Remember the good old days of the Internet, in which techies used to invent useful protocols, document them as RFCs, and then the best of these would be turned into Internet standards at the IETF? That approach gave us an open Internet with multiple implementations of the same standard services, all competing on merit not through proprietary lock-in.
Well that's not where we are today. Instead we have a ton of proprietary services that occasionally publish public APIs when it suits them, but they're almost always pathologically opposed to interoperating with anyone else that might provide competition. Imagine a world in which everyone used their own homegrown mail prototols instead of SMTP and POP or IMAP. That's where we are today with the social networking services.
Walled gardens are bad. Publishing open APIs doesn't make them any better, as the gardens are still walled and these closed services reject federating with other similar ones. And even if they accepted federation, the complexity of a fully interconnected graph in which each node has a different public API grows explosively, so technically this is a very bad design approach.
Things aren't at all healthy on this front of the Internet, and proprietary services having open APIs doesn't help much. The best that can be said is that it's a bit better than no API at all, but that's not saying much.
1. Politicians and government no longer represent what the people want. The bribary by the copyright lobby has gone way beyond the pale, and the political corruption of government seems unstoppable.
2. Politicians and government are now costing businesses money. While traditionally the government has supported businesses more than individuals, this has now reached the point where business finds itself at odds with the customers that provide its income, and that is a terminal situation.
The messages are pretty clear. What's unclear is where this is going, other than sending SOPA to hell.
Health as a business compounds the problem
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not only a problem of unrealistic expectations by patients.
There is also a conflict of interest between the doctor's duty in the best interests of his patients and in the best interests of the medical practice that employs him. A principled doctor can stay on the honest side to a large extent, but take transparent honesty too far and your career prospects are threatened.
It's not really all that different to how it is in other professions. However, other professions don't have the same direct effect on human life and suffering, so the problem stands out a bit more in this discipline.
It's especially bad in a country in which the medical industry is extremely lucrative which has the inevitable consequence that medical insurance is astronomically priced. That turns everything into a money game, and the result HAS to be bad medical practice: after all, a doctor cannot offer the same level of service to a person without money as to one who is rolling in it, because if he did, what would the rich person be paying for?
Money distorts everything, but the effect is particularly harmful in the health profession.
To continue your car analogy as seriously as I can, a window manager plus an iconic launcher makes a perfectly functional car. It's got all the mod cons to get you from place to place and to do it comfortably and flexibly. What it doesn't have is frills nor learner-driver support. It doesn't have a beeper telling you that your lights are on when you open the door. It doesn't have a GPS to help you get around the country, because you know, most people know where they're driving on most trips, or else they have a road map or perhaps an independent GPS unit. These are totally optional extras needed only by a few.
In contrast, a typical Linux desktop like KDE or Gnome goes far beyond the already fully functional graphical computer made from a window manager plus an iconic launcher, by adding a ton of graphic frills and learner-driver support. This is cool, as lots of people like frills (especially eye candy) and there are lots of new users who benefit greatly from learner support. It should not be denigrated, just recognized as optional frills plus support features which aren't required by people who know what they're doing and who prefer an efficient uncluttered platform.
As car analogies go, this one is not unreasonable. It's easy to imagine perfectly functional but undecorated cars, and it's also easy to imagine cars with extensive new-driver support, and in the extreme there's also the "car" that has so many decorations that it's more of a carnival float than a purpose-built utilitarian vehicle. But hey, some people actually like bling, and some people need a helping hand, so that's cool.
Each to their own. We don't all drive the same kind of car.
This is a question which doesn't seem to get asked much, probably because Google is an unmovable behemoth that's not really interested in the owners of devices, but only in advertisers. Nevertheless, it needs to be asked.
These cellphones and tablets belong to us, they don't belong to the device manufacturer, nor to the cellphone service operator, and even less to Google. They are ours. So why are we, the owners, forbidden direct root access to our own devices? It's like owning a Linux desktop without root, or owning a Windows machine and not being allowed Administrator access.
