I don't know how many authors I've discovered by checking out their books at the library, then buying other of their books later.
That's nothing! You should see the authors I've discovered by checking out their books at the library, reading them, and then returning them once I was done. (OMG no money changed hands! I'm a criminal!)
You got your Apple//gs and I got my Apple ][+ for the same reason the other kids got their C-64s and Atari 800s. It wasn't "because we liked to figure things out." It was games. What did we want to figure out? Games, mostly. Winning games was good, so we figured out how to hack games. Free games were even better, so we figured out how to get around copy protection. Perhaps in the long view some of us wanted to figure out how to write games of our own, and so we learned to program. But the games came first; if you're telling me you got into computers because figuring out arcane flags for command-line programs was really exciting to you, or you loved figuring out how a floppy-disk filesystem worked, I'm calling you a liar.
Besides, this old trope that "the Mac hides everything from you" has been around since the day the Mac came out, and it wasn't true then and it isn't true now. The reason modern OSes seem to "hide things" is because they are in fact exponentially more complex than the DOSes of the 80s. A kid who "likes figuring things out" has a helluva lot more to figure out in the JDK or the.Net runtime than he did learning machine language for an 8-bit processor.
It sounds like you're arguing that Linux is a better educational tool because it forces you to twiddle around in the command line and "figure things out." When I was a kid, I would have just said "it breaks all the time." I'd have been much happier figuring out the things I wanted to figure out on an OS that worked when I wanted it to do something. (Not a knock on Linux, because I don't actually believe you even need to know much about the command line to run Ubuntu, but that's what you seem to be saying...)
Yikes. Should I feel fortunate that I've never had a civilian job that required me to "follow orders"? Or am I merely to infer that you are an asshole boss?
DRM? You're being a little broad with that term, aren't you? Microsoft is just going to conduct periodic sweeps of its entire data store with the assistance of whatever RIAA, MPAA, etc. When it identifies files (by signature) that have been flagged as copyright infringing, Microsoft will issue you a take-down notice while unilaterally deleting the files at the same time.
"Legalistically, you may appeal to the Emperor, but you would get no hearing. The Emperor today is not the Emperor of an Entun dynasty, you know. Trantor, I'm afraid, is in the hands of the aristocratic families, members of which compose the Commission of Public Safety. This is a development which is well predicted by Psychohistory." -- Isaac Asimov, Foundation
As has been discussed here very recently, this is yet another case of poorly socialized nerds fantasizing that there is some kind of perfect "legal hack" that will instantaneously invalidate decades of case law. It ain't so.
The "unsecured wireless AP" defense won't work. The "I just put software that I own on a server, I never made copies" defense won't work. The "I didn't do what I was required to do so the EULA doesn't apply to me" defense won't work.
Similarly, the "that bag of cocaine isn't mine, I've never seen it before" defense is continually tested and honed in thousands of jurisdictions around America, but it still doesn't work.
In fact, I know more people who are aggressively hostile toward Twitter than who use it.
Similarly, I've never heard anybody breathe the words Google Latitude -- if they actually even know what it is -- without the inevitable follow-up, "Eewww! What a creepy thing! What, is it like so people can stalk you?"
I suspect that this is another of the occasional Slashdot stories that seem targeted squarely, and solely, at college students.
Hysterical. It seems like every story with even the slightest political bent brings out all the reactionaries who want to bash Slashdot's supposed liberal bias. Now this guy says Slashdot is a haven for "Republi-nazis." Surely we can't have it both ways... can we?? Why, that would be almost as if... as if... nah, I dare not say it.
I'm 35, and I was vaccinated against polio as a child. The MMR jab hadn't been invented then. I had measles, mumps and German measles as a young child, as did everyone else I knew.
Strange. I turn 36 in March and not one person I've ever known has had a case of measles, mumps, or rubella (barring parents I don't know anything about). I'm not sure about polio but I suspect I was vaccinated against that, too. I lived in Canada when I was of vaccination age and went to grammar school in the U.S.
