Why do I for some reason think that this may have been motivated by the American auto industry, which has for some reason neglected to keep its standards as high as the imports.
This guy has no idea what copyrights and patents are for. Copyrights and patents were given to us by our government with the expressed intent of fostering economic growth by providing a limited monopoly on a new product to its creator for a number of years. Limitations on monopoly length were specifically to encourage the creators to produce more products, and to eventually allow these products move into the public domain where the general public can better enjoy them.
This worked well for most of our history, until both systems were broken in one way or another. Now, they are both abused to protect the monopoly granted. In copyrights, the monopoly was no longer limited by time, among other things. In patents, the monopoly is abused in several ways, such as patenting several different ways of producing a product, with vague language, or even patenting a product that already exists.
To use their language. This abuse of monopoly is in itself theft. In copyright, it is theft from the general public, by preventing a product from entering the public domain. In patents, it is theft from both our economy and the general public, stagnating research and invention of new products.
The problem is not in the conflict between open source and copyright. The problems were brought about by the Sonny Bono extension act as well as that of the DCMA. Granting an unreasonable monopoly of control of content to the point of threatening fair use, even long after the author has died.
Parent is not off-topic, and has a point. Using code words rather than version numbers is seriously problematic when identifying to a new user whether or not they are using the newest version, and to whether or not the packages they are installing are obsolete.
My personal complaint is the lack of contiguity between releases. I'd really like it if I could install from an old system disk and update it to current without getting "Your system is obsolete" during an update...
On top of that, I've -never- seen a Dvorak keyboard. I'm sure I could find some online if I looked, but I'm -very- happy with the feel of my current keyboard (I own 2 and a wireless version of it now) and don't look forward to trying to find a Dvorak layout one that I like. Most keyboards have keys that snap off and pop on....
The Robot Laws themselves were originally taken from safety design principles used in actual robots.
In the way most people think of them, they cannot be practically implemented within an artificial intelligence of human level ability. This is simply because such an artificial brain would be massively parallel by design, and would require something as complex to detect the breaking of the laws, a second artificial brain. Such an artificial brain would in itself be subject to the same problem. There are ways to make it work, however it is nontrivial.
On the low level however we can prevent some things from happening as long as the robot's brain is more of a software construct than a simulated brain. Proximity sensors and similar hardware can be installed into the robots to prevent people from getting run over and such, and in the few autonomous military robots these already exist, but not much more can really be done at this point.
Now, we can in the near future see robots that go around shooting autonomously, but such a robot would require that our soldiers be tagged with some sort of implant to identify them. Image recognition won't really work, as a soldier can always be a disguised enemy.
It hate to say it, but this writer is either a moron or a shill....
"Windows Vista more than doubled its market share in March from the prior month. while the share of computers running Mac OS X fell for the first time in nine months... By the end of March, Vista was used by 2.04% of computers connected to the Internet, according to the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company. That's up from 0.93% of PCs in February."
"The share of PowerPC-based Macs fell, though, from 4.29% in February to 3.94% in March. That dip was not fully offset by an increase in Intel-based Mac hardware, leading to a overall net decline in Mac share of 0.3%, to 6.08% in March. "
Could this possibly be written with any more spin? Apple experiences a sales dip prior a new OS release, and it is further spun by dropping Powerpc sales, with the writer conveniently neglecting to inform the reader that they are being phased out.
If we look at all the entire first quarter, the numbers aren't so hot yet. It really is too early to tell whether or not Vista will be a flop or not; considering that the January numbers had Vista at 0.18%. Give it another quarter before market share numbers start becoming meaningful. At this point, Vista still has nothing on existing XP sales, and still behind sales of both types of OS X boxen.
Quarter 1, 2007 Windows XP 84.31% Windows 2000 4.80% Mac OS 4.19% MacIntel 2.03% Windows 98 1.50% Vista 1.05%
This seems to be part of a campaign bend apple into more of a green product.
On their own page, they go as far as manipulating the truth to make it appear that Apple is doing less work than it is actually doing: http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/about.html
"Apple finally came around to a limited recycling program in the US, but they can do better."
This is worded as if it just happened recently. Except that the US (and Japan) take-back program started up in 2002. (Announced in 2001) It includes not only recycling of its own computers, but also other vendor's computers and monitors. I wonder which way they consider this to be "limited"?
The images at the top of the Greenpeace site show Chinese children holding color iMac keyboards dating before 2000.... before recycling programs in the US and Asia actually existed.
