The EU may see this as easy money, but the reality is that it might as well collectively agree to gas the whole of Europe. It'll be quicker, less painful, and less stressful on the unemployment figures.
I wonder if the companies that have a stake in Linux like RedHat, IBM, and so forth would be willing to pony up the dough to create our own illustrious-sounding "institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth. Or at least the truth as we see it and not the way Micro$oft does.
They're just not that stupid. Biased, false reports with dodgy backgrounds don't tend to do much for your business image, not matter how cleverly you try to disassociate yourself from them.
People tend to believe in the old adage that "there's no smoke without fire." I do believe Microsoft is trying to play with fire and not get burnt, but will be spending some time in hospital over these kind of incidents in the future.
Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi, with a more open approach and an emphasis on using C++. The result is a program that builds upon Sodipodi's good points by adding a better user interface, handsome new features (like boolean operations), as well as being a lot more stable.
My impression is that Lauris Kaplinski (the Sodipodi maintainer) was doing a David Dawes impression and holding Sodipodi development back in one way or another, and Inkscape is the result of all the frustration that built up. Now the momentum is with Inkscape which has a bright future with a lot of active developers.
Also, the "unorganised approach to open source" comment in the story is very unfair. Inkscape is a very well organised project and Bryce in particular is very diligent about keeping the future well mapped out. The "unorganised" jibe is really because Bryce and Co let people hack on features they want to hack on, and readily accept them if they meet a decent standard. But isn't that what open source is all about? And isn't the reason for many forks and/or project stagnation due to this being prevented? I'd say "open minded" is a more appropriate term.
Sound a lot like material breach of contract with them not coming through with the money. Or else the deliberatly sabatoged it in order to own that dev space.
Or, on the flip side, sounds more like a child throwing toys out of the preverbial pram.
It's almost blackmail. "Support me else I shut it down."
Prevent [another SCO-type BS lawsuit]? Nothing will do that short of turning SCO corp. into a legal crater as an example of any other company foolish enough to attempt the same stunt.
Fortunately SCO and Darl McBride are doing a great job of cratering themselves. Short of turning up and denying the crap SCO is flinging at people, IBM and the like have had to do almost nothing.
Is it only me who gets the impression, lately, that everything SCO does digs their grave a little deeper?
Hey! Let's just crosspost everything from OSNews, and like, not even change the titles much. Oh, wait!!! It's been done! Nevermind.
Didn't you know? CowboyNeal is Eugenia Lol-Queri. They are one and the same.
Not female, not male, just some trans-gender geek-news-obsessed freak!
Got to go... the FBI are peaking through my curtains again. (They infiltrated Manchester years ago and have been tracking me ever since.) Gotta go check the beer bottle on my door handles haven't been disturbed again.
A good test of desktop self-sufficiency could be if an OS can make it's own high quality SVG icons. Linux is getting there, but not quite yet.
Ok, name one thing you can't do in Inkscape that prevents us from making high quality SVG icons?
Until Sodipodi 0.20+, there was an argument that there was no decent Free Software SVG editing tool.
Until Inkscape (a fork of Sodipodi with more refined goals and using C++), there was an argument that there was no decent Free Software SVG editing tool with a good UI.
Now, there really is no argument that we're missing something. As of Inkscape 0.38, we have a stable, well-featured SVG editor. And it's fast catching with Illustrator in termsof features.
You're wrong, today the Council needed a 2/3 majority. The Parliament in second reading needs an absolute majority (NR_OF_MEPS/2 instead of YES_VOTES > NO_VOTES) for each of its original amendments that it wants to reinstate. And because we are going to elect a new parliament next month, they can even decide to start the whole thing all over again.
OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NOOO!!!
I thought we were once and for all rid of those annoying whingey, half-assed protest pages, "This page is down in protest of software patents... actually it's not, here's a clicky thingy."
I've seen that many of those pages that I'm now beyond caring. It's becoming a question of insanity! Don't you know that MEPs don't browse the web? Hell, mine don't even use email, they have secretaries to do that!
This really isn't meant as flamebait. Pixar's movies are extremely cool looking but I really wish they'd make some movies that weren't oriented towards children.
