If you don't say anything it won't change. If you say something it MIGHT change. I would point out that the changes to IP law have not yet been implemented (month or two to go). Up until then things can still be changed, so it's still worth screaming as loudly as you can.
In that case please contact SLUG or turn up to one of their meetings. The next meeting is on Friday, May 27 from 6:00pm to 9:30pm at the University of Technology, Broadway, Sydney. Once you are there, have a word to whoever seems to be running the show and they will point you to the relevant person to talk to.
Read it again: without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY. The FSF is being open that their code is not a salable product.
Anyone is welcome to come along and turn the FSF's code into a salable product. They can do this by offering a warranty that the code has a useful purpose and can do so for whatever price they choose. Again to quote from the GPL:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
The generally low price for GPLd software is a consequence of unfettered competition, something monopolists have a problem with.
Contrary to popular belief, virtial reality was not perfected in 1995. In reality VR was perfected in 1994. 10:42pm on 29th November to be precise. At this time, the US population was sedated by the United Nations via a dose to the drinking water supply. When they woke up 24 hours later, the entire nation was "Trumanised".
To keep suspicions at bay, advances in VR were removed from this new reality.
It's hard on the US people, but that was the only way the world could keep their growing nuclear arsenal at bay. On the bright side, GWB is just a bad dream (one they will never wake up from).
This post will not be posted on the VR version of slashdot.
Has anyone bought a mobile phone and decided *NOT* to use the telephone function? Why should one pay for an ongoing telephone service, when all one wants is a camera, hard disk and music player?
Has anyone tried this? What was the reaction of the seller, who was no doubt expecting further income from a telephone plan?
Perhaps that is an indicator of when a mobile phone's 'other' services come up to scratch, when people buy them with a view to ignoring the telephone function?
> In the new 90nm model of the Athlon 64 with Winchester core, half of the L2 cache is deactivated; the production process for the chips is identical to that of the larger variants.
Any one know whether this deactivation is reversible?
I know if I was building such a chip I would make it so either half of the cache could be activated. That way in case of a production fault, either half of the cache could be used. Consequently yields would go up and AMD gets more dollars in the bank.
If either half of the cache can be activated, perhaps it is possible to activate both halves simultaneously???
Someone who is learning as they go will be forced to write to the level of an inexperienced person, and will have a better idea than an experienced person of what newbies have difficulty with.
Getting involved is not just for experienced people! Just jump in and have a go.
The most important (and hardest) thing is to start writing. It doesn't have to be perfect, just force yourself to start and do the best you can at the time. Once you've finished the text, and understand things better, you can go back and correct any factual errors you may have made (or release it and let others correct it for you).
Re:The problem with comparisons to Betamax
on
Michael Weiss Interview
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The comparison is valid.
It is irrelevant how many copies can be made or how perfect they are. Making one imperfect copy of a copyrighted work without permission makes you a law breaker (it is a binary thing) and is not being debated.
The issue at stake is whether a subset of copyright holders are allowed to dictate the conditions under which works in which they have no interest may be copied.
Put in those terms, the case sounds like a subset of copyright holders asking for their competition to be ruled illegal.
It would be really cool to see an animation of the map over time, to see how world attention 'sloshes' around. Even better if it was combined with a ticker showing which significant world event corresponds to each burst of activity.
Personally I'm pleased to see these sorts of experiments, and look forward to future refinements of your experiment.
As decribed in your blog post, the bounty seems to encourage a single hacker to work at producing a solution. This has the potential for pitting hackers against each other and potentially putting sharing of information at risk. (eg. a team collaborating and developing in the open has their their work submitted at the last minute by a third party.) By encouraging solitary work you appear to be discouraging free software's main competitive advantage: collaboration.
Wouldn't it be better to figure out a way to encourage a team of hackers to collaborate, in an open forum, to come up with a solution?
One method might be to remove personal gain from the equation, by offering a sizeable donation to a suitable free sofware project as a 'reward'.