The page is designed to get Apple to do two things:
* Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
* Offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.
The question here is, is it reasonable to persecute Apple for not meeting an arbitrarily set "worst toxic chemicals" goal? And I say this because "worst toxic chemicals" is fairly ambiguous. They recycle plastics, foam, paper and whatnot from their products, they follow a number of environmental standards in the US and Europe and maintain their own.
It may sound correct however, if this were true, devices that use electrical nerve stimulation would not function properly. This is not because that sound-based neurons would not be stimulated, they likely would, but due to the fact that many designed in such a way that they block signals traveling in the opposite direction than intended. I seem to recall it was by inducing a sufficiently high level of magnetic flux in the nerve to prevent threshold voltage from being reached and causing the nerve to fire.
Yes, laws against this were passed over a decade ago, perhaps two. I don't think anyone outside of Microsoft actually remembers they exist at all.
Software that acts like this is not only illegal, it also can cause monetary damage affecting third parties. Perhaps the authors have not considered what happens if someone were to say, install their software on a work computer, only to find months of hard work deleted by the package because someone else used a key from a key generating program? The software could have even been installed by a third party consultant.
I foresee future legal difficulties for these guys.
Is anyone actually working on some kind of universal package installer that wraps around everything else yet? It would be nice to be able to use rpm, portage, apt, and so on under any other linux/bsd but with one single package database and a common interface.
This article tells us absolutely nothing about the design other than that the total number of neurons emulated is very small. And no, this is not the "most ambitious project yet" by a landslide. It is dwarfed by IBM's own Blue brain project, as well as CCortex.
a couple of months ago that predicted FPS games would suffer due to the DRM? And a subsequent astroturfing article attempting to convince us otherwise? Before that one, wasn't there another that predicted OpenGL games would suffer because they had to run under Aeroglass? (or whatever it is called)
If working with an "Evil" company made other companies evil, civilization would have entirely collapsed with the advent of the corporation. Apple choosing just Cingular over a plethora of carriers is just indicative of Jobs' desire to keep it simple. Integrating with systems of other companies would produce additional problems in the long run, as well as increase initial costs. You can see the same philosophy applied to platform control; Apple holds control of their platform to keep their code relatively simple, as opposed to Microsoft's method of having dozens if not hundreds of platforms to work with, complicating their code further.
As for the essay, It should be clear enough from Job's own quotes here that he sees enforcing DRM as a waste of time and money on his part. In particular, Apple's own contractual obligation to fix whenever DRM breaks within a specific period of time.
"...a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store." He continues with the following, further indicating how small a role DRM plays on an iPod itself, and simultaneously pointing out that iPod sales are not tied to sales of DRMed music.
"Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store.... This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM." And the rest is more of the same, eventually pointing out that the music industry is selling DRM free CDs themselves. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/>
From the content and apple behavior over the last ten years, it appears to me that Jobs is trying sway public opinion enough to put some kind of pressure on the music industry to drop DRM. Dropping DRM altogether would both improve public opinion of his company and drop DRM related expenditures across all of Apple. Again, this fits in line with Jobs idea to keep it simple.
Problems coming from the onset of Vista could have been seen by anyone not wearing blinders and a welding hood. Since when has a Microsoft operating system EVER played well with a competitor's filesystem. Early adopters have noone to blame but themselves?
Finally, the Apple Corps deal was inevitable ever since Apple entered the music biz with iTunes and the iPod, as I seem to recall that operating iTunes violates their previous agreement.
There is NOTHING forcing you to "emerge world", "emerge system", and "emerge --sync" every single time Gentoo updates portage... Emerge flags include "--pretend", "--ask" and "--fetchonly" among several others, learn to use them.
Spam has had a tendency to spike around election time for one reason or another. Not to mention this is the 4th quarter, when everyone and his cousin is trying to sell holiday gifts. How about some data for the past 6 months?
Slashdot Mirror
Not likely. Probably this though:o ff&q=star+child+%2B2001&btnG=Search+Images
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&gbv=2&safe=
You've obviously never compiled all of KDE from source before.
Why do I for some reason think that this may have been motivated by the
American auto industry, which has for some reason neglected to keep its
standards as high as the imports.
It seems to me that Microsoft is now openly and directly extorting some of their bigger customers that have Linux servers.
http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/24641/
My personal wish is that someone would have enough guts to call the police on one of their sales reps and set some things in motion...
