Ever heard of C or C++? Ever heard of a little group of companies which used to be AT&T? Is 99.999% uptime and 99.9% call completion "Enterprise Class" enough for you? That's right, phone switches are software. Mostly written in C.
Sometimes not. Sometimes the record company is a licensee of the right to distribute. This seldom happens, but with big-name stars who move from one label to another it's been known to be a condition of the move.
Let's see, under how many areas can prople try to claim computers as part of their realm of profiteer--err, regulation?
1. recording and playback (tv/radio repair) 2. office machines (copier/fax repair people) 3. telephony device (Ma Bell et al) 4. instructional aid (school boards and councils) 5. text comminucation device (courier and package services) 6. timekeeping device (clock and watch repair) 7. publishing device (newspaper/magazine/book industries) 8. video & music composition & production (music, movie, and TV industries) 9. lighted case mods could be argued to be lamps... 10. etc... etc... etc..
There's no end to what a GENERAL PURPOSE device can be used to do. Therefore, if one board that's over anything besides general purpose computers can tax and license, then pretty much every board who covers anything can. That way, no one can afford to be a repair technician, and the idea of disposable OEM PCs becomes a reality and not just a nightmare.
"If there are any doubts about the sluggish pace of adopting the metric system in the US, the major US stock exchanges switched from fractions to decimals a scant 3 years ago."
...which has nothing to do with metric. More precision was desired than the 1/8 dollar. Instead of going to 1/16 in a nation which already had decimal prices on everything else, tenths and hundredths made more sense. There's no such thing as a "metric dollar".
I suppose you'd say that in Europe someone needs to cut a pie into ten equal slices? Get real.
"Although the performance of processors has steadily increased in the past 20 years, the performance of the input-output paths that connect these chips to the rest of the computer hasn't, resulting in well-documented bottlenecks" is not quite right.
Bus speeds haven't kept pace with processor speeds, to be sure. However, saying they haven't increased is completely untrue. Whether or not you can say the the improvements in bus speeds have failed to increase "steadily" is a matter of what scale one is using to measure the improvements. From 8 bits at under 5 megahertz to 64 bits at 1.6 gigahertz is quite an improvement.
Perhaps the improvements haven't been steady enough for News.com, but steadiness isn't the point. The overall improvement is. There's more improvement desired, to be sure. Which is better: watching bus speeds improve "steadily", or to watch a breakthrough occur so that bus speeds once again match processor speeds? That's one breakthrough not likely to happen -- at least not any time soon. However, such a breakthrough would be much better than improvement at a pointless steady rate.
You don't sue to overturn a patent. You make an administrative request to the patent office to have the patent overturned. The only party who can sue over a patent is the patent holder. You can claim as your defense, once sued by the patent holder, that the patent is invalid.
Make the corporation responsible. With the rights of a person comes the responsibilities of a person.
A corporation, being a legal entity equal to a person, should have the same taxes to pay as a person and get no extra tax breaks. Being a legal entity equal to a person, it should be forced to serve a sentence and pay a fine when breaking the law. Anything less than these things means that something which has been promised the rights of a citizen is being treated preferentially due to its origins of not being a person -- a complete contradiction.
So, if a corporation commits a crime for which the shareholders aren't responsible, make the corporation, as a virtual person, serve a virtual sentence. A crime punishible by five years in prison? Make the corporation pay all profits to the victims and the government for five years, plus restitution. That'd clean up their act considerably.
Processes are patentable but not copyrightable. The expression of a process is copyrightable but not patentable. The idea of getting from point A to point B in the development of a product for which the process is developed is often not copyrightable or patentable either one (although sometimes point B itself is patentable).
In short, the idea having value is in no way related to copyright. Copyright is about the expression of the idea having merit.
Except that guy who sends $40,000 then loses his house because foreclosure's better than death, then the bank can't get what he owes on the mortgage on the open market. That's lost profit.
Nope. If someone's too stupid to set their price high enough, or can't make a product worthy of selling at higher than what it took to make, then their rights have not been violated when they don't make a profit.
Profit is what you get over and above what you spent to get it. Getting profit is part science, part art, and part dumb luck. You have a right to try to profit. You don't have a right to make profits for no good reason.
It's the same as with getting a job. You have the right to apply for work and to be hired if you're the right candidate. You are not guaranteed to be the best candidate for a particular job.