I'm sure others can come up with much better suggestions.
In a related vein, are you going to attempt to quantify any substantial contribution made by a prexisting third party project?
> I'd love to get a lawnmower that delivered fuel pellets rather than mulch that needs to be hauled away or worked back into the ground.
Of course this lawn mower would be powered by grass pellets! It would be neat to have a mower that was able to produce more pellets than were required to power it.
Example using random numbers: Use 100 pellets to mow the lawn. After mowing the lawn you have 500 pellets, of which you save 100 for the next mow and use 400 to power your house.
Any ideas on how much energy could be extracted from a square metre of suburban backyard?
My 65 year old non-computer literate father runs Ubuntu. He went this route (under my advice) since:
Ubuntu is not susceptible to viruses and spyware.
For $0 he gets a complete operating system and set of applications, saving him around $1000.
It works.
I have little inclination to provide support for MS based systems, so by running Ubuntu he gets me interested.
He bravely started off with the first release (warty) of Ubuntu. There were a few minor glitches (mainly that the graphical modem configuration didn't work, so I had to do it for him from the a bash prompt, and the web browser didn't have java and flash installed by default) but the whole process went remarkably smoothly. My expectation is that the imminent second release (hoary) will be polished enough that my father could do an installation by himself.
In short, ditch the windows. For a typical home user Ubuntu can do everything windows can only more reliably, better and cheaper. (No doubt others will offer conflicting opinions.)
You don't have to bother evaluating better web based technologies. When they are worth using others will tell you about them. It's the nature of the web.
For example, a professor of the university department in which I worked came back from Digital Research Labs, enthusing about a great new search algorithm the designers of Digital's Computer Aided Design software had come up with. A short time later Altavista was 'it'.
The same happened a few years later. The buzz from collegues and those on the web was about a new search engine called Google.
The short answer is, "Don't go looking for the 'next search engine'. It will find you."
The GPL states that you can use either the version at the time of release OR a later version. Consequently a user is free to ignore any new versions and continue to use code based on the license it was released under.
As for authors, are they going to sue themselves for copyright infringement? An author can do whatever they want with their code.
Not all Australians are racist. In fact the majority aren't. It's just unfortunate that we have a racist (and an opportunist) as Prime Minister. Trust me there is a *SHITLOAD* of opposition here in Australia to what our government is doing to refugees.
Then there are those who are working for refugees, but don't set up websites about it.
There are hosts of similar sites, set up by those working to do good (unlike our government) on the issues of Aborigines, invading other countries and being a good global citizen.
Australia is a diverse community, about which generalisations cannot be made. I agree Australia's image is tarnished, but I also point out that a lack of shine does not sit well with many Australians.
Isn't raising money for servers a short term solution? Surely the real solution is to invest time and effort into finding a way to distribute wikipedia across the 'net?
Google seems to have succeeded in building a distributed platform. What about something similar to seti@home, which takes a chunk of each user's disk space and bandwidth and uses them to implement a virtual computer on which wikimedia projects may be run?
Surely someone is already working on something like this (pointers anyone??)
No, that is how CORPORATIONS work in this day and age.
Large corporations are not capitalists, as those who run them do not own the capital they control. Those who run corporations lie, trying to pass themselves off as capitalists.
Corporations will say 'shareholders control us, shareholders own the captial, therefore we are capitalists'. This is bullshit. Basically corporations own each other, though a circle of shareholding. They are independent of capitalism, as the real shareholders (ie. people who own the majority of shares) will always be overridden by a majority of corporate shareholders.
When was the last time you saw capitalists, the Mum and Dad investors who actually own shares, determine the outcome of a board meeting?
A corner shop is capitalism. Wal-mart is oppression.
"So, the economists observe, the corporation,
Hath other corporations that on him sharehold;
And these have other still to hold 'em;
And so proceed, ad infinitum"
(With apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Given that those who control corporation generally do not own the capital they control, a second quote comes to mind
Criminal: a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.
