Well, DUH!!!! You have to show your work, and Wolframalpha doesn't show.... Wait, yes it does. Well, for complex problems anyway. The particular example given here was pretty darn simple, despite the mathematical verbiage...
However, as far as the Text's "going stale", about all anyone is going to be able to find are the answers to problems, which will not be enough for you to grade correctly.
Basically, your answer is correct, but meaningless in the context of this thread.
"But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort."
This is now an absurd claim, at this point. WolframAlpha returns you the answer to any problem by just typing it in.
Take for example one I just made up as I was typing this:
Limit as x -> 0 of (sqrt(sin (x-5)) + tan((y- pi/2)^2)) / x(y-2)^2
And bingo, it gives the answer, as well as gives the series expansion:
Besides, an Open Textbook can be modified, updated, support the development of new resources, homework sets, etc. by the teachers themselves. So they can leverage the MASSIVE amount of prep work they all do anyway. But with a closed book system, these teachers all have to reinvent the wheel for themselves, as they cannot share their efforts based on a copyrighted book.
You seem a bit confused. People who steal stuff are theives and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. End of conversation. This is a totally separate issue to the non-commercial use of consumer-purchased media.
No, you are wrong. First of all, someone who copies a copyrighted work outside of fair use has committed copyright infringement, not theft. Theft assumes you have deprived the owner of his possession(s).
The actus reus of theft is usually defined as an unauthorised taking, keeping or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft
So a person may be breaking the law (i.e. copyrights), but they are not thieves, and they are not stealing. They are infringing. Yet as things stand, infringing occurs if you sing happy birthday to someone in public, even though it is unlikely that Time Warner really owns the copyright involved.
And companies that claim copyrights to works in the public domain are not guilty of breaking any law. That is totally legal, and their takedown notices to publishers and websites either have to be respected, or take the risk of punishments themselves.
So regardless of what you think is clearly defined in the law concerning copyright infringement, the law is still quite muddled. And it is a huge problem, as many aspiring companies are blocked from entering the market by draconian royalties, fees, copyfraud (i.e. false claims of copyright), and artificial liability. Nobody is sure how to proceed since any cutting edge technical product or service could get slashed away by copyright maximalists. Witness the RealDVD ruling just a few days ago.
Words have meaning for a reason. You seem to agree with almost every point, except that you think copyright infringement is stealing (you are wrong), and that the boundaries around copyright are clear (you are wrong), and that companies that enable consumers to exercise their right to use their purchased media for no profit are working in a well defined legal space (you are wrong).
Who knows? But Time Warner gets about 2 million a year for a copyright of the *words* (not the tune, as that when into the public domain).
The strange thing is that nobody knows who wrote the words to "Happy Birthday". The copyright to the song was awarded to Jessica Hill in a lawsuit, and the Clayton F Summy Company and Jessica Hill secured the copyright in 1935 with the publishing of the sheet music with the words and a copyright notice. (The song had been published prior to that time, but not with any author or copyright, so those dates don't count).
The copyright will expire under current law in 2030, but isn't likely to without some movement, like the Pirate Party, to champaign for the value of the Public Domain.
The biggest problems with computer systems is configuring them, and once you do configure them, cloning that configuration to another system.
Chrome will need to do two things:
1) Make Chrome nice and shiny like the Mac OS, Vista, and Windows 7 2) Make it bullet proof and easy to configure and deploy.
They need device drivers for almost everything, and support for making drivers easy to build, debug, and to find. Make a system configuration easy to examine, modify, clone, and combine with the configurations of other systems.
Do that, and Windows is toast. Personally, I'd like to see more than just an OS that beats Windows. Linux really mostly does that already.
I think that the real game changer for Operating Systems will come from a complete redesign of an OS from the ground up with an eye on cheap memory, cheap disk space, fast communication between components in a computer system. I can envision an Operating System mostly stripped of functionality but provides connectivity to the various components in the system. Applications bring their own "file system" implementations to manage bulk storage provided by the OS. Interfaces to Applications provide the means to publish public views, but file structures private to the application would be sealed by the application rather than the OS. Why do we expose the guts of every application, other than to save disk space, which we squander anyway? An Application and the files you use to run your application are all a public view should expose.
Mice and keyboards are inputs to a application, but why must it be local? Why can't my mouse scroll from one computer system to another? Cut and paste between computer systems? We have the bandwidth, we have the connections. A desktop should be a means to show a view, but not necessarily of an application on my system. Maybe I need to run an application somewhere else. And lastly, why should an application have to be "ported" between a Mac or Windows system? Only because applications get wound around the functionality these OS's provide. However, mostly this is only a few megabytes of code. Cut the OS functionality accessed by an application (and allow the application to use various sets of libraries instead) and the effort to make a Windows application or Mac application or Linux application gets drastically reduced.
The real key to moving people into a cloud computational environment is making all the effort of configuring a system also move easily over the network. Microsoft can't really do that because they are tied into proprietary which is protected largely because it is hard to configure a computer system. Let's see what Google does.
Chrome isn't going to be that, but one can always dream.
Why does windows Suck? => Windows and microsoft results, no macs in sight Why is windows insecure? => Windows and Microsoft results, no macs in sight.