You evidently didn't see the Final Fantasy movie, to see how hard it is to produce a good adult oriented CG film.
CG is still cartoony. How many adult cartoons do you know of? Viz?
If the data structure/algorithm is sufficiently complex, and no-one would have thought of it in the first place, then it may be worthy of a patent [of decent amount of time, non-renewable].
Software in incomparable to physical inventions.
To start with, software can be immediately distributed globally within a matter of days. There is not the same large R&D expenditure, the same manufacturing, distribution, and logistical problems, the mass co-operation needed to find a point of sale, and the other many issues that go into making a profit from selling a physical invention.
Even if some software is complex enough to be considered an invention, the author can get it to market almost instantly. Why should they get 14 years to hold onto the right to do that before anybody else?
And how can a datastructure or an algorithm be considered an invention, it's just a logical set of instructrions that almost anybody striving for that same particular goal will conclude.
No, if it's sufficiently complex, you have the trademark and you keep the code. Then if somebody else wants to implement competition, they have to work out how to do it themselves, and since it's "complex" it'll take a while. By which time, if the idea is so great, you'll have monopolised the market as there is no limitation on how quickly you can distribute it other than the price you slap on your software.
I think the trend in CPUs is going to change dramatically soon, much the same way it has with video cards. Except, in a slightly different direction. Instead of getting faster, the direction they need to be going is getting less expensive to produce, less power requirements, and less heat output....and more of them.
I wouldn't be suprised if 2-4 processor machines were not the normal in 3 years time.
Why keep going up, when you can go sideways and gain as much ground?
You would think that the people developing the best project in the world would at least have the knowledge of how to become inaccessible to spam.
Bingo! They already have on an individual basis!
Anybody who knows anything about Free Software can pretty much block all spam using a variety of techniques from filtering (eg Bayesian with SpamAssassin) to challenge-response systems.
The changelog contains emails so people can be easily contacted for information. It's called open development - people interact at all levels in order to get work done.
If people were bothered about spam, do you really think htey would consent to having their email published in something as conspicious as the Linux changelogs?
This little guy shows that as far as the goal of a fully working robotic (human-avatar) intelligence, mechanistically we're there. We can create an avatar which is robust enough to do the full human movements. Now we just need to improve the AI side of things. Let's face it, AI is severly lacking at the moment. I wouldn't say I'm an expert by any means, but I do try to keep up with the relevant research in the field.
Ruh-eally. Did you watch the movies?
The robots had the dexterity and balance of, at best, a 3 year old human. The over hand throw video was telling, as it took the robot several separate motions to position itself and wobbled about as much as is possible without falling over upon throwing the ball. The ball was thrown with no accuracy.
If anything, this actually shows how far we have yet to go before welcoming our robot overlords.
The government(s) want you to believe that it is merely a coincidence. Coincidentally, I'm currently offering virtual tinfoil hats at a 20% discount. Therein lies the difference between a fortunate and unfortunate coincidence!
So it was you that caused the fire! You're diabolical plan to profit from the sale of protective metalic headwear has been foiled by your own arrogance, thinking you could brag in public!
Re:Fantastic!
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
[Photoshop does stuff] like channel/layer based JPEG compression control, which is invaluable for web designers.
Um, I'm a web designer. How is that invaluable?
I think you're eating too much of the hamburger that Adobe is feeding you with buzzwords like that.
Gimp creates jpegs just fine. If you require ultimate fine-grained control over image creation then I'd wager:
You're using too many images in your website. Learn CSS.
You're wasting your time when you could be doing more productive things which would help you create your websites more quickly instead of worrying about 1k or so in a jpeg. It's ok, we have broadband (or 56k modems at the very worst).
Re:SEE HOW FUCKING STUPID GENTOO/GNU/LUNIX IS!!!!!
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
I swear fucking linux retards make shit hard on purpose just so they feel some love since there mom never gave them any and the only thing there dad gave them was a cock in the ass!!!
Are you jealous because your dad never gave you anything?
Re:Sweet!
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Now maybe I can figure out how to use the thing.