> That job resume you're writing up now is going to be pretty irrelevant in 3 years
I disagree. Not everything becomes irrelevant. If that resume got you your current job, or the money you earned from that job is contributing to your current lifestyle it isn't irrelevant. You can use the same argument against me, but I state (without any evidence apart from personal experience) that relevance is less likely in email.
Interesting to consider the case of a resume sent via email. I would put forward the hypothesis that a resume via email is more likely to be ignored than a resume on paper, so email *is* less relevant!
I still contend that most email is irrelevant, and that which is relevant has a *very* short half life (much shorter than a typical resume).
I did a similar analysis in 1998. I came to the following conclusion:
Given enough time, nearly every email becomes irrelevant.
This 'law' is base based on the fact that of many thousands of emails, there were only about 3 or 4 that I judged to be of value (worth keeping) after three years.
A corollary:
You can safely ignore your email and suffer minimal long term consequences.
Here is an example of the application of "Femto's Law". The boss sends you an email asking you to do something. If you ignore the email, the boss will either a) if it is important come and tell you personally or, b) find someone else to do the task.
Ultimately I think the law is based on the fact that email is mainly used for trivial stuff and important stuff will eventually be presented to you in a form which is harder to ignore.
I guess the applicabililty might have changed since 1998, if email has come to be used for non-trivial stuff, but I reckon it's mostly still true.
Side note: the reason I ended up doing the analysis is because the 'delete' button stopped working on my mail client and I had to sort my emails when jobs. AT the time I posted my conclusions to the rest of the University department, to other people's amusement.
Surely security belongs on the edges of the network, where users can make their own judgements about how much security they desire? Need high security? Do your own encryption at each end.
There is also the issue of whether any security, except your own, can be trusted. Will Cisco guarantee the absence of backdoors or 'approved' (not by the user) surveillance?
Then there is the issue of who makes the call on what 'security' is. There's a fair chance the average geek, sys admin, government and music trade rep will all have different ideas of what security is. Who's version gets implemented by Cisco and friends? Better that each one gets to do their own security.
The Internet is a bit like a town. There is no 'owner'. Individuals may own bits of it, but it is a common space.
This in turn is a flawed analogy, as the main street of the Internet is privately owned by a corporation (except for those countries with government owned telcos). Only the shops and houses are owned by individuals.
Question: if the main street is privatley owned, do individuals still have privacy rights? I say yes, as the police don't get different search powers when you drive your car off a public highway onto a privately owned toll road.
Another improvement will come in the way businesses are able to install Windows on large numbers of machines. Today, mass deployment is done through a process known as "ghosting" an image of the operating system. An improved method will come with Longhorn, Montgomery said.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't say anything it won't change. If you say something it MIGHT change. I would point out that the changes to IP law have not yet been implemented (month or two to go). Up until then things can still be changed, so it's still worth screaming as loudly as you can.
In that case please contact SLUG or turn up to one of their meetings. The next meeting is on Friday, May 27 from 6:00pm to 9:30pm at the University of Technology, Broadway, Sydney. Once you are there, have a word to whoever seems to be running the show and they will point you to the relevant person to talk to.
The FSF is not selling a product. There is no offer to buy or acceptance of that offer. In fact, **there is no product** To quote from the GPL:
Read it again: without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY. The FSF is being open that their code is not a salable product.
Anyone is welcome to come along and turn the FSF's code into a salable product. They can do this by offering a warranty that the code has a useful purpose and can do so for whatever price they choose. Again to quote from the GPL:
The generally low price for GPLd software is a consequence of unfettered competition, something monopolists have a problem with.
Now go and crawl back under your bridge.
Wallace's definition of price fixing is a competitive market setting the price lower than the price he wants to charge.
Why didn't they set the date for yesterday? That way we wouldn't have to wait to see if it was successful.
To keep suspicions at bay, advances in VR were removed from this new reality.
