I always wonder whether it wouldn't be possible to demonstrate the absurdity of the system in a "real-world" way.
The point it that things are being patented that contain no innovation and require no research to develop. Sometimes they're not even developed at all, but still patented - just wild ideas.
Now it you look at the free software environment, there's tons of development going on all the time, including some substantial innovation - but hardly any of it registers on the economic "IP screen". The best one can hope for is that it can be used as prior art to shoot down some particularly silly patent.
To shortcut the argument: imagine the FSF or some such organisation going up to MS, SCO et al and being able to go "uh, no, dude, that's covered by such-and-such basic-tech-stupid-patent which belongs to - er, that would be us. Cash will be fine please. Repeatedly." - basically until it becomes clear to every last one of them that the economic environment just isn't going to work like this.
It all breaks down at the point that it sucks to formulate the patents, shove them through the [$laywer]-filter, have them registered etc. etc., and defend them. Plus, it costs a bit. And no, I'm not offering myself as a volunteer.
A diesel engine can last around 200,000 miles, I don't think an electric motor will last that long.
Just let the engineers who perfected the diesel engine loose on the problem.
But no - is this a troll? A diesel engine has a minimum of hundreds of parts, many of them precision, many of them in a hostile environment (heat, pressure, wear, etc) - an electric motor has a minimum of three moving parts, including the bearings, all of them in comparatively non-hostile environments.
What - on earth - gives you the idea a diesel engine is a better bet than an electric motor when it comes to longevity?
Just a note: I fired up OOo on reading your comment just to see the lightbulb: I'd never noticed it before (OK, I don't use OOo much, because my clients don't etc etc).
And the one Good Thing about the lightbulb compared to Clippy is that when you close it, you don't have to watch it *wink* at you before it zooms up and back home, i.e., to some inner circle of hell.
Winking Clippy... it's about the only thing I can think of that will reliably make me cringe. [shudder]
I've had this problem under Windows, too. Comma on the keypad, but set "." as decimal separator in the OS localisation => can't use keypad under Excel.
It's not so much an OOorg problem as it is a hardware one. From the bug report: "[...] all Spanish keyboards sold in Spain [have] a dot in the numeric keypad, but the decimal point character in Spain is the comma. [...]".
... WTF?
Any "solution" in the OS (including the current MS one for Excel) is going to be a nasty kludge anyway. If I see a "." key on the keypad, hit the key in Excel, and a "," appears - now *that* is a bug:)
Then again, if you read RMS' diatribe on this subject: if you have GNU/Linux (for the anal retentive), and turn it into GNU/BSD or GNU/Hurd (for the anal retentive), what you get is largely indistinguishable from the GNU/Linux you started out with. I.e., the desktop is identical, all the apps are identical and work the same way, the shell(s), the devices (the ones there are drivers for, that is) and so on. (Or an analogy: would you mark a Ferrari with a Porsche engine "Porsche"? A Panasonic TV with a Sony CRT "Sony"? An Apple PC with an IBM processor "IBM"?)
Just to say the man is not entirely devoid of any kind of a point.
Start by saying that politics is a dirty word. The questions you ask are reflected in many areas: if all space agencies pulled together, human kind would have reached Mars by now. Then again, if that money had been used differently, hunger would have been eradicated the world over a while back (it's not as if there's not enough food to go around). If people really pulled together, AIDS would probably be conquered by now - as it is, it's largely up to the private med/chem companies to come up with a solution, driven solely by the profit motive.
So: yes, if there were a benevolent GNU/BSD/Linux/whatever dictator, who had the power to *make* all open source developpers to donate their time to "The One True OSS Cause [TM]", then yes, we'd have TOTOC[TM] instead of MS now. Whoop-dee-doo.
Point is, the hardly imaginable total effort invested in OSS dev by all the people out there is essentially, individually an excercise in freedom. "We" or "They" aren't out to beat MS, or even to build the best possible OS, but instead there's a whole plethora of goals being followed, attained, discarded, re-discovered and so on, all the time. And there isn't any one person or group who can tell "Us" or "Them" that we have to do something one way instead of another.
