental. If you're crazy enough to use it on a production server, you better have a support contract so Sun/Oracle can fix any problems that come along. That seems reasonable.
Although it'd be better if they just said "don't use it for production, period."
Per the GPL though, only one person would have to go through the trouble of requesting a copy -- you could then upload it to a public FTP repository. It could be inconvenient if they released updates often, but that's usually not the case for a BIOS.
Actually, that would probably fit in pretty well with Google's strategy.
They don't even need to display ads directly on twitter. Google would just treat Twitter as another source of information to mine for data, a source that's much more social than regular email or web searches.
You might mention that you went to a rock concert and that it was totally awesome. Then while you're on Youtube, Gmail, etc, you notice ads for that band and other rock bands. Google News offers to display news about that band.
Or you tweet that you're bored. Google offers up ads for movies, travel packages, antidepressants, and whatever else matches the top adwords. Google knows you better than your friends do. Google is the only friend you can tell everything.
Download is often abbreviated as DL, like "DL speed" or "# DLs".
Also, DC stands for a lot of other things, but if I see DLC I immediately think of games since there's no other notable meanings of DLC that I know of.
Personally, I don't like the large maps in Quake Wars. It's way too open (haven for snipers) and I either spend most of the time running around or clumsily crashing my vehicle.
I think the change in distances requiring people to be good at medium to long range combat really changed the nature of the game, and it doesn't really work for me.
It probably raised the difficulty bar too high. I'm a fairly average FPS player, and I could play respectably well in ET -- but I get pretty badly pwnd in ETQW (although not as badly as CoD4).
Serials have existed long before anyone came up with the term "digital rights management". I wouldn't even call cd/dvd checks "DRM" even if they fit the strict definition. I associate the term "DRM" with the more recent, often insidious copy protection systems that require online activation, won't run if they detect a virtual drive, rootkit into your system, etc.
Most people only own the land up to their driveway. From there on, it's usually owned by the city.
That's why if the water pipes break (due to an earthquake or something) in the middle of the street, it's not your responsibility to fix it. You'd have a hard time dividing up the bill, in any case.
And for obvious reasons, a company can't just dig up a road and install new pipes or cables. They need a permit, and the city doesn't want the road being dug up every other week so they grant exclusive rights for ONE group to do it once.
Now arguably since it's public land, the network connections ought to be owned and controlled by the city and leased out to any ISP that wants to hook you up, but that's much different from the homeowner owning the last mile.
IANAL, nor do I know much about patents (so correct me if I'm wrong), but that doesn't sound right. The claims are usually independent. I was under the impression that you could invalidate individual claims of the patent, making them effectively unenforceable, even if the patent itself isn't thrown out. As long as you can invalidate all the claims that you're being sued over, that's good enough.
Scenario (again, IANAL):
You can claim "1. Suppose there is a round, disc-shaped object that can rotate freely on one axis" (aka a wheel). Obviously you can't patent the wheel, but people usually throw in as many claims as possible, even if some are completely obvious, and they don't affect the validity of later claims. Next, suppose your main claim is "2. A method for optimizing wheel traction using unobtainium, whereas 3. the wheel is coated using alternating strips of unobtainium, and 4. etc". Finally, suppose you throw in a claim, "16. The wheel gains a slight performance boost by injecting it with ice cream."
Obvious, injecting the wheel with ice cream is a totally novel, if not particularly useful/practical, but most likely the claim you would try to enforce is the one about using unobtainium. If someone had to invalidate the ice cream claim too, it's highly unlikely they'd be able to kill the entire patent. But if only the ice cream claim remained, it wouldn't be a particularly useful patent.
I'd imagine he'd be pushing for regular checkups.
Sure, the ER is required to treat you, but it's extremely expensive. If you don't have insurance, you'd on the hook for the bill, unless you're already broke in which case everyone else has to pay for it. Also, many forms of cancer are much less dangerous if detected early.
Getting everyone to visit the doctor at least once a year could potentially reduce health care costs by huge amounts in the long run.
Just give them as little information as possible. I think only your name and email address are required, and any personal info fields you fill out (which are pretty much all optional) can be restricted so they're only visible to your friends.
The wall is a little annoying privacy-wise because anyone you give access to your wall can see what everyone else has posted on your wall. You could still disable your wall and rely on private messaging though.
Essentially, if you keep an empty or locked-down profile, it's like having an entry in the phone book, except you don't have to give out your phone number. Of course, Facebook encourages totally random people you haven't seen in decades to try to "friend" you, so I guess if you'd rather not have any contact at all you might want to stay off Facebook. But otherwise it's not too bad.
It's important to note that Cisco is only buying Jabber Inc. XMPP is an open standard, so anyone can implement their own client or server, and lots of people have. That's not going to change, regardless of what Cisco does.
Furthermore, Jabber Inc's XCP server isn't even open source. I suspect that other Jabber servers such as the open source jabberd and ejabberd are much more commonly used in the open source community.
So Cisco's acquisition of Jabber Inc really has no impact on the Jabber/XMPP open source community. In fact, continuing to develop Jabber XCP as a commercial product can only help push the adoption of XMPP, which is good for everyone.
No, it'll just be a closed-source plugin like Flash or Silverlight.