This guy has no idea what copyrights and patents are for. Copyrights and patents were given to us by our government with the expressed intent of fostering economic growth by providing a limited monopoly on a new product to its creator for a number of years. Limitations on monopoly length were specifically to encourage the creators to produce more products, and to eventually allow these products move into the public domain where the general public can better enjoy them.
This worked well for most of our history, until both systems were broken in one way or another. Now, they are both abused to protect the monopoly granted. In copyrights, the monopoly was no longer limited by time, among other things. In patents, the monopoly is abused in several ways, such as patenting several different ways of producing a product, with vague language, or even patenting a product that already exists.
To use their language. This abuse of monopoly is in itself theft. In copyright, it is theft from the general public, by preventing a product from entering the public domain. In patents, it is theft from both our economy and the general public, stagnating research and invention of new products.
The problem is not in the conflict between open source and copyright. The problems were brought about by the Sonny Bono extension act as well as that of the DCMA. Granting an unreasonable monopoly of control of content to the point of threatening fair use, even long after the author has died.
I think the rant here should be, "Why aren't the Wings3d developers adding animation capability to their project?!"
Someone might have considered writing that headline in such a manner
as to not make Hans Reiser appear as a confessed serial killer...
Parent is not off-topic, and has a point. Using code words rather than version numbers is seriously problematic
when identifying to a new user whether or not they are using the newest version, and to whether or not the packages
they are installing are obsolete.
My personal complaint is the lack of contiguity between releases. I'd really like it if I could install from an old system disk and update it to current without getting "Your system is obsolete" during an update...
The Robot Laws themselves were originally taken from safety design principles used in actual robots.
In the way most people think of them, they cannot be practically implemented within an artificial intelligence of human level ability. This is simply because such an artificial brain would be massively parallel by design, and
would require something as complex to detect the breaking of the laws, a second artificial brain. Such an artificial brain would in itself be subject to the same problem. There are ways to make it work, however it is nontrivial.
On the low level however we can prevent some things from happening as long as the robot's brain is more of a software construct than a simulated brain.
Proximity sensors and similar hardware can be installed into the robots to prevent people from getting run over and such, and in the few autonomous military robots these already exist, but not much more can really be done at this point.
Now, we can in the near future see robots that go around shooting autonomously, but such a robot would require that our soldiers be tagged
with some sort of implant to identify them. Image recognition won't really work, as a soldier can always be a disguised enemy.
It hate to say it, but this writer is either a moron or a shill....
"Windows Vista more than doubled its market share in March from the prior month. while the share of computers running Mac OS X fell for the first time in nine months... By the end of March, Vista was used by 2.04% of computers connected to the Internet, according to the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company. That's up from 0.93% of PCs in February."
"The share of PowerPC-based Macs fell, though, from 4.29% in February to 3.94% in March. That dip was not fully offset by an increase in Intel-based Mac hardware, leading to a overall net decline in Mac share of 0.3%, to 6.08% in March. "
Could this possibly be written with any more spin? Apple experiences a sales dip prior a new OS release, and it is further spun by dropping Powerpc sales, with the writer conveniently neglecting to inform the reader that they are being phased out.
If we look at all the entire first quarter, the numbers aren't so hot yet. It really is too early to tell whether or not
Vista will be a flop or not; considering that the January numbers had Vista at 0.18%. Give it another quarter before market share numbers start becoming meaningful. At this point, Vista still has nothing on existing XP sales, and still behind sales of both types of OS X boxen.
Quarter 1, 2007
Windows XP 84.31%
Windows 2000 4.80%
Mac OS 4.19%
MacIntel 2.03%
Windows 98 1.50%
Vista 1.05%
Ditto here, and I'm in the U.S.
This seems to be part of a campaign bend apple into more of a green product.
/ ptb_us.html
On their own page, they go as far as manipulating the truth to make it appear that
Apple is doing less work than it is actually doing: http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/about.html
"Apple finally came around to a limited recycling program in the US, but they can do better."
This is worded as if it just happened recently. Except that the US (and Japan) take-back program started
up in 2002. (Announced in 2001) It includes not only recycling of its own computers, but also other
vendor's computers and monitors. I wonder which way they consider this to be "limited"?
http://www.apple.com/environment/recycling/
http://www.apple.com/environment/
The images at the top of the Greenpeace site show Chinese children holding color iMac keyboards dating
before 2000.... before recycling programs in the US and Asia actually existed.
The page is designed to get Apple to do two things:
* Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
* Offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.