Example: a while ago someone built an ASCII front-end for the Doom engine. This is of course premier piss-artistry of the highest degree, and was also anything but easy (that is to say kudos to the man). But do you honestly believe if someone had had the power to go up to this guy and say "Dude, ASCII-Doom is stupid. What we really need is a USB driver for the BSD kernel. Do that.", that the guy in question would have been in any way motivated to invest even a fraction of the energy in this new task?
Conclusion: yes, concentrated, coordinated effort would be more effective, but it's not politically doable beyond what we have today. And that's a Good Thing.
Which brings me to the article in hand: Zack Welsh, instead of revelling in the possibility of forking Gentoo, seems to be intent on whining about the big bad man who wouldn't share his toy. Well, Zack, make a bit-perfect copy of said toy, go play with it, and if you do well, you might have some other kids join you. Where's the problem?
The question is: where does each of you figure going when (or if) you do leave? If each of you already knows, that's fine. If it's just a ploy, however, it might backfire. But above all: if some people do leave, it will be a boon for the people left behind: they (the department) will have the full attention of the management and "instant VIP status". The best position for you is if you're the only one left over of course: you get to rebuild the department, and more or less dictate the terms:) One more thing: people in general (I know I do) tend to over-estimate their worth *in a particular position*. I.e.: you may know the ins and outs of whatever it is you do intimately, and figure everything would crumble if you / your department upped and left... but what might actually happen is that the management hires some Joes and Janes off the street, who have re-invent many many wheels, but perhaps by doing just that get by just fine. Question: have you accounted for that? In the end, walking out is cool (especially if the boss is French like @ JBoss (kidding! kidding!)), but finding a solution is ultimately more satisfying.
I think I'll start sending out resumes for the position of "Resume Collector and Archiver - You Know You Need One(TM)". Anyone got a link to the relevant federal reglementation?
The work is impressive, says materials chemist Michael Sailor at the University of California, San Diego, whose team has developed flexible, biodegradable photonic crystals. He says he now plans to test the phenomenon for himself.
Sounds like they didn't manage to make crystals that actually *last*, and are attempting to sell this bug as a feature. Who says the physical engineering guys can't learn anything from the software guys?:)
There is a certain difference: the ability to distinguish between that which is "harmful" and that which is "harmless" has improved since the time of the example of doctors recommending smoking for some conditions. "Cancer" used to be "an enlarged organ", perhaps "unnatural growth", or if the no autopsy was performed, just plain "died prematurely of old age". Let alone the issue of following all the "maybe"s will eventually stop you in your tracks - the possibilities of gauging how dangerous something is better now than it was several decades ago, and will be better again in another couple of decades. Yes, it may turn out in retrospect to have been a bad idea, but from what I have read about the issue of "electrosmog" I have the firm impression that to the best of human knowledge today it's harmless.
Personally, I still worry more about what I eat, drink and breathe - and figure that by the time I kick the metaphysical bucket, someone will have found cause or other to pin it on to - and it will probably turn out to be something completely unexpected, like, oh, I dunno - could beer be lethal?
BTW: I recommend reading William Gibson's original story "Johnny Mnemonic". The "memory overload" is a total crap idea inserted by the makers of the movie, and not part of the original.
This article makes me thing of a slightly strange formulation often seen in plays:
Exuent Microsoft
But then, it's probably too much to hope for. I can already see the blue-eyed look on the Softies' faces: "But... but... it *does* confirm to the standards. Well, almost. Well, okay, there are some things in there that will make an implementation than confirms with *only* W3C standards to crash, but that's hardly our fault. And look! We put some really neat new stuff in there to make up for it. We're on your side. Really. Trust us."
Okay. I'll raise you two ZX-81's, a Sinclair QL with two of the brain-dead streamer thingies, a TI99/4a *with* a game cartridge, a 1541 drive for my C-64, an 8-inch floppy for my ][e & clone, a couple of IBM 5140's, and an MSX with a 5 1/4 floppy drive. All LNIB (just kidding).
[rereads the above]... *damn* I've got a lot of trash.
[...] can wirelessly transmit location, movements and vital signs via the Internet, storing the info in a database.