Of course. Because any climate scientist who isn't in agreement suddenly finds he has no govt funding, and loses credibility in his field.
Haha, of course! The government -- staunch foe of the oil industry! They'll do anything to promote their low-carbon agenda at the expense of the giant petrochemical corporations, even if it DOOMS US ALL!
I get the reference, but this is actually a longstanding myth about copyrights. The idea was that a sealed envelope with a postmark on it would establish the date that you created a work. Obviously, however, that isn't true -- it's trivial to fake a postmark, or you could have just as easily mailed yourself an empty, unsealed envelope for use later. Simply put, sending a copy of your work to yourself gets you nothing.
Dishonest? The submitter said it's a design company. Presumably they're using it for graphic design. I worked for graphic design companies for many years. The GIMP doesn't cut it.
My gut says that if you're expecting this one patent to protect you from anybody filing an opportunistic lawsuit against you then it's a waste of money.
It's certainly not illegal to invent a new protocol/new software and give it away for free. If someone later patents the same thing and comes to get you, then what you did is prior art. The thing is, just saying it doesn't make you immune from lawsuits -- the point of the lawsuit is to prove that you don't owe anybody anything. Likewise, your one patent wouldn't stop anyone else from writing a slightly different patent and trying the same thing. In other words, so long as software is patentable, you'll never be safe from patent lawsuits.
Maybe the thing to do is to file a copy of your specifications and your software code with the U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright protection for software is automatic, just like it is for written works or anything else. Registering your copyright does confer certain advantages, however. In this case, the point would be to grant you a recognized legal document establishing that your work was completed before any future patents came into being. It would certainly be cheaper than $10,000.
The real thing you have to worry about is the likelihood that there are already 200+ patents on the books covering the ideas that you have implemented. No patent registration will protect you against that.
It's Adobe Creative Suite... which includes stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You won't find free replacements for those. (And don't bother replying about the GIMP until it has proper CMYK support.)
Why Win7 is not purely 64 bit is beyond me - any recent machine can run the 64 bit version, any older machine should be running XP anyway.
There are probably some people who buy recent machines for performance or some specific features, but who still need to run peripherals for which only 32-bit drivers are available. My Mustek scanner, for instance. First they said they would never write Vista drivers. After lots of moaning from customers they finally did, but only 32-bit. Vista x64 requires 64-bit signed drivers for all hardware.
Not really. What now I suspect you're really trying to say is that the people who do "office stuff" who use Windows-based software run those programs on older Macs using something like Virtual PC... which means they don't actually have to boot into Windows all the time, but they do most of their computing in Mac OS X and just run the programs they need under VPC. That I would believe.
Ditto. What kind of company would keep buying Mac laptops for employees when it knew that those employees would need to buy an additional Windows license and install Bootcamp so that they could boot into Windows all the time? It's ludicrous just on the face of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how many authors I've discovered by checking out their books at the library, then buying other of their books later.
That's nothing! You should see the authors I've discovered by checking out their books at the library, reading them, and then returning them once I was done. (OMG no money changed hands! I'm a criminal!)
You got your Apple //gs and I got my Apple ][+ for the same reason the other kids got their C-64s and Atari 800s. It wasn't "because we liked to figure things out." It was games. What did we want to figure out? Games, mostly. Winning games was good, so we figured out how to hack games. Free games were even better, so we figured out how to get around copy protection. Perhaps in the long view some of us wanted to figure out how to write games of our own, and so we learned to program. But the games came first; if you're telling me you got into computers because figuring out arcane flags for command-line programs was really exciting to you, or you loved figuring out how a floppy-disk filesystem worked, I'm calling you a liar.
Besides, this old trope that "the Mac hides everything from you" has been around since the day the Mac came out, and it wasn't true then and it isn't true now. The reason modern OSes seem to "hide things" is because they are in fact exponentially more complex than the DOSes of the 80s. A kid who "likes figuring things out" has a helluva lot more to figure out in the JDK or the .Net runtime than he did learning machine language for an 8-bit processor.