Put quotes around the question, i.e. "Why is windows so expensive?", and Bing only returns Windows results. But looking at these results, they are not big hitter sites. I am no big Windows fan (using Linux anytime I have a choice) but I just don't think there is that much discussion about how expensive Windows is out there. The expense of Macs is always discussed.
Yeah? So you miss type, and then what? Wait for them to time out, say they didn't get it, and give you another shot?
Why not just take the 5 you have, figure out they are wrong, and give you another shot at providing the number? Okay, if they CAN'T validate the number, then the # has a purpose.
This is why I like using the web rather than a phone. I get a backspace key for when I fat-finger something.
As others have said, the problem isn't P2P networks.
But something has to be done to insure our safety, right?
Wrong. If doing something like baning P2P technologies doesn't make us safer (and it will not), then doing so will cost us money for absolutely no return on said funds.
I never feel safer when people that make policy do so in a way that proves they have no grasp of the problem. They need to find out who leaked the information and deal with them. That is low tech, find who is at fault and ban THEM.
You claim "There's no 'fiar use' here", but in fact fair use is defined in the law. Section 107 of the copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code) states that Fair Use sets out four factors by which use might be considered fair (with no quotes).
1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
None of these factors have been extensively examined that I know of. The fourth factor is rather critical in this case, and I am not aware of any serious research that would suggest the value of music has suffered by file sharing. In fact, quite a bit of evidence to the contrary exists. If none of this evidence was submitted by Neeson, then this is his own fault.
I got here late (and you did too, it seems), but you made the absolute key observation. Each change resets the 5 year start date. This is critical, because this is how Time-Warner makes 2 million a year on the Happy Birthday song (the tune written in 1893 with the words "Good Morning to All"). The new words (i.e. "Happy Birthday to You") first appeared in print in 1935. Thus the modification in 1935 yields a new copyright date. (Now all sorts of problems exist with Time-Warner's claim on this song, but it absolutely demonstrates a reset of a copyright date given a modification to an existing work).
With this in mind, A five year copyright would be just fine for GPL. Certainly someone could take the 5 year old code base and use that as a start for their closed source product. What's wrong with that? They have to give up 5 years of progress to do this. It would only be reasonable with a source base that wasn't moving along in the first place.
Heck, you can do that today with Apache or BSD or MIT licensed open source. I don't see anyone doing that. Because doing so is a bet that your paid developers are going to outstrip the open source community on a product with wide and dynamic efforts behind it. And for a product which is essentially static, well such a source base is static and not going anywhere. If the ability to take that and run with it is needed to get some paid effort to progress, the 5 year copyright limit works in the favor of software progress. And if someone does something truly exciting with an otherwise stale code base, this will just inspire some people to take up the code again and develop an open source version again. And as long as they choose GPL, GPL will again work in the favor of open source as long as the community actually performs.
So I just don't see the problem. As ikegami said, only with fewer words.
The idea that nobody would invent anything new without patents (or copyrights lasting 130 years... consider the Happy Birthday song!) goes against logic as well as against the facts. In the Fashion industry, you cannot patent or copyright a design for a shirt or a dress. Make something popular, and everyone can make a knock off. None the less, we have plenty of designs, design shows, and fashion designers.
How can that possibly be if a fashion designer cannot patent or copyright their designs? Could it be that the new stuff simply sells better than the old stuff?
In the case of patents, lasting "only" 20 years, we can mostly outlive several cycles in a typical lifetime. Progress can be slowed by excessive license fees and patent trolls, but not completely halted. Perhaps that is okay, or perhaps it isn't. Patents serve to limit the field to several large companies who control a significant number of the needed licenses and can afford to license the patents that they do not control.
The lone inventor (or small company) can benefit from their patents in a new market, but only in as much as they keep out everyone else. Does this make the market more innovative? I doubt it. In an established market, they might be able to drain license fees, but they are unlikely to make a product. In an established market, hundreds if not thousands of patents can apply to a product. The lone inventor or small company might be able to ike some cash from a big company, but the patents of a lone inventor will not allow them entry into an established market.
Hawkins is right about the external store.... But the real change is when we began to code processes for computers. The interesting thing about books isn't that they exist, but that we can read something from 2000 years ago and continue processes defined by such texts.
The interesting thing about programs isn't that they exist external (like books), but that a machine reads something defined external to itself, perhaps from another country or time, and executes the processes defined by such tasks.
In the latter case, no HUMAN was required. We successfully built a mechanism by which processes can be defined and propagated without direct human involvement (other than supplying the computer, and putting it in touch with the software).
Suddenly I can have access to processes meticulously defined and tested by others without having to read a book or study or practice. I just load up a program and execute.
We have not only externalized the genetic store, as it were, but also the role of the organism in executing the processes.
The U.S. has nearly broken the bank, fighting for freedom by, well, fighting.
Even in 2001, some technical people felt the better way to promote freedom would be to work to establish communications in countries that are now beset with violence and poverty and totalitarian control by oppressive governments (none of these three problems necessarily being related, mind you).
There exist problems with doing this. One is addressed by this idea, how do you even make computers work where the utilities and support are unreliable if not non-existent. But the advantage of this is limited if you don't deal with a second problem: How you link people into the internet in a way that denies oppressors and/or conflicts from breaking these connections (as Iran has attempted to do lately)?