It's hard on the US people, but that was the only way the world could keep their growing nuclear arsenal at bay. On the bright side, GWB is just a bad dream (one they will never wake up from).
This post will not be posted on the VR version of slashdot.
Has anyone tried this? What was the reaction of the seller, who was no doubt expecting further income from a telephone plan?
Perhaps that is an indicator of when a mobile phone's 'other' services come up to scratch, when people buy them with a view to ignoring the telephone function?
> In the new 90nm model of the Athlon 64 with Winchester core, half of the L2 cache is deactivated; the production process for the chips is identical to that of the larger variants.
Any one know whether this deactivation is reversible?
I know if I was building such a chip I would make it so either half of the cache could be activated. That way in case of a production fault, either half of the cache could be used. Consequently yields would go up and AMD gets more dollars in the bank.
If either half of the cache can be activated, perhaps it is possible to activate both halves simultaneously???
Someone who is learning as they go will be forced to write to the level of an inexperienced person, and will have a better idea than an experienced person of what newbies have difficulty with.
Getting involved is not just for experienced people! Just jump in and have a go.
The most important (and hardest) thing is to start writing. It doesn't have to be perfect, just force yourself to start and do the best you can at the time. Once you've finished the text, and understand things better, you can go back and correct any factual errors you may have made (or release it and let others correct it for you).
It is irrelevant how many copies can be made or how perfect they are. Making one imperfect copy of a copyrighted work without permission makes you a law breaker (it is a binary thing) and is not being debated.
The issue at stake is whether a subset of copyright holders are allowed to dictate the conditions under which works in which they have no interest may be copied.
Put in those terms, the case sounds like a subset of copyright holders asking for their competition to be ruled illegal.
It would be really cool to see an animation of the map over time, to see how world attention 'sloshes' around. Even better if it was combined with a ticker showing which significant world event corresponds to each burst of activity.
As decribed in your blog post, the bounty seems to encourage a single hacker to work at producing a solution. This has the potential for pitting hackers against each other and potentially putting sharing of information at risk. (eg. a team collaborating and developing in the open has their their work submitted at the last minute by a third party.) By encouraging solitary work you appear to be discouraging free software's main competitive advantage: collaboration.
Wouldn't it be better to figure out a way to encourage a team of hackers to collaborate, in an open forum, to come up with a solution?
One method might be to remove personal gain from the equation, by offering a sizeable donation to a suitable free sofware project as a 'reward'.
I'm sure others can come up with much better suggestions.
In a related vein, are you going to attempt to quantify any substantial contribution made by a prexisting third party project?
Of course this lawn mower would be powered by grass pellets! It would be neat to have a mower that was able to produce more pellets than were required to power it.
Example using random numbers: Use 100 pellets to mow the lawn. After mowing the lawn you have 500 pellets, of which you save 100 for the next mow and use 400 to power your house.
Any ideas on how much energy could be extracted from a square metre of suburban backyard?
- Ubuntu is not susceptible to viruses and spyware.
- For $0 he gets a complete operating system and set of applications, saving him around $1000.
- It works.
- I have little inclination to provide support for MS based systems, so by running Ubuntu he gets me interested.
He bravely started off with the first release (warty) of Ubuntu. There were a few minor glitches (mainly that the graphical modem configuration didn't work, so I had to do it for him from the a bash prompt, and the web browser didn't have java and flash installed by default) but the whole process went remarkably smoothly. My expectation is that the imminent second release (hoary) will be polished enough that my father could do an installation by himself.In short, ditch the windows. For a typical home user Ubuntu can do everything windows can only more reliably, better and cheaper. (No doubt others will offer conflicting opinions.)
You don't have to bother evaluating better web based technologies. When they are worth using others will tell you about them. It's the nature of the web.
For example, a professor of the university department in which I worked came back from Digital Research Labs, enthusing about a great new search algorithm the designers of Digital's Computer Aided Design software had come up with. A short time later Altavista was 'it'.
