When will the US government realize that allowing patents on common ideas is just wrong?
What a dumb question.
Pay attention, it's not difficult to understand this: a politician will do and say whatever will increase his/her chances of being reelected. What is "right", "true", "smart", "good" etc is just irrelevant. The very few exceptions are politicians whose electoral position is completely safe against any possible challenge, for example Edward Kennedy, or second-term presidents. The usual ways to increase one's chances of reelection are (1) to attract big $ for campaign funding or (2) to get the endorsement of big labor unions.
When you understand this, the news will make more sense to you.
And because it is "old" makes C "bad" why njdj? ... but to claim a language is bad because it is simply "old" is stupid
If you'd actually read my comment before replying to it, you'd have realized that I did not say C was bad. In fact C is pretty good for some things. But for large projects that are best developed using object-oriented techniques, C++ is much better. If you dig into GNOME, (and if you're a developer) you'll see that it's using a lot of object-oriented ideas, and expresses them clumsily because C just doesn't have the support for them. Back in 1996, there may have been reasons to go this way. But in 2002 there aren't.
As a developer, I found the article sad. It's like going back at least 5 years, to the days when people used to use C. Somebody ought to tell these guys that the rest of the world has migrated to C++.
...the basic X-Windows system? Isn't that system supposed to be very inefficient?
Ignore the people who tell you that X is "very inefficient". In short, they don't know what they're talking about. If you compare speeds of a range of similar applications on the same hardware running Linux (all Linux GUIs use X) vs running Windows XP, you will find a lot of differences for all sorts of reasons, some things Linux does faster and other things Windows XP does faster. In so far as there is any pattern at all, most people seem to agree that Linux is faster (though I'm sure somebody will flame me for saying that). So whatever causes the differences, it can't be the use of X.
When you move beyond using a single computer and want to access applications on different machines on a LAN from a single workstation, the tremendous power of X comes into play. You can run graphical apps on any machine on your LAN, and interact with their GUIs on your screen, just as if they were running locally. Once you've gotten used to this, you'll never want to give it up.
I thought this site was for techies. I'm a techie. To me CGI stands for "Common Gateway Interface". Clearly it means something competely different in this context. Isn't somebody going to tell us what?
Linus Torvalds wrote the kernel of Linux and established the Open Source software model, which is a revolutionary way of creating software. In doing so, he not only designed one of the most important pieces of software ever, but he also created a new paradigm for software engineering."
Linus did a great job writing Linux (which is a kernel), but the rest of this citation is utter rubbish. He is always ready to point out that he could never have accomplished what he did without the earlier work of the Free Software Foundation.
IMHO the FSF deserves the credit for establishing the free software movement, but others will doubtless differ. We should all be able to agree though that it wasn't Linus Torvalds.
long k[]={0,178};char*p=&k[1]; main(){while(p---k)putchar (72+((k[1]>>(p-k)*2)&3|(!((p-k)&1)
Who could resist trying your sig...?
But when I put it into a.c file, gcc declines to compile it, giving the message: "Invalid operands to binary -", which makes sense because p and k are pointers to different types (of different sizes). Would you care to submit a correction?:-)
Why did you lump the EFF in with the FSF? They have little in common.
IMHO anyone who values his/her civil liberties is already a member of EFF. (If you're not, please get your credit card ready before going to their web site.) They don't write software.
I happen to think that the FSF does good work too, and deserves to be much higher up your list of developers of useful software. "Linux" wouldn't exist without the FSF. But a typical Windows user probably wouldn't care - whereas civil liberties concern everyone.
"All those in favor of losing their rights, do nothing."
Given this guy's track record from last year's predictions (no better than a coin toss - by his own admission) was it really worth giving/. space to this?
Most Britons would gladly pay a TV license rather than watch adverts every 5 minutes
Your comment is a perfect illustration of unthinking acceptance of collectivist/totalitarian arguments.