Then of course, there is the problem of actually doing something. How do you get governments/people/companies to invest in the tiny costs (when compared to fighting in Iraq and elsewhere) of deploying such technology in places where it would be needed. The U.S. and its government is much more interested in dropping million dollar bombs to blow up stuff, than dropping a few bills in a way that would actually have leverage with the people of this world, and that would actually be appreciated.
Bombs and war are disruptive and prevent people from both hearing the ideas about peace and tolerance and telling their own ideas and stories to the world. We need a technology that both gives people a voice no matter what their circumstances, and the ability to join the dialog about such problems even if the power doesn't run all the time.
I hope people take such ideas seriously, and actually do something other than just sell these systems to rich people that like mountain cabins.
Absolutely, spam and malware cost government and companies millions if not billions of dollars. But what is the Government going to do?
Every server placed on the Internet is exposed to traffic. If we try and shape and filter that traffic, we can certainly reduce spam and such, but at the cost to everyone. What does Obama think he is going to do to stop a "Cyber Pearl Harbor"? filter all traffic over the net? Restrict what servers can host what applications? Control what applications people install and use?
This so reminds me back when I was a freshmen in college, and I heard about all the "Languages" people used to program computers (the main one being a mainframe in the center of campus). I saw people carrying around boxes of cards, and wondered about computer "languages" and how they worked.
Well the same thing is happening about "cyber attacks" and such. There are problems, but no matter what we do to solve them, they must be solved system by system, user by user, server by server, application by application, service by service. The government can't do anything to help except to mandate standards. But that is the worst possible thing we could do. Standards necessarily mean that we replicate the same vulerabilities everywhere. Even if it takes 1000 x the effort to take advantage of a vulnerability in standard system, by definition everyone that follows that standard is vulnerable. We are far better off with diversity, where there are millions of more vulerabilities but none of them common to many applications and systems then we are having the same ones.
No mystery here. It is called genetic diversity in nature. A species without it dies.
But most likely, if we get anything from Obama's efforts, killing off diversity will be result. And that will be bad for us all.
As long as your application doesn't care about power (where most of my projects are large scale and DO care about power), adding more x86 boxes works just fine.
Rock was Sun's effort to develop a processor with high single thread performance. Single thread performance doesn't help the database performance of Sun' s new Oracle Over Lords. What databases need is high multi-thread performance.
The Niagara line ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 ) provides the proper architecture for improving database performance, and this effort by Sun has the added benefit of actually producing shipping products (Unlike Rock).
At this time, Oracle/Sun has NOT announced the killing off of further Niagara development.
You have 58 billion in total output (2 digits) costing American workers 373,375 jobs (6 digits), 16.3 billion in earnings (3 digits) and 2.6 billion in tax revenue (2 digits).
Already we find ourselves wondering what kind of math skills are involved, without looking at the bogus research behind them. 373,375 jobs ?!!?! Really? Not 373,374? Not 373,376? If that is true, then we have to assume there is a fairly detailed breakdown carrying 6 digits of accuracy down from the 58.0000 billion in total output (i.e. if you only have two digits to begin with, you don't get more later.... THAT means the starting figure has to have AT LEAST 6 digits, and more likely 9 or 10 to nail this down to such an exact job count).
So that makes us wonder what fraction of the 58 billion account for these 373,375. The trick is to look at the TAXES. We know because they told us that 2.6 billion is going to go to taxes. But that is only 4.4 percent of 58 billion! That is federal, state, and local taxes! And that HAS to be spot on if they are so accurate with the job count!
But they also claimed the 58 billion includes 16.3 billion in earnings. We gotta assume most of that accounts for the 2.6 billion in taxes. But that is only 15.9 percent of the earnings!?! I don't quite understand how they are keeping their tax rates so low, unless they are piping that money offshore. In which case, one has to wonder about that.
ANY way you slice these figures, not much income tax can be assumed, or that tax number would be MUCH bigger.
Now the only way I can figure cutting down the income tax is by assuming low paying jobs. So let's guess their analysis assumes 20K per year per job. That comes to about 7.4 billion.
That leaves 34.3 billion on the table. Where does that go? Expenses? But IF all that goes to expenses, doesn't that imply jobs created in addition to the 373,375 jobs quoted? A massive error perhaps?
The numbers just don't add up. And what kind of Senator would repeat them when they are so clearly junk?
For some people, the IPhone as currently configured is just huge. They travel, or they do work that doesn't involve a computer....
Me, I am in front of a computer all day. Sure there are time when having access to email when out and about would be nice, but seriously, it isn't something that is killing me.
So I use a three or four year old phone. It can do messaging, and I can play a game or two, and use some Star Trek ring tones.
I will buy a Smart phone. But only when that 1) doesn't lock me into a single provider, and 2) all this kind of crap has settled out, and 3) when such a phone isn't locked into one vertical change of command (Apple).
I don't want to spend huge dollars on a phone only to have to spend huge dollars to get the next iteration. I will wait until the delta between iterations isn't so vast.
So one of these years I think smart phones will let me run applications I get from third parties. They will interface with my computers as well as with the Internet. And I will be able to reasonably make a phone call. And that phone will not break the bank.
Got so caught up in the story, that I didn't make my point....
Use the copper to provide a land line on the cheapest plan possible. Especially if you have kids. Don't use it, but make sure your kids know the emergency number.