It sounds like you're arguing that Linux is a better educational tool because it forces you to twiddle around in the command line and "figure things out." When I was a kid, I would have just said "it breaks all the time." I'd have been much happier figuring out the things I wanted to figure out on an OS that worked when I wanted it to do something. (Not a knock on Linux, because I don't actually believe you even need to know much about the command line to run Ubuntu, but that's what you seem to be saying...)
Yikes. Should I feel fortunate that I've never had a civilian job that required me to "follow orders"? Or am I merely to infer that you are an asshole boss?
DRM? You're being a little broad with that term, aren't you? Microsoft is just going to conduct periodic sweeps of its entire data store with the assistance of whatever RIAA, MPAA, etc. When it identifies files (by signature) that have been flagged as copyright infringing, Microsoft will issue you a take-down notice while unilaterally deleting the files at the same time.
"Legalistically, you may appeal to the Emperor, but you would get no hearing. The Emperor today is not the Emperor of an Entun dynasty, you know. Trantor, I'm afraid, is in the hands of the aristocratic families, members of which compose the Commission of Public Safety. This is a development which is well predicted by Psychohistory." -- Isaac Asimov, Foundation
As has been discussed here very recently, this is yet another case of poorly socialized nerds fantasizing that there is some kind of perfect "legal hack" that will instantaneously invalidate decades of case law. It ain't so.
The "unsecured wireless AP" defense won't work. The "I just put software that I own on a server, I never made copies" defense won't work. The "I didn't do what I was required to do so the EULA doesn't apply to me" defense won't work.
Similarly, the "that bag of cocaine isn't mine, I've never seen it before" defense is continually tested and honed in thousands of jurisdictions around America, but it still doesn't work.
Last I checked, the "nice lady" had actually been replaced by an automated system.
I still don't know anyone who uses Twitter.
In fact, I know more people who are aggressively hostile toward Twitter than who use it.
Similarly, I've never heard anybody breathe the words Google Latitude -- if they actually even know what it is -- without the inevitable follow-up, "Eewww! What a creepy thing! What, is it like so people can stalk you?"
I suspect that this is another of the occasional Slashdot stories that seem targeted squarely, and solely, at college students.
Eh? Are we talking about the same PHPBB? 'Cause this one is open source, GPL-licensed, and totally free.
Hysterical. It seems like every story with even the slightest political bent brings out all the reactionaries who want to bash Slashdot's supposed liberal bias. Now this guy says Slashdot is a haven for "Republi-nazis." Surely we can't have it both ways ... can we?? Why, that would be almost as if ... as if ... nah, I dare not say it.
I'm 35, and I was vaccinated against polio as a child. The MMR jab hadn't been invented then. I had measles, mumps and German measles as a young child, as did everyone else I knew.
Strange. I turn 36 in March and not one person I've ever known has had a case of measles, mumps, or rubella (barring parents I don't know anything about). I'm not sure about polio but I suspect I was vaccinated against that, too. I lived in Canada when I was of vaccination age and went to grammar school in the U.S.
Of course. Because any climate scientist who isn't in agreement suddenly finds he has no govt funding, and loses credibility in his field.
Haha, of course! The government -- staunch foe of the oil industry! They'll do anything to promote their low-carbon agenda at the expense of the giant petrochemical corporations, even if it DOOMS US ALL!
OK, well the phrase is "a spanner in the works," not "a spanner in the wrench" (where a spanner and a wrench are the same thing).
I'll bet my spanner against your wrench that you're not actually British.
I get the reference, but this is actually a longstanding myth about copyrights. The idea was that a sealed envelope with a postmark on it would establish the date that you created a work. Obviously, however, that isn't true -- it's trivial to fake a postmark, or you could have just as easily mailed yourself an empty, unsealed envelope for use later. Simply put, sending a copy of your work to yourself gets you nothing.
