How can a business possibly expect to survive when they *don't sell anything*? Free software as a business model works if it's in conjunction with a product/service you're selling (hardware drivers, for instance). Open source is supposed to be a community movement, not a business one. If they want to sell money-making add-ons to sourceforge (I'm suspecting these are add-ons that most OSers wouldn't care much for anyway - sourceforge is doing fine without them as we speak), good on them. If they improve the OS core while they're at it, even better.
Everybody knows what is copyright and not legally downloaded, and what's downloaded with the approval of the source.
That's what I was replying to. The original story is about an ISP scanning for copyrighted material. An AC stated that everyone knows what is legally downloaded, and I pointed out that there are a lot of situations in which the ISP will not know the legality of the downloaded material.
How do they tell the difference between a 1.5Mb low-quality version of a Bare Naked Ladies song and a 1.5Mb high-quality 30-second sample of the same song?
I suppose I could say *me*.
I immediately went home and backed up the tracks to the CD my band had been working on, just in case. I then, a few weeks later, burned a copy of Linux to install, and keep as an emergency boot disk.
I have yet to burn a CD of music that isn't owned entirely by me.
Ive rarely seen anything that needed both a box, and the software to go in it, ship on time.
Hmmmm...if they rarely ship on time, perhaps they should be firing the people who come up with these shipping dates. You'd think 20 years of experience might give 'em a little hint on how to schedule. At least let people know it's a "tentative" release date, rather than using the phrase definitely launch on schedule. Why not pad the schedule, and give gamers a pleasant surprise if they happen to get it done early?
Re:OT: slashcode
on
SIGGRAPH 2001
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Absolutely. The closed-source hotmail switchover went far better
It's getting better though. Every version that comes out takes usability into account more and more. The one thing I wish they'd fix up are those damn x* and g* filenames in the program menus. It would seriously take about an hour to go through and just give them real names.
And about OS/2, GEM (no, not old enough to remember, but I'll assume...) - they weren't Windows-compatible. I don't see any reason why people shouldn't have a choice of environments as long as they can all run one another's applications. That's about all.
I would think that making an offer to the squatter would be infinitely more cost-effective than actual litigation.
Perhaps, but what if the guy who happens to own "ford.com" says "yeah, I'd like a $200 million for it"? There is a lot of invalid litigation out there by corporations trying to stop people using anything with their copyrighted name in it, but there are also a number of valid suits. If I'm looking for an intro to linux products, I'll type in "www.linux.com". If it takes me to a cybersquatter's website, it wastes that much more of my time. Cybersquatting makes web traversal more difficult.
We should not be attacking Yahoo! because they exercised their freedom a bit.
They're exercising their "freedom" because of the protests they had - not from any moral decision. If Yahoo!'s moving towards a more family-oriented service, good on 'em. Try to strip as much porn as they can from search results, close down the "morally deficient" clubs, and add a bunch of things for the kids. I'm only against the decision if it's a result of protestors objecting to something that they have no obligation to view - on a free service.
And, since you seem to be inviting it, and since it's been a while since I had a good debate (god forbid it turn into a flame-fest), I ask you to elaborate on the "moral principles" to which we should return, and more specifically, what you perceive the dangers of porn to be.
I'd assume that they're working with photographs and photograph-like images (as opposed to stick-man drawings or something like that). In that case, the function could look at certain things that would appear in a photograph - colour borders, gradient, etc. If the picture consistently doesn't show what's expected, then that could be used to show that there's been some sort of change made to it. I don't know much about graphics analysis, so I couldn't say for sure, but I can see this working.
Your calculations are all on the ball for the solar system, but you're looking at the results of something astonomers still don't fully understand - the birth of the solar system.
For all we know, every time there's a dust cloud with size > X and < Y, there will be exactly 9 planets with exactly a 4/9 chance of terrestrial planets, 1/2 chances of being in the life zone, 1/63 chance of a significantly sized moon, etc. People who quote statististics on the likelihood of alien life are working with too many unknowns - I've heard estimates ranging from 1/4 to 1/universe.
Back to the subject line though, sure, Earth's unique - just about everything out there is, but the question is if there's a planet that could support life. Until there's more information on the statistics involved (statistics that can probably only be achieved through the study of other solar systems), there's no way to quantify the likelihood of life.
The article said that this may be a solution to one of the many problems they've had cloning different animals, and even if it were the only problem, humans don't have that much of an advantage :
``It's like an airplane with two jet engines. You see two nice jet engines and you like it,'' Jirtle said. ``Why? Because you feel comfortable that there's redundancy. In mice and rats, you only have one engine. If it blows, you're done.''
For example, Killian said that only one in 300 cloned sheep embryos takes hold, and up to half of these embryos experience large offspring syndrome.
Basically they're saying that because sheep have "one engine", they're harder to clone. But they're losing half of them! I'm hardly willing to accept that "two engines", each with a fifty percent chance of failure is a significant improvement.