It's daft, and it's completely wrong.
Currently the crackers seem to have easier access to root than the device owners. Google, stop navel gazing and caring only about profit, and do something for users for a change. Add to standard Android a legitimate method for users to have access to root on their own devices, so that "rooting" becomes a thing of the past. It's not your right (nor anyone else's) to deny it.
Github and Bitbucket have made development and distributed SCMs painless, and that's why Linux developers have gone there in droves.
It's not necessarily because of any huge failing on Sourceforge's part, other than just not keeping up with the times. It's simply been leapfrogged. That happens all the time.
It's not too late to do something about it. Offer all the "new" distributed SCMs as options, make everything dead simple, pretty up the good ol' girl's face (and get rid of any Javascript that is only used for decoration), and offer some kind of incentive --- that bit's up to you, be creative, make your marketing people earn their keep.
It's not too late to turn the Sourceforge boat around for Linux devs, but it does need a little bit of effort on your (SF's) part.
Unfortunately I doubt that they'll have an epiphany and decide to stop the rot that's making the site less and less usable with each update.
I suspect that they don't even realize that they've turned a perfectly usable discussion site into a modern disaster that barely works, and that most of the problems can be blamed squarely on excess use of Javascript. Perhaps the survey might draw their attention to the sad state of affairs, assuming that they do read them and try to understand the comments.
You seem to think that it matters to science what beliefs a person holds when presenting experimental data or writing a scientific paper. Well it doesn't. It could be Bugs Bunny or Santa Claus doing it for all it matters to science, as long as appropriate data is being provided. Belief or disbelief in something is not required.
What's important is that the data is public and the work is reproduceable, and the same applies to any analysis presented in a paper. Other teams can then repeat the work and either find agreement or disagreement with the numbers.
The only crime in science is falsifying data, and that is not happening here, unless you have evidence to the contrary.
This had nothing to do with bitcoin security, it was just a trading site with local accounts that got compromised. If the site had been trading eggs, the story would have been about lost eggs. Bitcoin security wasn't involved.
The only thing that this fiasco highlights is that you should not keep your money (regardless of the type of currency) in the possession of another party. BTC were designed to live in your own private wallet, and that is where you should keep them.
What needs to be done now is to implement exchanges without local bitcoin storage in customer accounts. The whole thing should be as distributed as bitcoin itself, so that a hacked exchange won't matter much.
If some content infringes copyright, and a link exists to that content, then it is the content that infringes (because it is a copy) and not the link (because it is not a copy). Copyright law is about copies, and does not deal with links.
And as a further no, a link does not carry any semantic (implied or otherwise) about the copyright status of whatever is at the far end of the link. The text that surrounds the link might do so, but the link itself does not. It's a semantic-free pointer. Copyright infringement may be a property of some content, but it is not a property of a link to that content, because a link does not have any relevant attribute to carry that information.
A thing and a pointer to a thing are utterly different, and trying to conflate them just makes a logical argument descend into logical nonsense.
Stop hyping this project which is either an ill-fated experiment or a scam.
Do you realize that the "real" currencies in your pocket and in your bank are all equally a "scam"? They are all abstract fictions that we use as tokens to avoid the unwieldiness of direct barter.
Ostensibly bitcoin is less of a scam than the currency that you seem to think is "real". Bitcoin is tied to a scarce computational resource which prevents its supply being manipulated, unlike the money that governments can print arbitrarily. Ever since "real" currency left the gold standard, its actual value has been evaporating steadily, and Fractional Reserve Banking has turned over 90% of its original value into pure debt. If you're looking for unsound currency practices, look there.
There is nothing "real" about the dollar as a currency except the fact that people are willing to give you goods in exchange for them. And that reality happens to be exactly the same with bitcoin.