It's not difficult - you can find some good tutorials at gug.sunsite.dk.
Your life would be a lot easier if you just used MP3 in the first place.
I remember an incident a few decades ago when a little old black lady sat at the front of the bus when it would be easier to sit with her enthic contemporaries at the back of the bus, as was expected at the time.
And wouldn't it be easier for Mr R. Stallman to give up his dreams of global software freedom and use Windows?
Wouldn't it have been easier for Mr L. Torvalds to just forget about writing his own OS and use Windows like everybody else?
You, good Sir, are part of the mass that made the crap software that is Windows a monopoly because it was easy. Thanks, but no thanks, I'll stick with my Freedom because I'm free to choose the less-easy option and help make it easy.
How is the parent 'informative'? Are people who moderate even bothering to compare the articles?
The other story is about the release of Gtk2.4 and associated libs, which is an event in itself.
This story is about the future of the Gnome desktop (or indeed Free Software desktop in general) by assessing how a framework can be established that is a direct (and hopefully superior) alternative to the framework Microsoft will be introducing with Longhorn.
Still, I have to admit, this is something that could go so many ways. Right now Mono has the mindshare in terms of Gnome/GTK# apps, people are playing with it, liking it, there are actually unique interesting apps (like Muine) written in it etc. Where are the interesting GTK/Java apps?
On the other hand, the GNU java toolchain is nicer than Monos. GCJ is a really nice, easy to use compiler that's pretty fast and it creates ELF binaries. It fits in with the existing infrastructure, reuses our investment in ELF and the resultant apps don't have strange EXE and DLL extensions.
According to the consensus, around the time C# was announced by MS, C# was just Java with a few more keywords.
So make GCJ compile C#! Problem solved! Best of both worlds! A union of two houses!
Slashdot Mirror
The EU may see this as easy money, but the reality is that it might as well collectively agree to gas the whole of Europe. It'll be quicker, less painful, and less stressful on the unemployment figures.
So Hitler wasn't a madman after all!
I wonder if the companies that have a stake in Linux like RedHat, IBM, and so forth would be willing to pony up the dough to create our own illustrious-sounding "institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth. Or at least the truth as we see it and not the way Micro$oft does.
They're just not that stupid. Biased, false reports with dodgy backgrounds don't tend to do much for your business image, not matter how cleverly you try to disassociate yourself from them.
People tend to believe in the old adage that "there's no smoke without fire." I do believe Microsoft is trying to play with fire and not get burnt, but will be spending some time in hospital over these kind of incidents in the future.
As completely excellent as Python is, it's just a fact that it just doesn't run as fast as C (or even Java or Mono) for nearly any operation.
Have you tried Psyco?
From the website: "Psyco is a Python extension module which can massively speed up the execution of any Python code."
Sodipodi is pretty good, IIRC.
Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi, with a more open approach and an emphasis on using C++. The result is a program that builds upon Sodipodi's good points by adding a better user interface, handsome new features (like boolean operations), as well as being a lot more stable.
My impression is that Lauris Kaplinski (the Sodipodi maintainer) was doing a David Dawes impression and holding Sodipodi development back in one way or another, and Inkscape is the result of all the frustration that built up. Now the momentum is with Inkscape which has a bright future with a lot of active developers.
Also, the "unorganised approach to open source" comment in the story is very unfair. Inkscape is a very well organised project and Bryce in particular is very diligent about keeping the future well mapped out. The "unorganised" jibe is really because Bryce and Co let people hack on features they want to hack on, and readily accept them if they meet a decent standard. But isn't that what open source is all about? And isn't the reason for many forks and/or project stagnation due to this being prevented? I'd say "open minded" is a more appropriate term.
Sound a lot like material breach of contract with them not coming through with the money. Or else the deliberatly sabatoged it in order to own that dev space.
Or, on the flip side, sounds more like a child throwing toys out of the preverbial pram.
It's almost blackmail. "Support me else I shut it down."
That's hardly in the spirit of Free Software.
Prevent [another SCO-type BS lawsuit]? Nothing will do that short of turning SCO corp. into a legal crater as an example of any other company foolish enough to attempt the same stunt.