Not that any Slashdotter would know anyone that might get arrested.... Still one should be aware that in many places (like Texas) your "Phone Call" has to be a collect phone call through some third party (don't know the name of the third rate company in Texas), and they won't make a collect call to a cell phone.
So.... If the police show up at your daughter's apartment because of a domestic disturbance call, and she isn't entirely interested in letting them search the house (like she is studying for finals barefoot in her night gown after finally kicking out her very loud boyfriend).... And the police are so worried that she is being held against her will and being beaten up by her boy friend that they throw her on the ground and beat her up and haul her to jail....
THEN when she tries to call you and you have no land line.... You will not be disturbed.
THEN she will get tossed barefoot on the streets at 4:30 am in her night gown in downtown Austin Texas and will finally give you a call when she borrows a phone from a construction worker....
AND you will be thankful that you got 45 extra minutes sleep.
I am not entirely clear why so many states like Texas have decided that it is a great idea to only give people the right to a COLLECT phone call to a LAND LINE ONLY in this day and age, but that is the way it is.
In the end, an "operating system" is just a set of applications, and some glue to allow applications to share code/processor(s)/memory/IO. Anything that can be done by a "operating system" can be done by code within an application...
VMWare, anyone?
Besides, we have had multi-boot systems for years and years. The hardware has always allowed us to pick our poison and go. With ever more powerful hardware, why not allow us to run several "operating systems" at the same time?
What we really need is a configuration management system for our computer systems. Something that allows us to track configuration changes, and to deploy and "un-deploy" configuration changes dynamically. Then....
If all you need is a bios and a browser, so configure the hardware. If something comes in and installs a rootkit to hyjack your system, detect that and reconfigure the system back the way it was. Need to install an application? Do that configuration change. Want to persist documents and such to the "cloud"? configure the system thusly.
The bottom line is that we have the processing power and disk space to build a system that can stand apart and watch and manage the configuration of our computers. That is to say, look at the disk and the bios and insure it matches what we expect it to. The running state of the system can do what it wants, but if the persisted image of a system is preserved, at worse one needs to reboot to get back to a known and understood configuration.
Especially on servers, I don't quite understand why we trust what we call "operating systems" to protect themselves. I don't understand why we think these things are "platforms". I don't know why the author thinks a "BIOS operating system" is any different than what we use now. (smaller, but nothing new about a smaller OS installed in ROM, PROM, EPROM, or EEPROM, or Static Ram, or any other static tech).
What might be different is a separate system in hardware that watches over your system in real time to manage one's configuration. As I said, especially in a server (where a secure interface to said system can be used to manage what should or should not be allowed in the configuration) makes so much more sense.
Science has one uniform way of conducting research called "the scientific method."
This turns out to be "false" (according to the Author of the test) because when you study different things (say Microbiology and History), you have to use different methods.
Well DUH! Of course you do. But that doesn't mean that you don't form theories and test your theories. You do that with historical research as well, even if you can't culture the Ottoman Empire!
Obviously there are people out there that think the Scientific Method actually refers to a literal method every scientist follows, checking off each step of The Method. Those of us that actually do research understand there is no such thing, but we all believe we use the Scientific Method.
So BLAH!
I haven't that much faith in a test intended to test my understanding of Science when the Author doesn't know how to avoid subjective wording in their questions.
1) Thou shalt not place the Left Curly Brace on a line of its own; this shows disrespect to thy Fathers and thy Mothers who only had 80 columns and 24 lines in days of old 2) Thou shalt not use the GoTo, for such disrespects the Prophet of Programming Dijkstra, 3) Thou shalt comment thy code, and provide great detail about the workings of thy mind when thou does first write thy method. And thou shalt revisit and revise thy comments only in the earliest hours of the morning prior to thy code review. 4) Honor thy Sun and thy Java that your days may be long upon the Virtual Machine where thy code livith. 5) Thou shalt Compile before checking in. 6) Thou shalt Run thy code at least once before shipping. 7) Thou shalt Test at least one Browser against thy Server's code, and thy backup Server's code, and thy Neighbor's Server's code. 8) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's operating system unless thy neighbor runs Linux; If ye cast your eye upon thy neighbor's Windows Server, and covet it in thy heart, thy staff shall take thee into thy parking lot and stone thee with mice until the demon of stupidity leaveth thee 9) Thou shalt not make libraries of other gods such as C# or Perl. These are an abomination before thy God. 10) Once thou hast compiled thy code, generated thy Java Doc, Reviewed thy code with the elders of thy people, Deployed thy code upon thy server, and tested thy code upon the Browser of thy God (Firefox 3.0), and thy customer doth stumble upon thy bug, thou shalt blame thy customer with thy mouth, and curse his existence, for thou hath commented, placed thy braces properly, indented with four spaces (and not eight as do the godless), hath capped thy constants, hath lowercased thy methods, and hath passed all thy JUnit tests..... It is the truth of God that if yee hath done all these things, thy customer must be at fault.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, DUH!!!! You have to show your work, and Wolframalpha doesn't show .... Wait, yes it does. Well, for complex problems anyway. The particular example given here was pretty darn simple, despite the mathematical verbiage...
However, as far as the Text's "going stale", about all anyone is going to be able to find are the answers to problems, which will not be enough for you to grade correctly.
Basically, your answer is correct, but meaningless in the context of this thread.
"But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort."