Why is it that companies seem to think that they can cordon off words from the natural language wordspace and treat them as private "property"? The fact that their governments give them a piece of paper confirming ownership merely shifts the question, because governments don't have any inherent rights over the wordspace either.
The phrase that Apple might rightly consider theirs in the US market is "Apple App Store", but even that should not be treated as exclusive if Apple Records or Apple Corps or some other Apple ever wanted to open an app store.
When you adopt a generic term as part of the your product name, you have to live with the consequences of non-exclusivity.
They hide data by splitting it into small pieces, writing it to disk in random order and marking that sector empty.
No they do not. You just totally invented that.
I know this is Slashdot and not reading TFA is a rite of passage, but at least don't try to "inform" when you have no idea about something.
None of the secret data is written to disk at all. As the researchers explain clearly (they're quoted in TFA), the data is encoded in the pattern of cluster allocations used for storing the non-hidden files already present on the drive. They even describe the RLE-based algorithm used for cluster-chain encoding. The size of existing files remains the same, the amount of disk space used and unused in the filestore remains the same, and the contents of all the files remain the same after this process.
So your explanation couldn't be more wrong. And the moderators who gave you a +5 Informative failed to understand the method as well.
... the fact that "suing as a business plan" is allowed at all.
When lawsuits are allowed to provide a revenue stream beyond verified actual damages plus reasonable expenses, they can be abused. And so they are abused, because profit is not restrained by ethics.
You're right about him being abstract, so I'll illustrate with something concrete what he says about our current operating systems being stuck in an old and primitive design model. I'll use an example taken from the Unix family, although it applies to all current O/S types.
When you open an O/S file for reading, then read and display its contents and end by closing the file (eg. as the Unix "cat" utility does), there is no mechanism for the user to replace that file with a composite entity (say made up of many smaller files), in such a way that the unmodified "cat" can open the composite entity as a single plain file and read and display the aggregate data transparently. The O/S supports collections of files through directories, but it does not extend file semantics to those collections, nor does it allow new user-programmed semantics to be given to them in a way that would be transparent to other applications. Thus, files do not behave like objects in OOP.
It's just a small practical example of the legacy problem that Ted Nelson identifies quite accurately, although he works on a larger and more visionary canvas. There have been some efforts at overcoming this poverty of O/S semantics (FUSE is a very notable example), but nothing has managed to emerge out of tech space and catch on. The traditional O/S provides such a huge comfort zone that we're stuck with an inertia problem that seems to defeat any attempt at raising the power of core O/S semantics.
You can't sensibly ask "How much of all available bandwidth for Hams are we talking about?", because all amateur bands have very different propagation characteristics, so a percentage figure isn't informative.
The 70cm band that he wants to sell off is one of the very best local area amateur community bands, recognized worldwide. The 2m band below it and the 23cm band above it don't have the same properties at all.
Linux is officially just a kernel, and a "Linux distro" is any suite of user-side, open source software that provides a complete operating system based on that Linux kernel.
That makes Android a totally kosher Linux distro, even if it is an unusual one with a special Java-based UI by default. It can't be suggested that lack of X11 means that it's not a Linux distro, since there are lots of other Linux distros without X11 too.
It's a travesty that Linux has such a good firewall system available in its kernel, yet Google is not using it to enhance security of Android devices as standard. The Android permissions checks alone are not enough, far too coarse and inflexible.
It's true that you can root your Android and install a firewall yourself, but that invalidates your warranty, and if you bought a high-end phone or tablet then you don't want to lose your warranty in case the hardware fails.
It's a very poor situation, and it's getting worse as the attacks on Android increase. Come on Google, provide a firewall as standard. "Too complex for phone users" is not an adequate excuse for not doing so, because it can be made totally transparent by default if you wish, and only the security-conscious few would need to configure it in detail.
The parent conjured up "Exim haters" out of thin air, but it's really a fiction. There is nothing that warrants such a label.