Fortunately SCO and Darl McBride are doing a great job of cratering themselves. Short of turning up and denying the crap SCO is flinging at people, IBM and the like have had to do almost nothing.
Is it only me who gets the impression, lately, that everything SCO does digs their grave a little deeper?
Hey! Let's just crosspost everything from OSNews, and like, not even change the titles much. Oh, wait!!! It's been done! Nevermind.
Didn't you know? CowboyNeal is Eugenia Lol-Queri. They are one and the same.
Not female, not male, just some trans-gender geek-news-obsessed freak!
Got to go... the FBI are peaking through my curtains again. (They infiltrated Manchester years ago and have been tracking me ever since.) Gotta go check the beer bottle on my door handles haven't been disturbed again.
A good test of desktop self-sufficiency could be if an OS can make it's own high quality SVG icons.
Linux is getting there, but not quite yet.
Ok, name one thing you can't do in Inkscape that prevents us from making high quality SVG icons?
Until Sodipodi 0.20+, there was an argument that there was no decent Free Software SVG editing tool.
Until Inkscape (a fork of Sodipodi with more refined goals and using C++), there was an argument that there was no decent Free Software SVG editing tool with a good UI.
Now, there really is no argument that we're missing something. As of Inkscape 0.38, we have a stable, well-featured SVG editor. And it's fast catching with Illustrator in termsof features.
What are you trying to say? I didn't get it.
You're wrong, today the Council needed a 2/3 majority. The Parliament in second reading needs an absolute majority (NR_OF_MEPS/2 instead of YES_VOTES > NO_VOTES) for each of its original amendments that it wants to reinstate. And because we are going to elect a new parliament next month, they can even decide to start the whole thing all over again.
OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NOOO!!!
I thought we were once and for all rid of those annoying whingey, half-assed protest pages, "This page is down in protest of software patents... actually it's not, here's a clicky thingy."
I've seen that many of those pages that I'm now beyond caring. It's becoming a question of insanity! Don't you know that MEPs don't browse the web? Hell, mine don't even use email, they have secretaries to do that!
This really isn't meant as flamebait. Pixar's movies are extremely cool looking but I really wish they'd make some movies that weren't oriented towards children.
You evidently didn't see the Final Fantasy movie, to see how hard it is to produce a good adult oriented CG film.
CG is still cartoony. How many adult cartoons do you know of? Viz?
If the data structure/algorithm is sufficiently complex, and no-one would have thought of it in the first place, then it may be worthy of a patent [of decent amount of time, non-renewable].
Software in incomparable to physical inventions.
To start with, software can be immediately distributed globally within a matter of days. There is not the same large R&D expenditure, the same manufacturing, distribution, and logistical problems, the mass co-operation needed to find a point of sale, and the other many issues that go into making a profit from selling a physical invention.
Even if some software is complex enough to be considered an invention, the author can get it to market almost instantly. Why should they get 14 years to hold onto the right to do that before anybody else?
And how can a datastructure or an algorithm be considered an invention, it's just a logical set of instructrions that almost anybody striving for that same particular goal will conclude.
No, if it's sufficiently complex, you have the trademark and you keep the code. Then if somebody else wants to implement competition, they have to work out how to do it themselves, and since it's "complex" it'll take a while. By which time, if the idea is so great, you'll have monopolised the market as there is no limitation on how quickly you can distribute it other than the price you slap on your software.
I think the trend in CPUs is going to change dramatically soon, much the same way it has with video cards. Except, in a slightly different direction. Instead of getting faster, the direction they need to be going is getting less expensive to produce, less power requirements, and less heat output. ...and more of them.
I wouldn't be suprised if 2-4 processor machines were not the normal in 3 years time.
Why keep going up, when you can go sideways and gain as much ground?
Unfortately, it's that "You've gotta type a command to do that!" mentality that keeps average desktop users away.
It's the "I don't know what sarcasm is and generally don't have a sense of humour" that unecessarily fragments open source development.
You would think that the people developing the best project in the world would at least have the knowledge of how to become inaccessible to spam.
Bingo! They already have on an individual basis!