This is now an absurd claim, at this point. WolframAlpha returns you the answer to any problem by just typing it in.
Take for example one I just made up as I was typing this:
Limit as x -> 0 of (sqrt(sin (x-5)) + tan((y- pi/2)^2)) / x(y-2)^2
And bingo, it gives the answer, as well as gives the series expansion:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Limit+as+x+-%3E+0+of+(sqrt(sin+(x-5))+%2B+tan((y-+pi%2F2)^2))+%2F+x(y-2)^2
Besides, an Open Textbook can be modified, updated, support the development of new resources, homework sets, etc. by the teachers themselves. So they can leverage the MASSIVE amount of prep work they all do anyway. But with a closed book system, these teachers all have to reinvent the wheel for themselves, as they cannot share their efforts based on a copyrighted book.
You seem a bit confused. People who steal stuff are theives and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. End of conversation. This is a totally separate issue to the non-commercial use of consumer-purchased media.
No, you are wrong. First of all, someone who copies a copyrighted work outside of fair use has committed copyright infringement, not theft. Theft assumes you have deprived the owner of his possession(s).
The actus reus of theft is usually defined as an unauthorised taking, keeping or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft
So a person may be breaking the law (i.e. copyrights), but they are not thieves, and they are not stealing. They are infringing. Yet as things stand, infringing occurs if you sing happy birthday to someone in public, even though it is unlikely that Time Warner really owns the copyright involved.
And companies that claim copyrights to works in the public domain are not guilty of breaking any law. That is totally legal, and their takedown notices to publishers and websites either have to be respected, or take the risk of punishments themselves.
So regardless of what you think is clearly defined in the law concerning copyright infringement, the law is still quite muddled. And it is a huge problem, as many aspiring companies are blocked from entering the market by draconian royalties, fees, copyfraud (i.e. false claims of copyright), and artificial liability. Nobody is sure how to proceed since any cutting edge technical product or service could get slashed away by copyright maximalists. Witness the RealDVD ruling just a few days ago.
Words have meaning for a reason. You seem to agree with almost every point, except that you think copyright infringement is stealing (you are wrong), and that the boundaries around copyright are clear (you are wrong), and that companies that enable consumers to exercise their right to use their purchased media for no profit are working in a well defined legal space (you are wrong).
So why claim his arguements are "full of holes"?
Who knows? But Time Warner gets about 2 million a year for a copyright of the *words* (not the tune, as that when into the public domain).
The strange thing is that nobody knows who wrote the words to "Happy Birthday". The copyright to the song was awarded to Jessica Hill in a lawsuit, and the Clayton F Summy Company and Jessica Hill secured the copyright in 1935 with the publishing of the sheet music with the words and a copyright notice. (The song had been published prior to that time, but not with any author or copyright, so those dates don't count).
The copyright will expire under current law in 2030, but isn't likely to without some movement, like the Pirate Party, to champaign for the value of the Public Domain.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
The biggest problems with computer systems is configuring them, and once you do configure them, cloning that configuration to another system.
Chrome will need to do two things:
1) Make Chrome nice and shiny like the Mac OS, Vista, and Windows 7
2) Make it bullet proof and easy to configure and deploy.
They need device drivers for almost everything, and support for making drivers easy to build, debug, and to find. Make a system configuration easy to examine, modify, clone, and combine with the configurations of other systems.
Do that, and Windows is toast. Personally, I'd like to see more than just an OS that beats Windows. Linux really mostly does that already.
I think that the real game changer for Operating Systems will come from a complete redesign of an OS from the ground up with an eye on cheap memory, cheap disk space, fast communication between components in a computer system. I can envision an Operating System mostly stripped of functionality but provides connectivity to the various components in the system. Applications bring their own "file system" implementations to manage bulk storage provided by the OS. Interfaces to Applications provide the means to publish public views, but file structures private to the application would be sealed by the application rather than the OS. Why do we expose the guts of every application, other than to save disk space, which we squander anyway? An Application and the files you use to run your application are all a public view should expose.
Mice and keyboards are inputs to a application, but why must it be local? Why can't my mouse scroll from one computer system to another? Cut and paste between computer systems? We have the bandwidth, we have the connections. A desktop should be a means to show a view, but not necessarily of an application on my system. Maybe I need to run an application somewhere else. And lastly, why should an application have to be "ported" between a Mac or Windows system? Only because applications get wound around the functionality these OS's provide. However, mostly this is only a few megabytes of code. Cut the OS functionality accessed by an application (and allow the application to use various sets of libraries instead) and the effort to make a Windows application or Mac application or Linux application gets drastically reduced.
The real key to moving people into a cloud computational environment is making all the effort of configuring a system also move easily over the network. Microsoft can't really do that because they are tied into proprietary which is protected largely because it is hard to configure a computer system. Let's see what Google does.
Chrome isn't going to be that, but one can always dream.
Why does windows Suck? => Windows and microsoft results, no macs in sight
Why is windows insecure? => Windows and Microsoft results, no macs in sight.
Put quotes around the question, i.e. "Why is windows so expensive?", and Bing only returns Windows results. But looking at these results, they are not big hitter sites. I am no big Windows fan (using Linux anytime I have a choice) but I just don't think there is that much discussion about how expensive Windows is out there. The expense of Macs is always discussed.