1. You're not a phenomenally fast typist 2. There is a decent graphical representation of what you want to do 3. Your mousing accuracy at least rivals your typing accuracy (not true for some people, especially with cheap mice or mice set up with different speed/acceleration than they are used to) 4. That what you want to do can be done without a lot of shifts back and forth between the keyboard from the mouse -- a source of great slowdown 5. that you don't take into account the extra wait often associated with graphical programs loading (still a bit true today, very true when the study was said to have taken place)
In the future, as the number of/.ers grows, it will be faster to publish a site on CD and distribute it worldwide to small outlets than for all the interested parties to load the page across the net.:-/
They're bigger because we wanted user-upgradable parts. They're louder because they need to be reliable and not burn up in a couple of months -- it's one of the prices of getting faster. They're less secure because we're connecting them to one another to enable things we couldn't easily do 15-20 years ago.
You can easily buy an SBC with an AMD Geode 1 GHz CPU and 128 megs of RAM, put your storage on CompactFlash with an IDE convertor, and have integrated Ethernet on it. With no fans needed and solid-state storage, it'd be quiet. With everything but the CF on one board, it'd be small. It would run most software people run on the stock desktops.
VMS indeed does do versioned filesystems. It's not too long, I'm sure, before there's a Linux filesystem that implements it at the FS level if there's not already. Until then, there are versioning systems at the application level.
There are all kinds of software we have now that we didn't 15-20 years ago. You're almost certainly reading/. on a web browser. SMTP/POP3 email software certainly wasn't the norm on desktops 20 years ago. We have much better animation now than then. We have realistic computer audio done mostly in software (this is enabled largely by the processor speeds and memory sizes, but the software to take advantage of it is fairly new). Instant messengers which work outside the LAN are certainly new within the last 15 years. The programming languages used to write other software have changed much over the last 15-20 years. Machine translation of natural languages was a dream 20 years ago, but now it's getting reasonably accurate. Software in just the last couple of years has taken big strides toward displaying everyone's languages together on screen in the proper character sets -- even with more than one alphabet in use at a time. Desktop operating systems have come from offering filesystem services and port access to one program at a time through the days of cooperative multitasking into the days of memory-protected preeemptive multitasking and even machine virtualization.
Sure, the uses of the individual applications may not have changed much -- reading text, editing text, listening to sounds, playing games, todo lists, calendars, address books, etc. Tewnty years ago, though, could you open your address book, drag a CD-quality sound clip into it, and type an annotaion before clicking a button to send it to someone on another continent?
Why in the world would the U.S. government allow a company with 90% market share in PC operating systems start selling pre-built PCs?
This has strongarm market-opening written all over it. Bet on the PC portion having the XBox's style of boot hardware -- you can't put a new OS on it without replacing a chip, and the chip also has DRM on it (with which Windows is signed), so it's illegal to replace the chip as you'd be disabling copyright protections.
Imagine General Electric (the parent company of the U.S. media giant NBC) selling televisions which only display the NBC, CNBC, MSNBC etc. stations in its stable. Imagine Turner Cable dropping all stations which compete too closely with Turner Broadcasting's stations. If you can't condone these practices, how could you condone MS putting out a Windows-only PC (with Windows sold internally to itself at little or no cost to subsidize hardware costs)?
Hopefully Dell, HP, IBM, eMachines, Alienware, Sony, Winbook, and the attorneys general for several states will raise all kinds of hell about this.
The same way the state of Illinois, among others, use publication as a punishment.
The state of Illinois puts on its websites registered sex offenders, deadbeat parents who refuse to pay child support, and probably other offenders in the future. It helps the public protect themselves in the one case and uses humiliation as a deterrent in the other.
It's not an amazing stretch that even in private newspapers ad space could be purchased or that this would be reported as news or public service. With government-run media, it'd be even easier.
I didn't read closely enough to tell if these Italian papers mentioned are run by the government, but that wouldn't be unusual in much of the world.
How long, with computerized production bringing music and movie making power to the desktop like never before and laws like this popping up, will it be before we see free or even Open Source movies.
I can foresee a possible future with Creative Commons, the GPL, the Free Documentation License, and the BSD license influencing the licensing of droves of hobbyist movies and music. I'm talking much, much more than we see now. Maybe the music and movie companies see this coming. Maybe they want to kill p2p not only because their own work is distributed royalty-free across it, but also because with the software to make competitive products getting better and p2p being a great distribution method, they're afraid of losing market share to upstarts.
So the people who break into Windows boxes with weak security and send through the proper server for that box but advertise biggerpenis.com in the email still get their mail delivered, and have it "verifiably" traced to their victim.
Not just foreign governments. State and local governments can benefit when the federal government spends on Open Source software. That means lower overall taxes or that the tax mney goes somewhere more useful.
Slashdot Mirror
With no price markup over the cost, there's no profit, and hence no reason to be in business.