Sure, we all have our own preferences for MTAs, and we even complain occasionally about particular features or unhelpful config styles, but that's the same for all applications. Sendmail's config is of course a joke, but that's an old MTA and shouldn't be compared with any of the modern ones like Exim, qmail, Postfix, etc.
All MTAs have their proponents, but "MTA haters" really don't exist as a sizeable group for any modern FOSS MTA, beyond a few colorful characters who claim that only their own code is any good.
As a complete outsider, having read through the logs, it is hard for me to understand how this could possibly not be a conflict of interest.
The problem is one of corporate versus community perception.
From a corporate standpoint, two teams working on similar projects constitute competition, because they split the market share and profits, which forces teams to create a better product if they want a greater share of the rewards.
From a community perspective, it doesn't work this way. Since there are (usually) no direct profits from open source projects, there is virtually no competition. Furthermore, open source code creates an atmosphere of cooperation between teams because they can happily use each others' ideas and code. The "reward" is simply in becoming well known for creating a useful product, and market share isn't even a relevant concept.
These are two very different development paradigms, and perceiving a "conflict of interest" when there are multiple teams really just highlights the corporate mindset and lack of appreciation for FOSS community values.
I'm not sure what a 2L law student and wine law enthusiast is doing posting to Slashdot, but given the legendary inability of most Slashdotters to gain the attention of the fairer sex, I'd say Lindsey could be a hit!
Perhaps nVidia's chief scientist wrote his piece because nVidia wants its very niche CUDA/OpenCL computational offering to expand and become mainstream. There's a problem with that though.
The computational ecosystems that surround CPUs can't work with hidden, undocumented interfaces such as nVidia is used to producing for graphics. Compilers and related tools hit the user-mode hardware directly, while operating systems fully control every last register on CPUs at supervisor level. There is no room for nVidia's traditional GPU secrecy in this new computational area.
I rather doubt that the company is going to change its stance on openness, so Dr. Daly's statement opens up the parallel computing arena very nicely to its traditional rival ATI, which under AMD's ownership is now a strongly committed open-source company.
Your suggestion that politicians are inappropriate while courts are appropriate doesn't make much sense. They're both of the same class, namely, both preoccupied with law and both clueless about technology. Even worse, the court system is adversarial and leads towards dollar damage limitation, not technological analysis.
This is an engineering problem, and the right institutions to handle it are the professional engineering bodies, particularly in Electrical Engineering and Electronics and in Mechanical Engineering, who for the most part are not corrupt, and they most definitely are not clueless about the technology.
Furthermore, they have a professional interest in staying outside of the financial and legal skirmishes, because their reputations depend on it. In a world that's truly messed up politically, economically and legally, Chartered Engineer is one of the few labels that still means something solid, at least to those who actually produce real things.
And in this particular subject, we really do need objective and trustworthy analysis of a very complex problem.
The summary discusses some extra problems surrounding the new Second Life policy, but the poster should really have pointed out something much more fundamental first:
Losing their previous GPLv2 compliance is clearly major back pedaling. (What's more, they've totally closed the source of their main viewer, which was previously GPLv2, but that's a separate issue.)
What they released previously as GPL cannot of course have its GPL license revoked, but they're trying to undo even the GPL rights on the old code, because their new terms cover all developers of Second Life Viewers without limitation.
Access to their servers is irrelevant to this new anti-GPL problem, by the way. Whether GPL code can be used for access is of no concern to the GPL, but what they've done is to impose restrictions on development and distribution of GPL code, not just restrictions on access.
It's a very bad situation.
And I haven't even mentioned that the new rules are incompatible with the GPL's "NO WARRANTY" clause either. What a mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the good old days of the Internet, in which techies used to invent useful protocols, document them as RFCs, and then the best of these would be turned into Internet standards at the IETF? That approach gave us an open Internet with multiple implementations of the same standard services, all competing on merit not through proprietary lock-in.