Anybody who knows anything about Free Software can pretty much block all spam using a variety of techniques from filtering (eg Bayesian with SpamAssassin) to challenge-response systems.
The changelog contains emails so people can be easily contacted for information. It's called open development - people interact at all levels in order to get work done.
If people were bothered about spam, do you really think htey would consent to having their email published in something as conspicious as the Linux changelogs?
This little guy shows that as far as the goal of a fully working robotic (human-avatar) intelligence, mechanistically we're there. We can create an avatar which is robust enough to do the full human movements. Now we just need to improve the AI side of things. Let's face it, AI is severly lacking at the moment. I wouldn't say I'm an expert by any means, but I do try to keep up with the relevant research in the field.
Ruh-eally. Did you watch the movies?
The robots had the dexterity and balance of, at best, a 3 year old human. The over hand throw video was telling, as it took the robot several separate motions to position itself and wobbled about as much as is possible without falling over upon throwing the ball. The ball was thrown with no accuracy.
If anything, this actually shows how far we have yet to go before welcoming our robot overlords.
are they called "soccer hooligans" or "football hooligans" ?
I believe the official term is, fat, stupid, wonkey-tooth, jobless, morons.
Unless you're Argentinian, in which case it's "government officials".
until gnome comes up with an integrated all-in-one development IDE ala' kdevelop, I'm not using it.
You haven't looked hard.
What about Anjuta, or MonoDevelop, combined with Glade?
Well, that, and because gnome is slow as ass compared to kde.
Unqualified, unsubstantiated, stupid as ass FUD.
The government(s) want you to believe that it is merely a coincidence. Coincidentally, I'm currently offering virtual tinfoil hats at a 20% discount. Therein lies the difference between a fortunate and unfortunate coincidence!
So it was you that caused the fire! You're diabolical plan to profit from the sale of protective metalic headwear has been foiled by your own arrogance, thinking you could brag in public!
Um, I'm a web designer. How is that invaluable?
I think you're eating too much of the hamburger that Adobe is feeding you with buzzwords like that.
Gimp creates jpegs just fine. If you require ultimate fine-grained control over image creation then I'd wager:
I swear fucking linux retards make shit hard on purpose just so they feel some love since there mom never gave them any and the only thing there dad gave them was a cock in the ass!!!
Are you jealous because your dad never gave you anything?
Now maybe I can figure out how to use the thing.
It's not difficult - you can find some good tutorials at gug.sunsite.dk.
Your life would be a lot easier if you just used MP3 in the first place.
I remember an incident a few decades ago when a little old black lady sat at the front of the bus when it would be easier to sit with her enthic contemporaries at the back of the bus, as was expected at the time.
And wouldn't it be easier for Mr R. Stallman to give up his dreams of global software freedom and use Windows?
Wouldn't it have been easier for Mr L. Torvalds to just forget about writing his own OS and use Windows like everybody else?
You, good Sir, are part of the mass that made the crap software that is Windows a monopoly because it was easy. Thanks, but no thanks, I'll stick with my Freedom because I'm free to choose the less-easy option and help make it easy.
How is the parent 'informative'? Are people who moderate even bothering to compare the articles?
The other story is about the release of Gtk2.4 and associated libs, which is an event in itself.
This story is about the future of the Gnome desktop (or indeed Free Software desktop in general) by assessing how a framework can be established that is a direct (and hopefully superior) alternative to the framework Microsoft will be introducing with Longhorn.
Still, I have to admit, this is something that could go so many ways. Right now Mono has the mindshare in terms of Gnome/GTK# apps, people are playing with it, liking it, there are actually unique interesting apps (like Muine) written in it etc. Where are the interesting GTK/Java apps?
On the other hand, the GNU java toolchain is nicer than Monos. GCJ is a really nice, easy to use compiler that's pretty fast and it creates ELF binaries. It fits in with the existing infrastructure, reuses our investment in ELF and the resultant apps don't have strange EXE and DLL extensions.
According to the consensus, around the time C# was announced by MS, C# was just Java with a few more keywords.
So make GCJ compile C#! Problem solved! Best of both worlds! A union of two houses!