Sorry, but that sounds like one of these post-modern patent applications. "Via the internet"... wooo-hoo! I hardly think anyone's building a device a tenth of the size of a pacemaker that will continuously transmit "ASL"-data (or whatever) to a satellite, or even the cell phone network. Bluetooth, WLAN, whatever, yea, but I don't expect to see anyone being tracked across the Austalian outback with one of these anytime soon.
As for the plus side: Finally - a rational use for that aluminium foil beanie. Now *that's* newsForNerds/stuffThatMatters.
The best take on this issue I heard was a memory upgrade for VAXen that consisted of removing a jumper: the boxes were delivered with the RAM maxed out, but some of it disabled. You could either remove the jumper yourself and void the warranty, or pay for the upgrade and have a Digital engineer to drop by to remove the jumper for you, but keep the warranty.
[...] users tended to try to defeat the security measures placed on them.
Yeah, well that's always pretty much the point, especially on/. The first question after type of DRM Apple was using became apparent when the iTunes store opened was "OK - how do we circumvent it?". And I can't see that changing. Some FBI/CIA agent working on a secure workstation - fine, keep secret what is deigned secret. But consumers, even office workers, will be saying "I want to send XY the plans to the power station / a tune / whatever, and it won't let me." The subsequent question is never even "why not?", but always "how can I do it in spite of the restrictions set by the system?"
Yes, I see a vastly expanding market for DMCA circumvention applications.
Slashdot Mirror
I always wonder whether it wouldn't be possible to demonstrate the absurdity of the system in a "real-world" way.
The point it that things are being patented that contain no innovation and require no research to develop. Sometimes they're not even developed at all, but still patented - just wild ideas.
Now it you look at the free software environment, there's tons of development going on all the time, including some substantial innovation - but hardly any of it registers on the economic "IP screen". The best one can hope for is that it can be used as prior art to shoot down some particularly silly patent.
To shortcut the argument: imagine the FSF or some such organisation going up to MS, SCO et al and being able to go "uh, no, dude, that's covered by such-and-such basic-tech-stupid-patent which belongs to - er, that would be us. Cash will be fine please. Repeatedly." - basically until it becomes clear to every last one of them that the economic environment just isn't going to work like this.
It all breaks down at the point that it sucks to formulate the patents, shove them through the [$laywer]-filter, have them registered etc. etc., and defend them. Plus, it costs a bit. And no, I'm not offering myself as a volunteer.
Ah, well.
- A diesel engine can last around 200,000 miles, I don't think an electric motor will last that long.
Just let the engineers who perfected the diesel engine loose on the problem.But no - is this a troll? A diesel engine has a minimum of hundreds of parts, many of them precision, many of them in a hostile environment (heat, pressure, wear, etc) - an electric motor has a minimum of three moving parts, including the bearings, all of them in comparatively non-hostile environments.
What - on earth - gives you the idea a diesel engine is a better bet than an electric motor when it comes to longevity?
- Finaly That lightbulb has got to go.
Just a note: I fired up OOo on reading your comment just to see the lightbulb: I'd never noticed it before (OK, I don't use OOo much, because my clients don't etc etc).And the one Good Thing about the lightbulb compared to Clippy is that when you close it, you don't have to watch it *wink* at you before it zooms up and back home, i.e., to some inner circle of hell.
Winking Clippy
[shudder]
I've had this problem under Windows, too. Comma on the keypad, but set "." as decimal separator in the OS localisation => can't use keypad under Excel.
:)
It's not so much an OOorg problem as it is a hardware one. From the bug report: "[...] all Spanish keyboards sold in Spain [have] a dot in the numeric keypad, but the decimal point character in Spain is the comma. [...]".
... WTF?
Any "solution" in the OS (including the current MS one for Excel) is going to be a nasty kludge anyway. If I see a "." key on the keypad, hit the key in Excel, and a "," appears - now *that* is a bug
Fix the keyboards I say.
Fiddlesticks.
That's nothing against my grey-goo- and fusion-power-patents.
Not to mention the time machine and faster-than-light travel.
Are you suggesting MongooseCN read the article before posting?
:)
Dude - you know that's just crazy talk
Not quite.
....
... *bibilip* ...]
Now, if the back of the screen showed the back of the picture, too
[*bibilip*
[glances at closed flip-open phone]
- "Dude. Bad hair day?"