Well that's not where we are today. Instead we have a ton of proprietary services that occasionally publish public APIs when it suits them, but they're almost always pathologically opposed to interoperating with anyone else that might provide competition. Imagine a world in which everyone used their own homegrown mail prototols instead of SMTP and POP or IMAP. That's where we are today with the social networking services.
Walled gardens are bad. Publishing open APIs doesn't make them any better, as the gardens are still walled and these closed services reject federating with other similar ones. And even if they accepted federation, the complexity of a fully interconnected graph in which each node has a different public API grows explosively, so technically this is a very bad design approach.
Things aren't at all healthy on this front of the Internet, and proprietary services having open APIs doesn't help much. The best that can be said is that it's a bit better than no API at all, but that's not saying much.
1. Politicians and government no longer represent what the people want. The bribary by the copyright lobby has gone way beyond the pale, and the political corruption of government seems unstoppable.
2. Politicians and government are now costing businesses money. While traditionally the government has supported businesses more than individuals, this has now reached the point where business finds itself at odds with the customers that provide its income, and that is a terminal situation.
The messages are pretty clear. What's unclear is where this is going, other than sending SOPA to hell.
It's not only a problem of unrealistic expectations by patients.
There is also a conflict of interest between the doctor's duty in the best interests of his patients and in the best interests of the medical practice that employs him. A principled doctor can stay on the honest side to a large extent, but take transparent honesty too far and your career prospects are threatened.
It's not really all that different to how it is in other professions. However, other professions don't have the same direct effect on human life and suffering, so the problem stands out a bit more in this discipline.
It's especially bad in a country in which the medical industry is extremely lucrative which has the inevitable consequence that medical insurance is astronomically priced. That turns everything into a money game, and the result HAS to be bad medical practice: after all, a doctor cannot offer the same level of service to a person without money as to one who is rolling in it, because if he did, what would the rich person be paying for?
Money distorts everything, but the effect is particularly harmful in the health profession.
To continue your car analogy as seriously as I can, a window manager plus an iconic launcher makes a perfectly functional car. It's got all the mod cons to get you from place to place and to do it comfortably and flexibly. What it doesn't have is frills nor learner-driver support. It doesn't have a beeper telling you that your lights are on when you open the door. It doesn't have a GPS to help you get around the country, because you know, most people know where they're driving on most trips, or else they have a road map or perhaps an independent GPS unit. These are totally optional extras needed only by a few.
In contrast, a typical Linux desktop like KDE or Gnome goes far beyond the already fully functional graphical computer made from a window manager plus an iconic launcher, by adding a ton of graphic frills and learner-driver support. This is cool, as lots of people like frills (especially eye candy) and there are lots of new users who benefit greatly from learner support. It should not be denigrated, just recognized as optional frills plus support features which aren't required by people who know what they're doing and who prefer an efficient uncluttered platform.
As car analogies go, this one is not unreasonable. It's easy to imagine perfectly functional but undecorated cars, and it's also easy to imagine cars with extensive new-driver support, and in the extreme there's also the "car" that has so many decorations that it's more of a carnival float than a purpose-built utilitarian vehicle. But hey, some people actually like bling, and some people need a helping hand, so that's cool.
Each to their own. We don't all drive the same kind of car.
Here's the RAMPS "shield" (Arduino daughterboard) that plugs into an Arduino MEGA microcontroller board to drive the various stepper motors of the printer -- http://reprap.org/wiki/Arduino_Mega_Pololu_Shield , http://reprap.org/wiki/RAMPS_1.4 .
If you look carefully, the Arduino is the blue board underneath the green RAMPS board in this picture of an assembled RepRap -- http://reprap.org/mediawiki/images/4/4a/Assembled-prusa-mendel.jpg .
There are cheaper AVR microcontroller boards that'll do the job of controlling a 3D printer, but the Arduino is by far and away the most popular.