The whole point of a free society is that the majority ("Most Britons") should not get to impose their will on everyone else, in matters which are not essential to the preservation of the rule of law etc.
Note that I'm not saying that the US is exemplary in this regard (I'm not an American). But there does seem to be more awareness of the value of personal liberty among Americans than among Brits.
whenever I watch BBC I get half way through the program, need a pee and am waiting for the adverts, and it takes me bloody twenty minutes to realise there arent any bloody adverts and I have to miss the bloody program to pee
On the whole an insightful comment, but it goes too far when it says
The differences between the old USSR and the present day US are minimal....
I don't think you realize quite how unpleasant the old USSR was. The US still has a long way to go before it gets there. But if people continue being complacent, it will continue in that direction. "All those in favor of losing their rights, do nothing".
Given the current craze about security it seems to me that taking pictures of surveillance cams and the personnel operating it is a sure-fire way to get questioned and maybe jailed for a night.
Yes, defending your rights will result in trouble and inconvenience to you.
But if you think that rights are just given to you for free, you're dreaming. You, or somebody else, has to earn them. Read about what the signers of the Declaration of Independence went through, so that Americans could live in freedom - at least until people like you decided rights weren't worth preserving.
Try to look beyond your immediate surroundings. Christmas doesn't really mean anything to most human beings. Worldwide, Christianity is a minority religion.
I will not give up vacation. But fixed "holidays" are just an inconvenience.
Wow, pompous'r'us. To paraphrase, You can't know if you enjoyed a movie unless you have watched lots of movies.
Why on earth did this comment get modded up? It's flaming a perfectly sensible comment which pointed out that you can't rate a movie (i.e. rank it in comparison with other movies) unless you have watched lots of movies - not just stuff hyped in the last couple of years.
I don't think position on this list means much, except maybe that some people get their kicks by clever ballot-stuffing. Just scan the list. "The Sting" is way down at #74. "The Ladykillers" doesn't make the list at all! (To be expected, I suppose, if the list largely reflects the views of humorless nerds.)
According to these standards, technically a megabyte (MB) is a power of ten, while a mebibyte (MiB) is a power of two, appropriate for binary machines...
I've never understood why otherwise intelligent people waste their time on this kind of silliness. Does anybody know?
DataSync Program Only Available in MS Windows Platform
But also on the product info page, they offer to sell you a CD with the source code of the device, for $20. OK, so one of us will have to do some work, but at least this is an open-source product - there is no proprietary protocol to reverse engineer.
Don't ignore the grains of wheat in all this chaff. OK, his attacks on X are clueless, but he is right about:
- Fonts suck
- KDE and GNOME desktop's look like crap
If you disagree with the above two, take a look at a Windows desktop.
- No good printing
He hasn't seen the real problem, but he's definitely spotted a symptom of the real problem. I think the underlying problem is reliance on PostScript. PostScript never really made sense. Ten years ago, we had more memory and faster processors on mostly-idle printers than we had on our desktops - to handle PS. If a job needs memory and processing power, put it on the computer where it can be used for other things too - not in a printer. Cheapo Windows printers (like the Lexmark 42) are a good idea. Except for the secrecy surrounding the interface, the idea makes sense. It was never realistic to expect every printer to have a PostScript interpreter in it. Ghostscript is a disaster too; compared with Print Preview in a Microsoft product, it just looks stupid.
Instead of rejecting the LDP license, I would question whether the GPL is appropriate for documentation.
The fine people who write software for us under the GPL get some return for their work. Firstly, developing software is fun. Secondly, they get recognition in the community, because relatively few people are capable of developing good software.
Documentation is different. It's a chore to write it. It doesn't bring the author much recognition, because pretty much anyone who has nothing better to do can put together some sort of documentation. So people have little incentive to write it. Consequently, documentation is the weak point of the free software movement.