The two pages of this article don't seem to be well-related. The first page looks at google-like search engines - Wisenut and Teoma, while the links in the second page fall into a different category altogether. Lasoo doesn't look like anything more than a glorified yellow pages, CURE looks like any other research database out there, and Vivisimo is the least creative of them all, being nothing more than another Dogpile. The first two look promising, but the others are just the same ideas churned out again.
...it's yet another reason that we can't believe anything posted anywhere. Now anyone with a grudge is free to say "Joe Blow of Joe's Carpentry shop talks to lima beans and eats babies". Anonymous speech is great, but accountability has its virtues too.
Oh, and if you're looking for some tips to make tools for Windows programmers, then I'd really like to see something like "MS Edit". Now there's a programming environment.
This is frickin' terrible Politics has killed off far too many good ideas. Every time a new government gets in it seems they spend half their time rolling back what the previous one did. Why is this? I can understand the problem if there are plenty of complaints or if something just plain doesn't work, but most of the time it's done with little thought as to what it has accomplished, what it's intended to accomplish, and what the costs involved are. That's what was done when the idea was first proposed and accepted, and looked over by plenty of highly-paid professionals.
Half (warning : made up stat) the projects a government starts never get the chance to become what they were intended because they aren't given the chance to mature. Rome wasn't built in a day, fellas. Think before you cut. </rant>
Not bad, but...
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 1, Funny
i'm still waiting for the release of Ultra Turbo Code Red XI, Player's Edition...
I'm surprised this wasn't obvious from the start! Let's look at the basic components of a paperback book. You get :
- A nice shiny cover
- A few hundred pages of printed text
- The ability to carry with you wherever you go
- The ability to share your good times with a friend, for free
Let's look at the basic components of an e-book :
- Non-copyable, non-movable bits
- uhhhh....
All this for the same price as a regular book. Nothing to pass on to your children, nothing to sell at a garage sale. $5 (and going up to $10, according to the article) for something that has about 10% the desirability of the original. Of course it doesn't sell.
Hindsight's 20/20, but you'd think that facts as self-evident as these would have been caught...
Slashdot Mirror
How can a business possibly expect to survive when they *don't sell anything*? Free software as a business model works if it's in conjunction with a product/service you're selling (hardware drivers, for instance). Open source is supposed to be a community movement, not a business one. If they want to sell money-making add-ons to sourceforge (I'm suspecting these are add-ons that most OSers wouldn't care much for anyway - sourceforge is doing fine without them as we speak), good on them. If they improve the OS core while they're at it, even better.
And, speaking as and indie, how do I go about getting *my* cut?
Everybody knows what is copyright and not legally downloaded, and what's downloaded with the approval of the source.
That's what I was replying to. The original story is about an ISP scanning for copyrighted material. An AC stated that everyone knows what is legally downloaded, and I pointed out that there are a lot of situations in which the ISP will not know the legality of the downloaded material.
Fine - I'll bite.
How do they tell the difference between a 1.5Mb low-quality version of a Bare Naked Ladies song and a 1.5Mb high-quality 30-second sample of the same song?
Aye - my bad.
Hmmm...one person...?
I suppose I could say *me*.
I immediately went home and backed up the tracks to the CD my band had been working on, just in case. I then, a few weeks later, burned a copy of Linux to install, and keep as an emergency boot disk.
I have yet to burn a CD of music that isn't owned entirely by me.
The RIAA is looking into a new emerging media known as "hard drives" that are capable of storying massive amounts of copyrighted data.
Ive rarely seen anything that needed both a box, and the software to go in it, ship on time.
Hmmmm...if they rarely ship on time, perhaps they should be firing the people who come up with these shipping dates. You'd think 20 years of experience might give 'em a little hint on how to schedule. At least let people know it's a "tentative" release date, rather than using the phrase definitely launch on schedule. Why not pad the schedule, and give gamers a pleasant surprise if they happen to get it done early?
Absolutely. The closed-source hotmail switchover went far better
It's getting better though. Every version that comes out takes usability into account more and more. The one thing I wish they'd fix up are those damn x* and g* filenames in the program menus. It would seriously take about an hour to go through and just give them real names.
And about OS/2, GEM (no, not old enough to remember, but I'll assume...) - they weren't Windows-compatible. I don't see any reason why people shouldn't have a choice of environments as long as they can all run one another's applications. That's about all.
Perhaps, but what if the guy who happens to own "ford.com" says "yeah, I'd like a $200 million for it"? There is a lot of invalid litigation out there by corporations trying to stop people using anything with their copyrighted name in it, but there are also a number of valid suits. If I'm looking for an intro to linux products, I'll type in "www.linux.com". If it takes me to a cybersquatter's website, it wastes that much more of my time. Cybersquatting makes web traversal more difficult.