This is a question which doesn't seem to get asked much, probably because Google is an unmovable behemoth that's not really interested in the owners of devices, but only in advertisers. Nevertheless, it needs to be asked.
These cellphones and tablets belong to us, they don't belong to the device manufacturer, nor to the cellphone service operator, and even less to Google. They are ours. So why are we, the owners, forbidden direct root access to our own devices? It's like owning a Linux desktop without root, or owning a Windows machine and not being allowed Administrator access.
It's daft, and it's completely wrong.
Currently the crackers seem to have easier access to root than the device owners. Google, stop navel gazing and caring only about profit, and do something for users for a change. Add to standard Android a legitimate method for users to have access to root on their own devices, so that "rooting" becomes a thing of the past. It's not your right (nor anyone else's) to deny it.
Morgaine.
Github and Bitbucket have made development and distributed SCMs painless, and that's why Linux developers have gone there in droves.
It's not necessarily because of any huge failing on Sourceforge's part, other than just not keeping up with the times. It's simply been leapfrogged. That happens all the time.
It's not too late to do something about it. Offer all the "new" distributed SCMs as options, make everything dead simple, pretty up the good ol' girl's face (and get rid of any Javascript that is only used for decoration), and offer some kind of incentive --- that bit's up to you, be creative, make your marketing people earn their keep.
It's not too late to turn the Sourceforge boat around for Linux devs, but it does need a little bit of effort on your (SF's) part.
Well we can dream ...
Unfortunately I doubt that they'll have an epiphany and decide to stop the rot that's making the site less and less usable with each update.
I suspect that they don't even realize that they've turned a perfectly usable discussion site into a modern disaster that barely works, and that most of the problems can be blamed squarely on excess use of Javascript. Perhaps the survey might draw their attention to the sad state of affairs, assuming that they do read them and try to understand the comments.
You seem to think that it matters to science what beliefs a person holds when presenting experimental data or writing a scientific paper. Well it doesn't. It could be Bugs Bunny or Santa Claus doing it for all it matters to science, as long as appropriate data is being provided. Belief or disbelief in something is not required.
What's important is that the data is public and the work is reproduceable, and the same applies to any analysis presented in a paper. Other teams can then repeat the work and either find agreement or disagreement with the numbers.
The only crime in science is falsifying data, and that is not happening here, unless you have evidence to the contrary.
This had nothing to do with bitcoin security, it was just a trading site with local accounts that got compromised. If the site had been trading eggs, the story would have been about lost eggs. Bitcoin security wasn't involved.
The only thing that this fiasco highlights is that you should not keep your money (regardless of the type of currency) in the possession of another party. BTC were designed to live in your own private wallet, and that is where you should keep them.
What needs to be done now is to implement exchanges without local bitcoin storage in customer accounts. The whole thing should be as distributed as bitcoin itself, so that a hacked exchange won't matter much.
No, no, and no.
If some content infringes copyright, and a link exists to that content, then it is the content that infringes (because it is a copy) and not the link (because it is not a copy). Copyright law is about copies, and does not deal with links.
And as a further no, a link does not carry any semantic (implied or otherwise) about the copyright status of whatever is at the far end of the link. The text that surrounds the link might do so, but the link itself does not. It's a semantic-free pointer. Copyright infringement may be a property of some content, but it is not a property of a link to that content, because a link does not have any relevant attribute to carry that information.
A thing and a pointer to a thing are utterly different, and trying to conflate them just makes a logical argument descend into logical nonsense.
Do you realize that the "real" currencies in your pocket and in your bank are all equally a "scam"? They are all abstract fictions that we use as tokens to avoid the unwieldiness of direct barter.
Ostensibly bitcoin is less of a scam than the currency that you seem to think is "real". Bitcoin is tied to a scarce computational resource which prevents its supply being manipulated, unlike the money that governments can print arbitrarily. Ever since "real" currency left the gold standard, its actual value has been evaporating steadily, and Fractional Reserve Banking has turned over 90% of its original value into pure debt. If you're looking for unsound currency practices, look there.