:)
Then again, if you read RMS' diatribe on this subject: if you have GNU/Linux (for the anal retentive), and turn it into GNU/BSD or GNU/Hurd (for the anal retentive), what you get is largely indistinguishable from the GNU/Linux you started out with.
I.e., the desktop is identical, all the apps are identical and work the same way, the shell(s), the devices (the ones there are drivers for, that is) and so on. (Or an analogy: would you mark a Ferrari with a Porsche engine "Porsche"? A Panasonic TV with a Sony CRT "Sony"? An Apple PC with an IBM processor "IBM"?)
Just to say the man is not entirely devoid of any kind of a point.
Start by saying that politics is a dirty word. The questions you ask are reflected in many areas: if all space agencies pulled together, human kind would have reached Mars by now. Then again, if that money had been used differently, hunger would have been eradicated the world over a while back (it's not as if there's not enough food to go around). If people really pulled together, AIDS would probably be conquered by now - as it is, it's largely up to the private med/chem companies to come up with a solution, driven solely by the profit motive.
So: yes, if there were a benevolent GNU/BSD/Linux/whatever dictator, who had the power to *make* all open source developpers to donate their time to "The One True OSS Cause [TM]", then yes, we'd have TOTOC[TM] instead of MS now. Whoop-dee-doo.
Point is, the hardly imaginable total effort invested in OSS dev by all the people out there is essentially, individually an excercise in freedom. "We" or "They" aren't out to beat MS, or even to build the best possible OS, but instead there's a whole plethora of goals being followed, attained, discarded, re-discovered and so on, all the time. And there isn't any one person or group who can tell "Us" or "Them" that we have to do something one way instead of another.
Example: a while ago someone built an ASCII front-end for the Doom engine. This is of course premier piss-artistry of the highest degree, and was also anything but easy (that is to say kudos to the man). But do you honestly believe if someone had had the power to go up to this guy and say "Dude, ASCII-Doom is stupid. What we really need is a USB driver for the BSD kernel. Do that.", that the guy in question would have been in any way motivated to invest even a fraction of the energy in this new task?
Conclusion: yes, concentrated, coordinated effort would be more effective, but it's not politically doable beyond what we have today. And that's a Good Thing.
Which brings me to the article in hand: Zack Welsh, instead of revelling in the possibility of forking Gentoo, seems to be intent on whining about the big bad man who wouldn't share his toy.
Well, Zack, make a bit-perfect copy of said toy, go play with it, and if you do well, you might have some other kids join you. Where's the problem?
- [...] which monopolistic Satan-organization does Slashdot hate more, at this particular moment... SCO or Microsoft?
They're hated equally, but SCO acutely, and MS chronically.Like having arthritis and appendicitis simultaneously
Dude - you're giving away C-64s?
Sling one my way!
:)
/pathetic 80s dude stuck in a rut
- And designing [games] to be thrown away is good practice?
;-)
Do you play games *that* badly?You keep your used toilet paper?
The question is: where does each of you figure going when (or if) you do leave? If each of you already knows, that's fine. :) ... but what might actually happen is that the management hires some Joes and Janes off the street, who have re-invent many many wheels, but perhaps by doing just that get by just fine. Question: have you accounted for that?
If it's just a ploy, however, it might backfire.
But above all: if some people do leave, it will be a boon for the people left behind: they (the department) will have the full attention of the management and "instant VIP status". The best position for you is if you're the only one left over of course: you get to rebuild the department, and more or less dictate the terms
One more thing: people in general (I know I do) tend to over-estimate their worth *in a particular position*. I.e.: you may know the ins and outs of whatever it is you do intimately, and figure everything would crumble if you / your department upped and left
In the end, walking out is cool (especially if the boss is French like @ JBoss (kidding! kidding!)), but finding a solution is ultimately more satisfying.
I think I'll start sending out resumes for the position of "Resume Collector and Archiver - You Know You Need One(TM)". Anyone got a link to the relevant federal reglementation?
Okay - that lights my bulb. I only know it from the song. Good and absurd, just like what I aspire to.
Kotman, eh? Ah, well.
- Curious? Does the name Dr. Kotman mean anything to you?