Check out the Google fights if you don't believe me:
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22Why+is+windows+so+expensive%22&word2=%22Why+are+macs+so+expensive%22
I don't know what algorithm is used to rank results by Bing, but it doesn't seem to be pro Windows in general, only with that particular search.
Nothing to see here, move along....
Yeah? So you miss type, and then what? Wait for them to time out, say they didn't get it, and give you another shot?
Why not just take the 5 you have, figure out they are wrong, and give you another shot at providing the number? Okay, if they CAN'T validate the number, then the # has a purpose.
This is why I like using the web rather than a phone. I get a backspace key for when I fat-finger something.
As others have said, the problem isn't P2P networks.
But something has to be done to insure our safety, right?
Wrong. If doing something like baning P2P technologies doesn't make us safer (and it will not), then doing so will cost us money for absolutely no return on said funds.
I never feel safer when people that make policy do so in a way that proves they have no grasp of the problem. They need to find out who leaked the information and deal with them. That is low tech, find who is at fault and ban THEM.
You claim "There's no 'fiar use' here", but in fact fair use is defined in the law. Section 107 of the copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code) states that Fair Use sets out four factors by which use might be considered fair (with no quotes).
1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
None of these factors have been extensively examined that I know of. The fourth factor is rather critical in this case, and I am not aware of any serious research that would suggest the value of music has suffered by file sharing. In fact, quite a bit of evidence to the contrary exists. If none of this evidence was submitted by Neeson, then this is his own fault.
I got here late (and you did too, it seems), but you made the absolute key observation. Each change resets the 5 year start date. This is critical, because this is how Time-Warner makes 2 million a year on the Happy Birthday song (the tune written in 1893 with the words "Good Morning to All"). The new words (i.e. "Happy Birthday to You") first appeared in print in 1935. Thus the modification in 1935 yields a new copyright date. (Now all sorts of problems exist with Time-Warner's claim on this song, but it absolutely demonstrates a reset of a copyright date given a modification to an existing work).
With this in mind, A five year copyright would be just fine for GPL. Certainly someone could take the 5 year old code base and use that as a start for their closed source product. What's wrong with that? They have to give up 5 years of progress to do this. It would only be reasonable with a source base that wasn't moving along in the first place.
Heck, you can do that today with Apache or BSD or MIT licensed open source. I don't see anyone doing that. Because doing so is a bet that your paid developers are going to outstrip the open source community on a product with wide and dynamic efforts behind it. And for a product which is essentially static, well such a source base is static and not going anywhere. If the ability to take that and run with it is needed to get some paid effort to progress, the 5 year copyright limit works in the favor of software progress. And if someone does something truly exciting with an otherwise stale code base, this will just inspire some people to take up the code again and develop an open source version again. And as long as they choose GPL, GPL will again work in the favor of open source as long as the community actually performs.
So I just don't see the problem. As ikegami said, only with fewer words.
The idea that nobody would invent anything new without patents (or copyrights lasting 130 years ... consider the Happy Birthday song!) goes against logic as well as against the facts. In the Fashion industry, you cannot patent or copyright a design for a shirt or a dress. Make something popular, and everyone can make a knock off. None the less, we have plenty of designs, design shows, and fashion designers.
How can that possibly be if a fashion designer cannot patent or copyright their designs? Could it be that the new stuff simply sells better than the old stuff?
In the case of patents, lasting "only" 20 years, we can mostly outlive several cycles in a typical lifetime. Progress can be slowed by excessive license fees and patent trolls, but not completely halted. Perhaps that is okay, or perhaps it isn't. Patents serve to limit the field to several large companies who control a significant number of the needed licenses and can afford to license the patents that they do not control.
The lone inventor (or small company) can benefit from their patents in a new market, but only in as much as they keep out everyone else. Does this make the market more innovative? I doubt it. In an established market, they might be able to drain license fees, but they are unlikely to make a product. In an established market, hundreds if not thousands of patents can apply to a product. The lone inventor or small company might be able to ike some cash from a big company, but the patents of a lone inventor will not allow them entry into an established market.
Makes one wonder about folks that take Dr. Richard Dawkin's thoughts on theology as definitive, doesn't it?
Hawkins is right about the external store.... But the real change is when we began to code processes for computers. The interesting thing about books isn't that they exist, but that we can read something from 2000 years ago and continue processes defined by such texts.
The interesting thing about programs isn't that they exist external (like books), but that a machine reads something defined external to itself, perhaps from another country or time, and executes the processes defined by such tasks.
In the latter case, no HUMAN was required. We successfully built a mechanism by which processes can be defined and propagated without direct human involvement (other than supplying the computer, and putting it in touch with the software).
Suddenly I can have access to processes meticulously defined and tested by others without having to read a book or study or practice. I just load up a program and execute.
We have not only externalized the genetic store, as it were, but also the role of the organism in executing the processes.
The U.S. has nearly broken the bank, fighting for freedom by, well, fighting.
Even in 2001, some technical people felt the better way to promote freedom would be to work to establish communications in countries that are now beset with violence and poverty and totalitarian control by oppressive governments (none of these three problems necessarily being related, mind you).
There exist problems with doing this. One is addressed by this idea, how do you even make computers work where the utilities and support are unreliable if not non-existent. But the advantage of this is limited if you don't deal with a second problem: How you link people into the internet in a way that denies oppressors and/or conflicts from breaking these connections (as Iran has attempted to do lately)?