Ever heard of C or C++? Ever heard of a little group of companies which used to be AT&T? Is 99.999% uptime and 99.9% call completion "Enterprise Class" enough for you? That's right, phone switches are software. Mostly written in C.
Sometimes not. Sometimes the record company is a licensee of the right to distribute. This seldom happens, but with big-name stars who move from one label to another it's been known to be a condition of the move.
will pop up?
Let's see, under how many areas can prople try to claim computers as part of their realm of profiteer--err, regulation?
1. recording and playback (tv/radio repair)
2. office machines (copier/fax repair people)
3. telephony device (Ma Bell et al)
4. instructional aid (school boards and councils)
5. text comminucation device (courier and package services)
6. timekeeping device (clock and watch repair)
7. publishing device (newspaper/magazine/book industries)
8. video & music composition & production (music, movie, and TV industries)
9. lighted case mods could be argued to be lamps...
10. etc... etc... etc..
There's no end to what a GENERAL PURPOSE device can be used to do. Therefore, if one board that's over anything besides general purpose computers can tax and license, then pretty much every board who covers anything can. That way, no one can afford to be a repair technician, and the idea of disposable OEM PCs becomes a reality and not just a nightmare.
The point of keeping the the moral high ground is that it's the moral high ground.
The point of morals is that they are morals.
Switching morals on and off based on the actions of others makes them cease to be morals.
That's odd. Mandrake 8.0 found the touchpad on my Toshiba Satellite just fine.
I suppose you'd say that in Europe someone needs to cut a pie into ten equal slices? Get real.
Bus speeds haven't kept pace with processor speeds, to be sure. However, saying they haven't increased is completely untrue. Whether or not you can say the the improvements in bus speeds have failed to increase "steadily" is a matter of what scale one is using to measure the improvements. From 8 bits at under 5 megahertz to 64 bits at 1.6 gigahertz is quite an improvement.
Perhaps the improvements haven't been steady enough for News.com, but steadiness isn't the point. The overall improvement is. There's more improvement desired, to be sure. Which is better: watching bus speeds improve "steadily", or to watch a breakthrough occur so that bus speeds once again match processor speeds? That's one breakthrough not likely to happen -- at least not any time soon. However, such a breakthrough would be much better than improvement at a pointless steady rate.
You don't sue to overturn a patent. You make an administrative request to the patent office to have the patent overturned. The only party who can sue over a patent is the patent holder. You can claim as your defense, once sued by the patent holder, that the patent is invalid.
Make the corporation responsible. With the rights of a person comes the responsibilities of a person.
A corporation, being a legal entity equal to a person, should have the same taxes to pay as a person and get no extra tax breaks. Being a legal entity equal to a person, it should be forced to serve a sentence and pay a fine when breaking the law. Anything less than these things means that something which has been promised the rights of a citizen is being treated preferentially due to its origins of not being a person -- a complete contradiction.
So, if a corporation commits a crime for which the shareholders aren't responsible, make the corporation, as a virtual person, serve a virtual sentence. A crime punishible by five years in prison? Make the corporation pay all profits to the victims and the government for five years, plus restitution. That'd clean up their act considerably.
...And Speed Buggy, who's been around longer than Benny the Cab.
Processes are patentable but not copyrightable. The expression of a process is copyrightable but not patentable. The idea of getting from point A to point B in the development of a product for which the process is developed is often not copyrightable or patentable either one (although sometimes point B itself is patentable).
In short, the idea having value is in no way related to copyright. Copyright is about the expression of the idea having merit.
Except that guy who sends $40,000 then loses his house because foreclosure's better than death, then the bank can't get what he owes on the mortgage on the open market. That's lost profit.
Nope. If someone's too stupid to set their price high enough, or can't make a product worthy of selling at higher than what it took to make, then their rights have not been violated when they don't make a profit.
Profit is what you get over and above what you spent to get it. Getting profit is part science, part art, and part dumb luck. You have a right to try to profit. You don't have a right to make profits for no good reason.
It's the same as with getting a job. You have the right to apply for work and to be hired if you're the right candidate. You are not guaranteed to be the best candidate for a particular job.
This assumes:
1. You're not a phenomenally fast typist
2. There is a decent graphical representation of what you want to do
3. Your mousing accuracy at least rivals your typing accuracy (not true for some people, especially with cheap mice or mice set up with different speed/acceleration than they are used to)
4. That what you want to do can be done without a lot of shifts back and forth between the keyboard from the mouse -- a source of great slowdown
5. that you don't take into account the extra wait often associated with graphical programs loading (still a bit true today, very true when the study was said to have taken place)
Sure you can sign yourself into slavery. It's called alimony. Once you've signed that paper, you keep working, but your ex gets all the benefits.