FroMan, can't say it does - please enlighten me.- The work is impressive, says materials chemist Michael Sailor at the University of California, San Diego, whose team has developed flexible, biodegradable photonic crystals. He says he now plans to test the phenomenon for himself.
Sounds like they didn't manage to make crystals that actually *last*, and are attempting to sell this bug as a feature.Who says the physical engineering guys can't learn anything from the software guys?
- (Although caves might be dangerous. What if rocks fall on your head? What if you get bitten by a snake? What if a bear attacks you? Oh dear..)
Radon, and natural radioactivity. We're fucked, life's just plain dangerous.Hey! who came up with the idea anyway? Refund! Refund!
:)
There is a certain difference: the ability to distinguish between that which is "harmful" and that which is "harmless" has improved since the time of the example of doctors recommending smoking for some conditions. "Cancer" used to be "an enlarged organ", perhaps "unnatural growth", or if the no autopsy was performed, just plain "died prematurely of old age".
Let alone the issue of following all the "maybe"s will eventually stop you in your tracks - the possibilities of gauging how dangerous something is better now than it was several decades ago, and will be better again in another couple of decades. Yes, it may turn out in retrospect to have been a bad idea, but from what I have read about the issue of "electrosmog" I have the firm impression that to the best of human knowledge today it's harmless.
Personally, I still worry more about what I eat, drink and breathe - and figure that by the time I kick the metaphysical bucket, someone will have found cause or other to pin it on to - and it will probably turn out to be something completely unexpected, like, oh, I dunno - could beer be lethal?
BTW: I recommend reading William Gibson's original story "Johnny Mnemonic". The "memory overload" is a total crap idea inserted by the makers of the movie, and not part of the original.
This article makes me thing of a slightly strange formulation often seen in plays:
... but ... it *does* confirm to the standards. Well, almost. Well, okay, there are some things in there that will make an implementation than confirms with *only* W3C standards to crash, but that's hardly our fault. And look! We put some really neat new stuff in there to make up for it. We're on your side. Really. Trust us."
Exuent Microsoft
But then, it's probably too much to hope for. I can already see the blue-eyed look on the Softies' faces: "But
Dude - if a character on DS9 asks such a near-rhetorical question, the answer invariably turns out to be the moral of that particular eposide.
:-)
In this case, young grasshopper, you seem to have missed it
You've got an Oric? Gimme!
... *damn* I've got a lot of trash.
:-)
Okay. I'll raise you two ZX-81's, a Sinclair QL with two of the brain-dead streamer thingies, a TI99/4a *with* a game cartridge, a 1541 drive for my C-64, an 8-inch floppy for my ][e & clone, a couple of IBM 5140's, and an MSX with a 5 1/4 floppy drive. All LNIB (just kidding).
[rereads the above]
- [...] can wirelessly transmit location, movements and vital signs via the Internet, storing the info in a database.
Sorry, but that sounds like one of these post-modern patent applications. "Via the internet"I hardly think anyone's building a device a tenth of the size of a pacemaker that will continuously transmit "ASL"-data (or whatever) to a satellite, or even the cell phone network. Bluetooth, WLAN, whatever, yea, but I don't expect to see anyone being tracked across the Austalian outback with one of these anytime soon.
As for the plus side:
Finally - a rational use for that aluminium foil beanie. Now *that's* newsForNerds/stuffThatMatters.
The best take on this issue I heard was a memory upgrade for VAXen that consisted of removing a jumper: the boxes were delivered with the RAM maxed out, but some of it disabled. You could either remove the jumper yourself and void the warranty, or pay for the upgrade and have a Digital engineer to drop by to remove the jumper for you, but keep the warranty.
Truth/myth? Anyone got any sources?
- [...] users tended to try to defeat the security measures placed on them.
Yeah, well that's always pretty much the point, especially onThe first question after type of DRM Apple was using became apparent when the iTunes store opened was "OK - how do we circumvent it?". And I can't see that changing. Some FBI/CIA agent working on a secure workstation - fine, keep secret what is deigned secret. But consumers, even office workers, will be saying "I want to send XY the plans to the power station / a tune / whatever, and it won't let me." The subsequent question is never even "why not?", but always "how can I do it in spite of the restrictions set by the system?"
Yes, I see a vastly expanding market for DMCA circumvention applications.