The same happened a few years later. The buzz from collegues and those on the web was about a new search engine called Google.
The short answer is, "Don't go looking for the 'next search engine'. It will find you."
As for authors, are they going to sue themselves for copyright infringement? An author can do whatever they want with their code.
Then there are those who are working for refugees, but don't set up websites about it.
There are hosts of similar sites, set up by those working to do good (unlike our government) on the issues of Aborigines, invading other countries and being a good global citizen.
Australia is a diverse community, about which generalisations cannot be made. I agree Australia's image is tarnished, but I also point out that a lack of shine does not sit well with many Australians.
Google seems to have succeeded in building a distributed platform. What about something similar to seti@home, which takes a chunk of each user's disk space and bandwidth and uses them to implement a virtual computer on which wikimedia projects may be run?
Surely someone is already working on something like this (pointers anyone??)
Large corporations are not capitalists, as those who run them do not own the capital they control. Those who run corporations lie, trying to pass themselves off as capitalists.
Corporations will say 'shareholders control us, shareholders own the captial, therefore we are capitalists'. This is bullshit. Basically corporations own each other, though a circle of shareholding. They are independent of capitalism, as the real shareholders (ie. people who own the majority of shares) will always be overridden by a majority of corporate shareholders.
When was the last time you saw capitalists, the Mum and Dad investors who actually own shares, determine the outcome of a board meeting? A corner shop is capitalism. Wal-mart is oppression.
Given that those who control corporation generally do not own the capital they control, a second quote comes to mind
Is the same logic as
which is the attitude of most companies, people and other copyright holders.
I'm willing to call most copyright holders juvenile. Are you?
Stop acting like a child William, RIAA, MPAA, ...
I disagree. Not everything becomes irrelevant. If that resume got you your current job, or the money you earned from that job is contributing to your current lifestyle it isn't irrelevant. You can use the same argument against me, but I state (without any evidence apart from personal experience) that relevance is less likely in email.
Interesting to consider the case of a resume sent via email. I would put forward the hypothesis that a resume via email is more likely to be ignored than a resume on paper, so email *is* less relevant!
I still contend that most email is irrelevant, and that which is relevant has a *very* short half life (much shorter than a typical resume).
This 'law' is base based on the fact that of many thousands of emails, there were only about 3 or 4 that I judged to be of value (worth keeping) after three years.
A corollary:
Here is an example of the application of "Femto's Law". The boss sends you an email asking you to do something. If you ignore the email, the boss will either a) if it is important come and tell you personally or, b) find someone else to do the task. Ultimately I think the law is based on the fact that email is mainly used for trivial stuff and important stuff will eventually be presented to you in a form which is harder to ignore.
I guess the applicabililty might have changed since 1998, if email has come to be used for non-trivial stuff, but I reckon it's mostly still true.
Side note: the reason I ended up doing the analysis is because the 'delete' button stopped working on my mail client and I had to sort my emails when jobs. AT the time I posted my conclusions to the rest of the University department, to other people's amusement.
PS. No, I'm not brave enough to ignore my email!
There is also the issue of whether any security, except your own, can be trusted. Will Cisco guarantee the absence of backdoors or 'approved' (not by the user) surveillance?
Then there is the issue of who makes the call on what 'security' is. There's a fair chance the average geek, sys admin, government and music trade rep will all have different ideas of what security is. Who's version gets implemented by Cisco and friends? Better that each one gets to do their own security.
Bzzt.
The Internet is a bit like a town. There is no 'owner'. Individuals may own bits of it, but it is a common space.
This in turn is a flawed analogy, as the main street of the Internet is privately owned by a corporation (except for those countries with government owned telcos). Only the shops and houses are owned by individuals.
Question: if the main street is privatley owned, do individuals still have privacy rights? I say yes, as the police don't get different search powers when you drive your car off a public highway onto a privately owned toll road.
Hey, Microsoft is ripping off APT!