There is nothing "real" about the dollar as a currency except the fact that people are willing to give you goods in exchange for them. And that reality happens to be exactly the same with bitcoin.
Why is it that companies seem to think that they can cordon off words from the natural language wordspace and treat them as private "property"? The fact that their governments give them a piece of paper confirming ownership merely shifts the question, because governments don't have any inherent rights over the wordspace either.
The phrase that Apple might rightly consider theirs in the US market is "Apple App Store", but even that should not be treated as exclusive if Apple Records or Apple Corps or some other Apple ever wanted to open an app store.
When you adopt a generic term as part of the your product name, you have to live with the consequences of non-exclusivity.
No they do not. You just totally invented that.
I know this is Slashdot and not reading TFA is a rite of passage, but at least don't try to "inform" when you have no idea about something.
None of the secret data is written to disk at all. As the researchers explain clearly (they're quoted in TFA), the data is encoded in the pattern of cluster allocations used for storing the non-hidden files already present on the drive. They even describe the RLE-based algorithm used for cluster-chain encoding. The size of existing files remains the same, the amount of disk space used and unused in the filestore remains the same, and the contents of all the files remain the same after this process.
So your explanation couldn't be more wrong. And the moderators who gave you a +5 Informative failed to understand the method as well.
... the fact that "suing as a business plan" is allowed at all.
When lawsuits are allowed to provide a revenue stream beyond verified actual damages plus reasonable expenses, they can be abused. And so they are abused, because profit is not restrained by ethics.
Morgaine.
You're right about him being abstract, so I'll illustrate with something concrete what he says about our current operating systems being stuck in an old and primitive design model. I'll use an example taken from the Unix family, although it applies to all current O/S types.
When you open an O/S file for reading, then read and display its contents and end by closing the file (eg. as the Unix "cat" utility does), there is no mechanism for the user to replace that file with a composite entity (say made up of many smaller files), in such a way that the unmodified "cat" can open the composite entity as a single plain file and read and display the aggregate data transparently. The O/S supports collections of files through directories, but it does not extend file semantics to those collections, nor does it allow new user-programmed semantics to be given to them in a way that would be transparent to other applications. Thus, files do not behave like objects in OOP.
It's just a small practical example of the legacy problem that Ted Nelson identifies quite accurately, although he works on a larger and more visionary canvas. There have been some efforts at overcoming this poverty of O/S semantics (FUSE is a very notable example), but nothing has managed to emerge out of tech space and catch on. The traditional O/S provides such a huge comfort zone that we're stuck with an inertia problem that seems to defeat any attempt at raising the power of core O/S semantics.
You can't sensibly ask "How much of all available bandwidth for Hams are we talking about?", because all amateur bands have very different propagation characteristics, so a percentage figure isn't informative.
The 70cm band that he wants to sell off is one of the very best local area amateur community bands, recognized worldwide. The 2m band below it and the 23cm band above it don't have the same properties at all.
Linux is officially just a kernel, and a "Linux distro" is any suite of user-side, open source software that provides a complete operating system based on that Linux kernel.
That makes Android a totally kosher Linux distro, even if it is an unusual one with a special Java-based UI by default. It can't be suggested that lack of X11 means that it's not a Linux distro, since there are lots of other Linux distros without X11 too.
It's a travesty that Linux has such a good firewall system available in its kernel, yet Google is not using it to enhance security of Android devices as standard. The Android permissions checks alone are not enough, far too coarse and inflexible.
It's true that you can root your Android and install a firewall yourself, but that invalidates your warranty, and if you bought a high-end phone or tablet then you don't want to lose your warranty in case the hardware fails.
It's a very poor situation, and it's getting worse as the attacks on Android increase. Come on Google, provide a firewall as standard. "Too complex for phone users" is not an adequate excuse for not doing so, because it can be made totally transparent by default if you wish, and only the security-conscious few would need to configure it in detail.