If the LDP license encourages just a few more people to write documentation, by giving them just a little more rights in the work they've done for us (and remember, under the LDP, the work is still freely copyable and distributable without payment), then I say: let's support the LDP license. "Rewriting" stuff because it's under the LDP license seems an especially unwise thing to do. I am willing to release software I write under the GPL. I am not willing to write documentation and put it under GPL, but I am willing to write documentation and release it under the LDP license.
Why go an re-invent the wheel everytime someone puts a different type of nut on it from what you like? Work with the people to get it the way you want it. Don't go throwing a temper tantrum, tossing away a perfectly good bit of software/documentation/whatever and screaming, "You no good, me do better!" Not only is it childish, it's also extremely narrow minded and wasteful of resources
How much documentation have you written for Linux?
Benefiting from the work that many volunteers have done entitles you to thank them, whatever their motivations and agendas. By abusing them, you tell us more about yourself than about those fine people.
Dangerous toys are things with parts that small children can injure themselves with
This is naive. Guns have been around for over 100 years, but it's only recently that kids have taken to gunning down multiple classmates in schools. Only since shoot-em-up video games became popular, in fact. Do you really believe there is no connection? Get your head out of the sand.
In IT, where it's very easy to be required to work 60hr+/wk,
Nobody in IT is required to work 60 hours/week. Even in the US, slavery was abolished more than 100 years ago. If you think you're required to work 60 hours/week, either you're letting your boss con you, or you have some personal psychological problem.
As a general rule, an anticompetitive monopolist should never be granted extra power to prevent competition through patent and copyright. To the contrary, a market entity's access to legalized monopoly protection should be inversely proportional to its size.
Clueless. Absolutely clueless. This suggestion is (1) sensible and (2) imaginative. Totally inappropriate to any proceedings in a US court of law, and likely to antagonize the bureaurats who are ostensibly representing the public interest.
Slashdot Mirror
When will the US government realize that allowing patents on common ideas is just wrong?
What a dumb question.
Pay attention, it's not difficult to understand this: a politician will do and say whatever will increase his/her chances of being reelected. What is "right", "true", "smart", "good" etc is just irrelevant. The very few exceptions are politicians whose electoral position is completely safe against any possible challenge, for example Edward Kennedy, or second-term presidents. The usual ways to increase one's chances of reelection are (1) to attract big $ for campaign funding or (2) to get the endorsement of big labor unions.
When you understand this, the news will make more sense to you.
And because it is "old" makes C "bad" why njdj?
...
but to claim a language is bad because it is simply "old" is stupid
If you'd actually read my comment before replying to it, you'd have realized that I did not say C was bad. In fact C is pretty good for some things. But for large projects that are best developed using object-oriented techniques, C++ is much better. If you dig into GNOME, (and if you're a developer) you'll see that it's using a lot of object-oriented ideas, and expresses them clumsily because C just doesn't have the support for them. Back in 1996, there may have been reasons to go this way. But in 2002 there aren't.
As a developer, I found the article sad. It's like going back at least 5 years, to the days when people used to use C. Somebody ought to tell these guys that the rest of the world has migrated to C++.
...the basic X-Windows system? Isn't that system supposed to be very inefficient?
Ignore the people who tell you that X is "very inefficient". In short, they don't know what they're talking about. If you compare speeds of a range of similar applications on the same hardware running Linux (all Linux GUIs use X) vs running Windows XP, you will find a lot of differences for all sorts of reasons, some things Linux does faster and other things Windows XP does faster. In so far as there is any pattern at all, most people seem to agree that Linux is faster (though I'm sure somebody will flame me for saying that). So whatever causes the differences, it can't be the use of X.
When you move beyond using a single computer and want to access applications on different machines on a LAN from a single workstation, the tremendous power of X comes into play. You can run graphical apps on any machine on your LAN, and interact with their GUIs on your screen, just as if they were running locally. Once you've gotten used to this, you'll never want to give it up.