In the future, as the number of /.ers grows, it will be faster to publish a site on CD and distribute it worldwide to small outlets than for all the interested parties to load the page across the net. :-/
They're bigger because we wanted user-upgradable parts. They're louder because they need to be reliable and not burn up in a couple of months -- it's one of the prices of getting faster. They're less secure because we're connecting them to one another to enable things we couldn't easily do 15-20 years ago.
/. on a web browser. SMTP/POP3 email software certainly wasn't the norm on desktops 20 years ago. We have much better animation now than then. We have realistic computer audio done mostly in software (this is enabled largely by the processor speeds and memory sizes, but the software to take advantage of it is fairly new). Instant messengers which work outside the LAN are certainly new within the last 15 years. The programming languages used to write other software have changed much over the last 15-20 years. Machine translation of natural languages was a dream 20 years ago, but now it's getting reasonably accurate. Software in just the last couple of years has taken big strides toward displaying everyone's languages together on screen in the proper character sets -- even with more than one alphabet in use at a time. Desktop operating systems have come from offering filesystem services and port access to one program at a time through the days of cooperative multitasking into the days of memory-protected preeemptive multitasking and even machine virtualization.
You can easily buy an SBC with an AMD Geode 1 GHz CPU and 128 megs of RAM, put your storage on CompactFlash with an IDE convertor, and have integrated Ethernet on it. With no fans needed and solid-state storage, it'd be quiet. With everything but the CF on one board, it'd be small. It would run most software people run on the stock desktops.
VMS indeed does do versioned filesystems. It's not too long, I'm sure, before there's a Linux filesystem that implements it at the FS level if there's not already. Until then, there are versioning systems at the application level.
There are all kinds of software we have now that we didn't 15-20 years ago. You're almost certainly reading
Sure, the uses of the individual applications may not have changed much -- reading text, editing text, listening to sounds, playing games, todo lists, calendars, address books, etc. Tewnty years ago, though, could you open your address book, drag a CD-quality sound clip into it, and type an annotaion before clicking a button to send it to someone on another continent?
the spam blocks you!
Why in the world would the U.S. government allow a company with 90% market share in PC operating systems start selling pre-built PCs?
This has strongarm market-opening written all over it. Bet on the PC portion having the XBox's style of boot hardware -- you can't put a new OS on it without replacing a chip, and the chip also has DRM on it (with which Windows is signed), so it's illegal to replace the chip as you'd be disabling copyright protections.
Imagine General Electric (the parent company of the U.S. media giant NBC) selling televisions which only display the NBC, CNBC, MSNBC etc. stations in its stable. Imagine Turner Cable dropping all stations which compete too closely with Turner Broadcasting's stations. If you can't condone these practices, how could you condone MS putting out a Windows-only PC (with Windows sold internally to itself at little or no cost to subsidize hardware costs)?
Hopefully Dell, HP, IBM, eMachines, Alienware, Sony, Winbook, and the attorneys general for several states will raise all kinds of hell about this.
The same way the state of Illinois, among others, use publication as a punishment.
The state of Illinois puts on its websites registered sex offenders, deadbeat parents who refuse to pay child support, and probably other offenders in the future. It helps the public protect themselves in the one case and uses humiliation as a deterrent in the other.
It's not an amazing stretch that even in private newspapers ad space could be purchased or that this would be reported as news or public service. With government-run media, it'd be even easier.
I didn't read closely enough to tell if these Italian papers mentioned are run by the government, but that wouldn't be unusual in much of the world.
How long, with computerized production bringing music and movie making power to the desktop like never before and laws like this popping up, will it be before we see free or even Open Source movies.
I can foresee a possible future with Creative Commons, the GPL, the Free Documentation License, and the BSD license influencing the licensing of droves of hobbyist movies and music. I'm talking much, much more than we see now. Maybe the music and movie companies see this coming. Maybe they want to kill p2p not only because their own work is distributed royalty-free across it, but also because with the software to make competitive products getting better and p2p being a great distribution method, they're afraid of losing market share to upstarts.
Think of how scared SCO and MS are of Linux.
Therefore, many men are... virii! (or viri, but that was explained above).
So the people who break into Windows boxes with weak security and send through the proper server for that box but advertise biggerpenis.com in the email still get their mail delivered, and have it "verifiably" traced to their victim.
This is worse, not better.
Not just foreign governments. State and local governments can benefit when the federal government spends on Open Source software. That means lower overall taxes or that the tax mney goes somewhere more useful.