The parent conjured up "Exim haters" out of thin air, but it's really a fiction. There is nothing that warrants such a label.
Sure, we all have our own preferences for MTAs, and we even complain occasionally about particular features or unhelpful config styles, but that's the same for all applications. Sendmail's config is of course a joke, but that's an old MTA and shouldn't be compared with any of the modern ones like Exim, qmail, Postfix, etc.
All MTAs have their proponents, but "MTA haters" really don't exist as a sizeable group for any modern FOSS MTA, beyond a few colorful characters who claim that only their own code is any good.
The problem is one of corporate versus community perception.
From a corporate standpoint, two teams working on similar projects constitute competition, because they split the market share and profits, which forces teams to create a better product if they want a greater share of the rewards.
From a community perspective, it doesn't work this way. Since there are (usually) no direct profits from open source projects, there is virtually no competition. Furthermore, open source code creates an atmosphere of cooperation between teams because they can happily use each others' ideas and code. The "reward" is simply in becoming well known for creating a useful product, and market share isn't even a relevant concept.
These are two very different development paradigms, and perceiving a "conflict of interest" when there are multiple teams really just highlights the corporate mindset and lack of appreciation for FOSS community values.
I'm not sure what a 2L law student and wine law enthusiast is doing posting to Slashdot, but given the legendary inability of most Slashdotters to gain the attention of the fairer sex, I'd say Lindsey could be a hit!
Move over NYCL, you've met your match. :-)
Perhaps nVidia's chief scientist wrote his piece because nVidia wants its very niche CUDA/OpenCL computational offering to expand and become mainstream. There's a problem with that though.
The computational ecosystems that surround CPUs can't work with hidden, undocumented interfaces such as nVidia is used to producing for graphics. Compilers and related tools hit the user-mode hardware directly, while operating systems fully control every last register on CPUs at supervisor level. There is no room for nVidia's traditional GPU secrecy in this new computational area.
I rather doubt that the company is going to change its stance on openness, so Dr. Daly's statement opens up the parallel computing arena very nicely to its traditional rival ATI, which under AMD's ownership is now a strongly committed open-source company.
Your suggestion that politicians are inappropriate while courts are appropriate doesn't make much sense. They're both of the same class, namely, both preoccupied with law and both clueless about technology. Even worse, the court system is adversarial and leads towards dollar damage limitation, not technological analysis.
This is an engineering problem, and the right institutions to handle it are the professional engineering bodies, particularly in Electrical Engineering and Electronics and in Mechanical Engineering, who for the most part are not corrupt, and they most definitely are not clueless about the technology.
Furthermore, they have a professional interest in staying outside of the financial and legal skirmishes, because their reputations depend on it. In a world that's truly messed up politically, economically and legally, Chartered Engineer is one of the few labels that still means something solid, at least to those who actually produce real things.
And in this particular subject, we really do need objective and trustworthy analysis of a very complex problem.
The summary discusses some extra problems surrounding the new Second Life policy, but the poster should really have pointed out something much more fundamental first:
The new policy is no longer compliant with GPLv2 clause 6. Lindens can no longer use GPL at all.
Losing their previous GPLv2 compliance is clearly major back pedaling. (What's more, they've totally closed the source of their main viewer, which was previously GPLv2, but that's a separate issue.)
What they released previously as GPL cannot of course have its GPL license revoked, but they're trying to undo even the GPL rights on the old code, because their new terms cover all developers of Second Life Viewers without limitation.
Access to their servers is irrelevant to this new anti-GPL problem, by the way. Whether GPL code can be used for access is of no concern to the GPL, but what they've done is to impose restrictions on development and distribution of GPL code, not just restrictions on access.
It's a very bad situation.
And I haven't even mentioned that the new rules are incompatible with the GPL's "NO WARRANTY" clause either. What a mess.