Then of course, there is the problem of actually doing something. How do you get governments/people/companies to invest in the tiny costs (when compared to fighting in Iraq and elsewhere) of deploying such technology in places where it would be needed. The U.S. and its government is much more interested in dropping million dollar bombs to blow up stuff, than dropping a few bills in a way that would actually have leverage with the people of this world, and that would actually be appreciated.
Bombs and war are disruptive and prevent people from both hearing the ideas about peace and tolerance and telling their own ideas and stories to the world. We need a technology that both gives people a voice no matter what their circumstances, and the ability to join the dialog about such problems even if the power doesn't run all the time.
I hope people take such ideas seriously, and actually do something other than just sell these systems to rich people that like mountain cabins.
Absolutely, spam and malware cost government and companies millions if not billions of dollars. But what is the Government going to do?
Every server placed on the Internet is exposed to traffic. If we try and shape and filter that traffic, we can certainly reduce spam and such, but at the cost to everyone. What does Obama think he is going to do to stop a "Cyber Pearl Harbor"? filter all traffic over the net? Restrict what servers can host what applications? Control what applications people install and use?
This so reminds me back when I was a freshmen in college, and I heard about all the "Languages" people used to program computers (the main one being a mainframe in the center of campus). I saw people carrying around boxes of cards, and wondered about computer "languages" and how they worked.
Well the same thing is happening about "cyber attacks" and such. There are problems, but no matter what we do to solve them, they must be solved system by system, user by user, server by server, application by application, service by service. The government can't do anything to help except to mandate standards. But that is the worst possible thing we could do. Standards necessarily mean that we replicate the same vulerabilities everywhere. Even if it takes 1000 x the effort to take advantage of a vulnerability in standard system, by definition everyone that follows that standard is vulnerable. We are far better off with diversity, where there are millions of more vulerabilities but none of them common to many applications and systems then we are having the same ones.
No mystery here. It is called genetic diversity in nature. A species without it dies.
But most likely, if we get anything from Obama's efforts, killing off diversity will be result. And that will be bad for us all.
"... is on x86 with just more boxes..."
As long as your application doesn't care about power (where most of my projects are large scale and DO care about power), adding more x86 boxes works just fine.
Rock was Sun's effort to develop a processor with high single thread performance. Single thread performance doesn't help the database performance of Sun' s new Oracle Over Lords. What databases need is high multi-thread performance.
The Niagara line ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 ) provides the proper architecture for improving database performance, and this effort by Sun has the added benefit of actually producing shipping products (Unlike Rock).
At this time, Oracle/Sun has NOT announced the killing off of further Niagara development.
You have 58 billion in total output (2 digits) costing American workers 373,375 jobs (6 digits), 16.3 billion in earnings (3 digits) and 2.6 billion in tax revenue (2 digits).
Already we find ourselves wondering what kind of math skills are involved, without looking at the bogus research behind them. 373,375 jobs ?!!?! Really? Not 373,374? Not 373,376? If that is true, then we have to assume there is a fairly detailed breakdown carrying 6 digits of accuracy down from the 58.0000 billion in total output (i.e. if you only have two digits to begin with, you don't get more later.... THAT means the starting figure has to have AT LEAST 6 digits, and more likely 9 or 10 to nail this down to such an exact job count).
So that makes us wonder what fraction of the 58 billion account for these 373,375. The trick is to look at the TAXES. We know because they told us that 2.6 billion is going to go to taxes. But that is only 4.4 percent of 58 billion! That is federal, state, and local taxes! And that HAS to be spot on if they are so accurate with the job count!
But they also claimed the 58 billion includes 16.3 billion in earnings. We gotta assume most of that accounts for the 2.6 billion in taxes. But that is only 15.9 percent of the earnings!?! I don't quite understand how they are keeping their tax rates so low, unless they are piping that money offshore. In which case, one has to wonder about that.
ANY way you slice these figures, not much income tax can be assumed, or that tax number would be MUCH bigger.
Now the only way I can figure cutting down the income tax is by assuming low paying jobs. So let's guess their analysis assumes 20K per year per job. That comes to about 7.4 billion.
That leaves 34.3 billion on the table. Where does that go? Expenses? But IF all that goes to expenses, doesn't that imply jobs created in addition to the 373,375 jobs quoted? A massive error perhaps?
The numbers just don't add up. And what kind of Senator would repeat them when they are so clearly junk?
For some people, the IPhone as currently configured is just huge. They travel, or they do work that doesn't involve a computer....
Me, I am in front of a computer all day. Sure there are time when having access to email when out and about would be nice, but seriously, it isn't something that is killing me.
So I use a three or four year old phone. It can do messaging, and I can play a game or two, and use some Star Trek ring tones.
I will buy a Smart phone. But only when that 1) doesn't lock me into a single provider, and 2) all this kind of crap has settled out, and 3) when such a phone isn't locked into one vertical change of command (Apple).
I don't want to spend huge dollars on a phone only to have to spend huge dollars to get the next iteration. I will wait until the delta between iterations isn't so vast.
So one of these years I think smart phones will let me run applications I get from third parties. They will interface with my computers as well as with the Internet. And I will be able to reasonably make a phone call. And that phone will not break the bank.
Got so caught up in the story, that I didn't make my point....