Dishonest? The submitter said it's a design company. Presumably they're using it for graphic design. I worked for graphic design companies for many years. The GIMP doesn't cut it.
My gut says that if you're expecting this one patent to protect you from anybody filing an opportunistic lawsuit against you then it's a waste of money.
It's certainly not illegal to invent a new protocol/new software and give it away for free. If someone later patents the same thing and comes to get you, then what you did is prior art. The thing is, just saying it doesn't make you immune from lawsuits -- the point of the lawsuit is to prove that you don't owe anybody anything. Likewise, your one patent wouldn't stop anyone else from writing a slightly different patent and trying the same thing. In other words, so long as software is patentable, you'll never be safe from patent lawsuits.
Maybe the thing to do is to file a copy of your specifications and your software code with the U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright protection for software is automatic, just like it is for written works or anything else. Registering your copyright does confer certain advantages, however. In this case, the point would be to grant you a recognized legal document establishing that your work was completed before any future patents came into being. It would certainly be cheaper than $10,000.
The real thing you have to worry about is the likelihood that there are already 200+ patents on the books covering the ideas that you have implemented. No patent registration will protect you against that.
It's Adobe Creative Suite ... which includes stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You won't find free replacements for those. (And don't bother replying about the GIMP until it has proper CMYK support.)
My point is that if you already start with the best code the compiler will provide, you can only improve from there.
Oh no, trust me, you can definitely screw it up worse, too.
I'm ... confused. From the article:
fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause.
Yeah, because I and everyone I know hates nothing more than being able to boot quickly.
almost anything would be an improvement over Network Manager.
What?? Personally, I prefer Network Manager to Vista's networking UI any day.
In fairness, Network Manager has actually done an amazing job
Oh, never mind then.
Yet, what really won me over, in playing around with the Moblin 2 alpha, was the insanely fast boots.
Wait, are you trying to help or harm the cause?
Fast boots could be a true advance in the history of computing.
Oh, I don't know. My Apple ][ booted into the Basic ROM quickly enough.
Having two OSes, one fast-booting and one slow-booting, is a horrible kludge. It's like a car with two steering wheels, one only for parking.
Actually it sounds more like having two cars, one that's moving fast and one that's moving slow. But these car analogies always confuse me.
I think Microsoft may have to really re-think a few things if they are going to compete on boot time with the Linux distros of tomorrow.
You might be right...
I don't know how fast Windows 7 is booting
Oh, never mind then.
I have a feeling that those declaring it's "mission accomplished" for Windows on netbooks may be getting ahead of themselves just a bit.
In fact, you could even say they're doing more to harm the cause than help it ... oh I give up.
But then again, if it was "not known" that just means it was never reported.
Why Win7 is not purely 64 bit is beyond me - any recent machine can run the 64 bit version, any older machine should be running XP anyway.
There are probably some people who buy recent machines for performance or some specific features, but who still need to run peripherals for which only 32-bit drivers are available. My Mustek scanner, for instance. First they said they would never write Vista drivers. After lots of moaning from customers they finally did, but only 32-bit. Vista x64 requires 64-bit signed drivers for all hardware.
Not really. What now I suspect you're really trying to say is that the people who do "office stuff" who use Windows-based software run those programs on older Macs using something like Virtual PC ... which means they don't actually have to boot into Windows all the time, but they do most of their computing in Mac OS X and just run the programs they need under VPC. That I would believe.
Coma wasn't written by Crichton, it was by Robin Cook. Bizarrely, Crichton directed the movie version.
OK, now I know you're lying. You can't run Bootcamp on "workstations outfitted with G5s."
Ditto. What kind of company would keep buying Mac laptops for employees when it knew that those employees would need to buy an additional Windows license and install Bootcamp so that they could boot into Windows all the time? It's ludicrous just on the face of it.