The question here is, is it reasonable to persecute Apple for not meeting an arbitrarily set "worst toxic chemicals" goal? And I say this because "worst toxic chemicals" is fairly ambiguous.
They recycle plastics, foam, paper and whatnot from their products, they follow a number of environmental standards in the US and Europe and maintain their own.
Should Apple offer free "take-back" worldwide? Even Levono doesn't do so.
http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/lenovo/about/environment
However, in the very least, it should be reasonable for Apple to accept recycled equipment worldwide, if at
a fee.
This is the first time I've seen the buzzword "standardization" used to defeat a set
of windows machines instead of the other way around.
It may sound correct however, if this were true, devices that use electrical nerve stimulation would not function properly. This is not because that sound-based neurons would not be stimulated, they likely would, but due to the fact that many designed in such a way that they block signals traveling in the opposite direction than intended. I seem to recall it was by inducing a sufficiently high level of magnetic flux in the nerve to prevent threshold voltage from being reached and causing the nerve to fire.
Wikipedia has a very good article on action potentials and the current science we know about nerve function. It is fairly complete. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Potential.
Yes, laws against this were passed over a decade ago, perhaps two. I don't think anyone outside of Microsoft actually remembers they exist at all.
Software that acts like this is not only illegal, it also can cause monetary damage affecting third parties.
Perhaps the authors have not considered what happens if someone were to say, install their software on a work
computer, only to find months of hard work deleted by the package because someone else used a key from a key
generating program? The software could have even been installed by a third party consultant.
I foresee future legal difficulties for these guys.
Is anyone actually working on some kind of universal package installer that wraps around everything else yet?
It would be nice to be able to use rpm, portage, apt, and so on under any other linux/bsd but with one single
package database and a common interface.
This article tells us absolutely nothing about the design other than that the
total number of neurons emulated is very small. And no, this is not the "most
ambitious project yet" by a landslide. It is dwarfed by IBM's own Blue brain project, as well
as CCortex.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain
The only novelty I see here is that they fabricated artificial neurons on a chip, which greatly
speeds up the whole thing.
a couple of months ago that predicted FPS games would suffer due to the DRM?
And a subsequent astroturfing article attempting to convince us otherwise?
Before that one, wasn't there another that predicted OpenGL games would suffer
because they had to run under Aeroglass? (or whatever it is called)
If working with an "Evil" company made other companies evil, civilization would have entirely collapsed with the advent of the corporation. Apple choosing just Cingular over a plethora of carriers is just indicative of Jobs' desire to keep it simple. Integrating with systems of other companies would produce additional problems in the long run, as well as increase initial costs. You can see the same philosophy applied to platform control; Apple holds control of their platform to keep their code relatively simple, as opposed to Microsoft's method of having dozens if not hundreds of platforms to work with, complicating their code further.
As for the essay, It should be clear enough from Job's own quotes here that he sees enforcing DRM as a waste of time and money on his part. In particular, Apple's own contractual obligation to fix whenever DRM breaks within a specific period of time. "...a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store." He continues with the following, further indicating how small a role DRM plays on an iPod itself, and simultaneously pointing out that iPod sales are not tied to sales of DRMed music. "Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store.... This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM." And the rest is more of the same, eventually pointing out that the music industry is selling DRM free CDs themselves.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/>
From the content and apple behavior over the last ten years, it appears to me that Jobs is trying sway public opinion enough to put some kind of pressure on the music industry to drop DRM. Dropping DRM altogether would both improve public opinion of his company and drop DRM related expenditures across all of Apple. Again, this fits in line with Jobs idea to keep it simple.
Problems coming from the onset of Vista could have been seen by anyone not wearing blinders and a welding hood. Since when has a Microsoft operating system EVER played well with a competitor's filesystem. Early adopters have noone to blame but themselves?
Finally, the Apple Corps deal was inevitable ever since Apple entered the music biz with iTunes and the iPod, as I seem to recall that operating iTunes violates their previous agreement.
There is NOTHING forcing you to "emerge world", "emerge system", and "emerge --sync" every single time Gentoo
updates portage... Emerge flags include "--pretend", "--ask" and "--fetchonly" among several others, learn to
use them.
noticed an upsurge of what seems to be microsoft
shills touting vista over other operating systems?
Spam has had a tendency to spike around election time for one reason or another.
Not to mention this is the 4th quarter, when everyone and his cousin is trying to
sell holiday gifts. How about some data for the past 6 months?
Mod parent +1 (knows what he's talking about)