I thought this site was for techies. I'm a techie. To me CGI stands for "Common Gateway Interface". Clearly it means something competely different in this context. Isn't somebody going to tell us what?
Linus Torvalds wrote the kernel of Linux and established the Open Source software model, which is a revolutionary way of creating software. In doing so, he not only designed one of the most important pieces of software ever, but he also created a new paradigm for software engineering."
Linus did a great job writing Linux (which is a kernel), but the rest of this citation is utter rubbish. He is always ready to point out that he could never have accomplished what he did without the earlier work of the Free Software Foundation.
IMHO the FSF deserves the credit for establishing the free software movement, but others will doubtless differ. We should all be able to agree though that it wasn't Linus Torvalds.
long k[]={0,178};char*p=&k[1]; main(){while(p---k)putchar (72+((k[1]>>(p-k)*2)&3|(!((p-k)&1)
...?
.c file, gcc declines to compile it, giving the message: "Invalid operands to binary -", which makes sense because p and k are pointers to different types (of different sizes). Would you care to submit a correction? :-)
Who could resist trying your sig
But when I put it into a
Why did you lump the EFF in with the FSF? They have little in common.
IMHO anyone who values his/her civil liberties is already a member of EFF. (If you're not, please get your credit card ready before going to their web site.) They don't write software.
I happen to think that the FSF does good work too, and deserves to be much higher up your list of developers of useful software. "Linux" wouldn't exist without the FSF. But a typical Windows user probably wouldn't care - whereas civil liberties concern everyone.
"All those in favor of losing their rights, do nothing."
Given this guy's track record from last year's predictions (no better than a coin toss - by his own admission) was it really worth giving /. space to this?
Any jerk can make predictions.
Most Britons would gladly pay a TV license rather than watch adverts every 5 minutes
Your comment is a perfect illustration of unthinking acceptance of collectivist/totalitarian arguments.
The whole point of a free society is that the majority ("Most Britons") should not get to impose their will on everyone else, in matters which are not essential to the preservation of the rule of law etc.
Note that I'm not saying that the US is exemplary in this regard (I'm not an American). But there does seem to be more awareness of the value of personal liberty among Americans than among Brits.
whenever I watch BBC I get half way through the program, need a pee and am waiting for the adverts, and it takes me bloody twenty minutes to realise there arent any bloody adverts and I have to miss the bloody program to pee
Ever heard of VCRs?
On the whole an insightful comment, but it goes too far when it says
The differences between the old USSR and the present day US are minimal....
I don't think you realize quite how unpleasant the old USSR was. The US still has a long way to go before it gets there. But if people continue being complacent, it will continue in that direction. "All those in favor of losing their rights, do nothing".
Given the current craze about security it seems to me that taking pictures of surveillance cams and the personnel operating it is a sure-fire way to get questioned and maybe jailed for a night.
Yes, defending your rights will result in trouble and inconvenience to you.
But if you think that rights are just given to you for free, you're dreaming. You, or somebody else, has to earn them. Read about what the signers of the Declaration of Independence went through, so that Americans could live in freedom - at least until people like you decided rights weren't worth preserving.
Try to look beyond your immediate surroundings. Christmas doesn't really mean anything to most human beings. Worldwide, Christianity is a minority religion.
I will not give up vacation. But fixed "holidays" are just an inconvenience.
Wow, pompous'r'us. To paraphrase, You can't know if you enjoyed a movie unless you have watched lots of movies.
Why on earth did this comment get modded up? It's flaming a perfectly sensible comment which pointed out that you can't rate a movie (i.e. rank it in comparison with other movies) unless you have watched lots of movies - not just stuff hyped in the last couple of years.
I don't think position on this list means much, except maybe that some people get their kicks by clever ballot-stuffing. Just scan the list. "The Sting" is way down at #74. "The Ladykillers" doesn't make the list at all! (To be expected, I suppose, if the list largely reflects the views of humorless nerds.)