They're exercising their "freedom" because of the protests they had - not from any moral decision. If Yahoo!'s moving towards a more family-oriented service, good on 'em. Try to strip as much porn as they can from search results, close down the "morally deficient" clubs, and add a bunch of things for the kids. I'm only against the decision if it's a result of protestors objecting to something that they have no obligation to view - on a free service.
And, since you seem to be inviting it, and since it's been a while since I had a good debate (god forbid it turn into a flame-fest), I ask you to elaborate on the "moral principles" to which we should return, and more specifically, what you perceive the dangers of porn to be.
I'd assume that they're working with photographs and photograph-like images (as opposed to stick-man drawings or something like that). In that case, the function could look at certain things that would appear in a photograph - colour borders, gradient, etc. If the picture consistently doesn't show what's expected, then that could be used to show that there's been some sort of change made to it. I don't know much about graphics analysis, so I couldn't say for sure, but I can see this working.
Your calculations are all on the ball for the solar system, but you're looking at the results of something astonomers still don't fully understand - the birth of the solar system.
For all we know, every time there's a dust cloud with size > X and < Y, there will be exactly 9 planets with exactly a 4/9 chance of terrestrial planets, 1/2 chances of being in the life zone, 1/63 chance of a significantly sized moon, etc. People who quote statististics on the likelihood of alien life are working with too many unknowns - I've heard estimates ranging from 1/4 to 1/universe.
Back to the subject line though, sure, Earth's unique - just about everything out there is, but the question is if there's a planet that could support life. Until there's more information on the statistics involved (statistics that can probably only be achieved through the study of other solar systems), there's no way to quantify the likelihood of life.
``It's like an airplane with two jet engines. You see two nice jet engines and you like it,'' Jirtle said. ``Why? Because you feel comfortable that there's redundancy. In mice and rats, you only have one engine. If it blows, you're done.''
For example, Killian said that only one in 300 cloned sheep embryos takes hold, and up to half of these embryos experience large offspring syndrome.
Basically they're saying that because sheep have "one engine", they're harder to clone. But they're losing half of them! I'm hardly willing to accept that "two engines", each with a fifty percent chance of failure is a significant improvement.
...downloading the Final Fantasy movie, or just the models used to create it?
The two pages of this article don't seem to be well-related. The first page looks at google-like search engines - Wisenut and Teoma, while the links in the second page fall into a different category altogether. Lasoo doesn't look like anything more than a glorified yellow pages, CURE looks like any other research database out there, and Vivisimo is the least creative of them all, being nothing more than another Dogpile. The first two look promising, but the others are just the same ideas churned out again.
So are you. If you had read the post you would know that the poster suggested a new standard, not "a standard that relies on IP from two companies" :
Why not define the standard and let _them_ conform to the standards
...it's yet another reason that we can't believe anything posted anywhere. Now anyone with a grudge is free to say "Joe Blow of Joe's Carpentry shop talks to lima beans and eats babies". Anonymous speech is great, but accountability has its virtues too.
...is "make", with a little bit of vi thrown in.
Oh, and if you're looking for some tips to make tools for Windows programmers, then I'd really like to see something like "MS Edit". Now there's a programming environment.
Too bad there's no point beyond the earth where the gravities from the earth and sun cancel out though.
This is frickin' terrible Politics has killed off far too many good ideas. Every time a new government gets in it seems they spend half their time rolling back what the previous one did. Why is this? I can understand the problem if there are plenty of complaints or if something just plain doesn't work, but most of the time it's done with little thought as to what it has accomplished, what it's intended to accomplish, and what the costs involved are. That's what was done when the idea was first proposed and accepted, and looked over by plenty of highly-paid professionals.
Half (warning : made up stat) the projects a government starts never get the chance to become what they were intended because they aren't given the chance to mature. Rome wasn't built in a day, fellas. Think before you cut.
</rant>
i'm still waiting for the release of Ultra Turbo Code Red XI, Player's Edition...
The desired solar atoms, if all piled up, will be equivalent to perhaps 10 grains of salt.
Obviously they're looking for exotic food garnishing of some sort...
And now that I think about it, if it's "equivalent" to 10 grains of salt, why bother going up there in the first place?
I'm surprised this wasn't obvious from the start! Let's look at the basic components of a paperback book. You get :
- A nice shiny cover
- A few hundred pages of printed text
- The ability to carry with you wherever you go
- The ability to share your good times with a friend, for free
Let's look at the basic components of an e-book :
- Non-copyable, non-movable bits
- uhhhh....
All this for the same price as a regular book. Nothing to pass on to your children, nothing to sell at a garage sale. $5 (and going up to $10, according to the article) for something that has about 10% the desirability of the original. Of course it doesn't sell.
Hindsight's 20/20, but you'd think that facts as self-evident as these would have been caught...