Use the copper to provide a land line on the cheapest plan possible. Especially if you have kids. Don't use it, but make sure your kids know the emergency number.
Not that any Slashdotter would know anyone that might get arrested.... Still one should be aware that in many places (like Texas) your "Phone Call" has to be a collect phone call through some third party (don't know the name of the third rate company in Texas), and they won't make a collect call to a cell phone.
So.... If the police show up at your daughter's apartment because of a domestic disturbance call, and she isn't entirely interested in letting them search the house (like she is studying for finals barefoot in her night gown after finally kicking out her very loud boyfriend) .... And the police are so worried that she is being held against her will and being beaten up by her boy friend that they throw her on the ground and beat her up and haul her to jail....
THEN when she tries to call you and you have no land line.... You will not be disturbed.
THEN she will get tossed barefoot on the streets at 4:30 am in her night gown in downtown Austin Texas and will finally give you a call when she borrows a phone from a construction worker....
AND you will be thankful that you got 45 extra minutes sleep.
I am not entirely clear why so many states like Texas have decided that it is a great idea to only give people the right to a COLLECT phone call to a LAND LINE ONLY in this day and age, but that is the way it is.
TRUE STORY.
Factual errors are not noted with a [sic], generally speaking.
In the end, an "operating system" is just a set of applications, and some glue to allow applications to share code/processor(s)/memory/IO. Anything that can be done by a "operating system" can be done by code within an application...
VMWare, anyone?
Besides, we have had multi-boot systems for years and years. The hardware has always allowed us to pick our poison and go. With ever more powerful hardware, why not allow us to run several "operating systems" at the same time?
What we really need is a configuration management system for our computer systems. Something that allows us to track configuration changes, and to deploy and "un-deploy" configuration changes dynamically. Then....
If all you need is a bios and a browser, so configure the hardware. If something comes in and installs a rootkit to hyjack your system, detect that and reconfigure the system back the way it was. Need to install an application? Do that configuration change. Want to persist documents and such to the "cloud"? configure the system thusly.
The bottom line is that we have the processing power and disk space to build a system that can stand apart and watch and manage the configuration of our computers. That is to say, look at the disk and the bios and insure it matches what we expect it to. The running state of the system can do what it wants, but if the persisted image of a system is preserved, at worse one needs to reboot to get back to a known and understood configuration.
Especially on servers, I don't quite understand why we trust what we call "operating systems" to protect themselves. I don't understand why we think these things are "platforms". I don't know why the author thinks a "BIOS operating system" is any different than what we use now. (smaller, but nothing new about a smaller OS installed in ROM, PROM, EPROM, or EEPROM, or Static Ram, or any other static tech).
What might be different is a separate system in hardware that watches over your system in real time to manage one's configuration. As I said, especially in a server (where a secure interface to said system can be used to manage what should or should not be allowed in the configuration) makes so much more sense.
So I took the "Science Literacy Test"
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/SciLit.html
A T/F test, including questions like:
Science has one uniform way of conducting research called "the scientific method."
This turns out to be "false" (according to the Author of the test) because when you study different things (say Microbiology and History), you have to use different methods.
Well DUH! Of course you do. But that doesn't mean that you don't form theories and test your theories. You do that with historical research as well, even if you can't culture the Ottoman Empire!
Obviously there are people out there that think the Scientific Method actually refers to a literal method every scientist follows, checking off each step of The Method. Those of us that actually do research understand there is no such thing, but we all believe we use the Scientific Method.
So BLAH!
I haven't that much faith in a test intended to test my understanding of Science when the Author doesn't know how to avoid subjective wording in their questions.
The 10 commandments of coding conventions
1) Thou shalt not place the Left Curly Brace on a line of its own; this shows disrespect to thy Fathers and thy Mothers who only had 80 columns and 24 lines in days of old
2) Thou shalt not use the GoTo, for such disrespects the Prophet of Programming Dijkstra,
3) Thou shalt comment thy code, and provide great detail about the workings of thy mind when thou does first write thy method. And thou shalt revisit and revise thy comments only in the earliest hours of the morning prior to thy code review.
4) Honor thy Sun and thy Java that your days may be long upon the Virtual Machine where thy code livith.
5) Thou shalt Compile before checking in.
6) Thou shalt Run thy code at least once before shipping.
7) Thou shalt Test at least one Browser against thy Server's code, and thy backup Server's code, and thy Neighbor's Server's code.
8) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's operating system unless thy neighbor runs Linux; If ye cast your eye upon thy neighbor's Windows Server, and covet it in thy heart, thy staff shall take thee into thy parking lot and stone thee with mice until the demon of stupidity leaveth thee
9) Thou shalt not make libraries of other gods such as C# or Perl. These are an abomination before thy God.
10) Once thou hast compiled thy code, generated thy Java Doc, Reviewed thy code with the elders of thy people, Deployed thy code upon thy server, and tested thy code upon the Browser of thy God (Firefox 3.0), and thy customer doth stumble upon thy bug, thou shalt blame thy customer with thy mouth, and curse his existence, for thou hath commented, placed thy braces properly, indented with four spaces (and not eight as do the godless), hath capped thy constants, hath lowercased thy methods, and hath passed all thy JUnit tests..... It is the truth of God that if yee hath done all these things, thy customer must be at fault.