Personally, I have a few conditions for what I consider tolerable DRM:
It'd also be nice if companies promised to remove DRM when they no longer wish to support it -- e.g., if years later the DRM no longer works on Windows XP, they should release a patch to disable the DRM. Ideally, they'd just disable DRM entirely within a year after release, but I have a hard time seeing the industry commit to either solution -- aside from the few companies that already do something like this.
I'm not sure what the grandparent poster was thinking, but the common concern about availability isn't that stem cell research will take off, but that cures developed using stem cells will demand a large supply of stem cells. Society would then have to decide whether it's ethically justifiable to use discarded embryos to treat people with life-threatening diseases on a large scale -- think "take two embryos and call me in the morning".
The people opposing stem cell research (and cloning research) would rather take that option completely off the table, by not developing it at all, or delaying it as long as possible hoping that some alternate form of treatment takes off first. Of course, as you point out, the U.S. isn't the only country doing stem cell research.
In addition to the "it could lead to widespread use" argument, some people are just opposed to stem cell research in general, just as some people are opposed to animal testing in general.
http://psyco.sourceforge.net/
The really neat thing about it is that you can just load the module and call some functions, and it'll start JIT compiling your Python code for some moderate speedups (particularly string and number crunching). It doesn't need a special version of CPython or anything.
The original author is no longer developing it though -- he's working on PyPy, the Python interpreter/JIT written in Python. I think they're up to about half the speed of CPython, which is pretty impressive considering how slow Python is.
So, really the memory access will be a bottle neck, you can never hope to have your program in cache and it will be much slower than C.
That's not always a given. If we go by the old rule of thumb that 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code, we could stick that 20% in one place to maximize cache usage. You can even optimize so that if branches that are taken are kept in the cache, and infrequently executed branches are moved out of the way, maybe in a separate page so they can be swapped to disk.
You can do this to a certain degree at compile time, but often you don't know in advance what paths are going to be hot (it might be based on the data) and it may even change as the program runs.
In practice, if someone tells you that Java is faster that C, they're speaking mostly in hypotheticals. Java and another high-level languages encourage so many layers of abstraction that the sheer amount of code that needs to run will probably make it slower than your typical C program. There's also a lot of things, particularly anything that needs to be dynamic, that you can't easily/efficiently compile.
What's interesting is LLVM and .NET, where you can run C/C++ code in an interpreted/JIT-compiled environment. Potentially, with the optimizations mentioned above, you could have C code running in a virtual machine that's faster than statically-compiled C code.
VMWare Server 1.0 works pretty well for basic desktop use, and has a number of useful features that VMWare Player doesn't.
I'd stay away from 2.0 unless you really want to run a server though. They replaced the nice, intuitive admin GUI with an ugly, buggy, and barely usable web browser based interface. To add insult to injury, the Tomcat instance takes 100+ megs of RAM.
Actually, there's an even stronger obligation: if Trolltech (Nokia) stops releasing new GPL versions of Qt, then all previous versions of Qt become BSD licensed. The KDE Free QT Foundation board (two Trolltech reps, two KDE reps, KDE decides ties) can vote to decide whether Trolltech is meeting its part of the agreement.
This probably won't happen for a long, long time though. Qt was bought out by Nokia which has plenty of resources and may be interested in developing mobile apps with it. KDE has an interest in Qt continuing commercial development by Trolltech, which has added lots of useful features/optimizations to Qt in coordination with KDE, that the KDE project probably couldn't do on their own on the same timescale on a purely volunteer effort.
I'd sign up in a heartbeat for a game with a cowbar :)
There was a pretty cool looking proof of concept graphical history viewer called Trailblazer using Webkit/Safari written by some UIUC students back in 2004. It even shows thumbnails of each of the pages in a directed graph. Would be great if someone ported it to Firefox.
This shouldn't go in the HTTP protocol though. You only really need this for large files, otherwise there's more overhead coordinating the P2P than time spent actually downloading the images.
I think there's already too much of a push to put non-essential features into HTML and the web browser in general. Especially ones that mandate specific technologies where there might be better or different approaches. You're better off using a plugin or launching an external app in that case.
Yeah, if you aren't incompetent, you should be able to survive a disgruntled employee torching your corporate headquarters too, because you have backups and insurance, right? Just because it's survivable doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. The Chinese company may be late to market and with a cheap knockoff, but since they didn't have to pay for millions in stolen R&D, they can sell it for less and cut into your margins.
So yes, it's great if your company is flexible enough to deal with bad situations, but unless you're in an industry with no secrets, any leak is going to hurt at least a bit. And in high tech, ideas -- especially if you have all the nitty details worked out -- can be worth a lot.
You actually get "tactical aid" points that accumulate based on how many capture points you own and some other factors. These let you fire things ranging from artillery strikes to tactical nukes, which can have a big effect on the gameplay, although you're right, the game is pretty drawn out typically.
Classic MacOS, possibly all the way back to the original Macintosh, had cmd-c (copy), cmd-v (paste), cmd-z (undo), and cmd-x (cut). Given that Windows 3.1 used nonsense like Shift-Ins, Windows 95 probably copied the keybindings from the Mac or somewhere else.
That's pretty unlikely to happen, for reasons ranging from licensing to ideological disagreements to technical limitations of making one product do everything for everyone. Fortunately, many areas of open-source software have closer to two major products (e.g. Firefox/Webkit, GNOME/KDE) which provides for some degree of choice while not quite being as fragmented as having a dozen products.