According to these standards, technically a megabyte (MB) is a power of ten, while a mebibyte (MiB) is a power of two, appropriate for binary machines...
I've never understood why otherwise intelligent people waste their time on this kind of silliness. Does anybody know?
DataSync Program Only Available in MS Windows Platform
But also on the product info page, they offer to sell you a CD with the source code of the device, for $20. OK, so one of us will have to do some work, but at least this is an open-source product - there is no proprietary protocol to reverse engineer.
Don't ignore the grains of wheat in all this chaff. OK, his attacks on X are clueless, but he is right about:
- Fonts suck
- KDE and GNOME desktop's look like crap
If you disagree with the above two, take a look at a Windows desktop.
- No good printing
He hasn't seen the real problem, but he's definitely spotted a symptom of the real problem. I think the underlying problem is reliance on PostScript. PostScript never really made sense. Ten years ago, we had more memory and faster processors on mostly-idle printers than we had on our desktops - to handle PS. If a job needs memory and processing power, put it on the computer where it can be used for other things too - not in a printer. Cheapo Windows printers (like the Lexmark 42) are a good idea. Except for the secrecy surrounding the interface, the idea makes sense. It was never realistic to expect every printer to have a PostScript interpreter in it. Ghostscript is a disaster too; compared with Print Preview in a Microsoft product, it just looks stupid.
IE... is the fastest, most reliable and best browser that I have worked with.
... no, let's start again .. Is it hard for you to read?
Did you read the article that this thread is about?
Do you have difficulty
Instead of rejecting the LDP license, I would question whether the GPL is appropriate for documentation.
The fine people who write software for us under the GPL get some return for their work. Firstly, developing software is fun. Secondly, they get recognition in the community, because relatively few people are capable of developing good software.
Documentation is different. It's a chore to write it. It doesn't bring the author much recognition, because pretty much anyone who has nothing better to do can put together some sort of documentation. So people have little incentive to write it.
Consequently, documentation is the weak point of the free software movement.
If the LDP license encourages just a few more people to write documentation, by giving them just a little more rights in the work they've done for us (and remember, under the LDP, the work is still freely copyable and distributable without payment), then I say: let's support the LDP license. "Rewriting" stuff because it's under the LDP license seems an especially unwise thing to do. I am willing to release software I write under the GPL. I am not willing to write documentation and put it under GPL, but I am willing to write documentation and release it under the LDP license.
Why go an re-invent the wheel everytime someone puts a different type of nut on it from what you like? Work with the people to get it the way you want it. Don't go throwing a temper tantrum, tossing away a perfectly good bit of software/documentation/whatever and screaming, "You no good, me do better!" Not only is it childish, it's also extremely narrow minded and wasteful of resources
How much documentation have you written for Linux?
Benefiting from the work that many volunteers have done entitles you to thank them, whatever their motivations and agendas. By abusing them, you tell us more about yourself than about those fine people.
Dangerous toys are things with parts that small children can injure themselves with
This is naive. Guns have been around for over 100 years, but it's only recently that kids have taken to gunning down multiple classmates in schools. Only since shoot-em-up video games became popular, in fact. Do you really believe there is no connection? Get your head out of the sand.
In IT, where it's very easy to be required to work 60hr+/wk,
Nobody in IT is required to work 60 hours/week. Even in the US, slavery was abolished more than 100 years ago. If you think you're required to work 60 hours/week, either you're letting your boss con you, or you have some personal psychological problem.
As a general rule, an anticompetitive monopolist should never be granted extra power to prevent competition through patent and copyright. To the contrary, a market entity's access to legalized monopoly protection should be inversely proportional to its size.
Clueless. Absolutely clueless. This suggestion is (1) sensible and (2) imaginative. Totally inappropriate to any proceedings in a US court of law, and likely to antagonize the bureaurats who are ostensibly representing the public interest.