Let me make the american free market counter-argument. American programming is of higher quality because it is ad-supported.
Then why do I spend all my time watching PBS and the Discover channel? Becuase ABC, NBC and CBS are filled with ABSOLUTE CRAP that I would never watch if they paid me. I don't even know what channels they are on in my area. The major channels are so worried about getting EVERY VIEWER possible that they worry more about not putting on something that would loose audience than they do about attracting more audience. What you get is lukewarm, stale, rehashes of old stories cleaned up for "the family" audience. Anything with any Zing might offend someone. Can't do that. Anything educational might bore someone. Can't do that.
At least FOX has some interesting comedies. So they offend people. Some offend me, I just don't watch those. But many others are really funny and I watch them a lot.
PBS is sponsered, but that does not drive their programming. PBS makes their lineup, and the sponsers come and add support to particular shows by name.
Any company that is driven too much by the business side of TV and not by the content side is just going to put out drek. Those really interested in making good material (PBS!) do it and get by.
If you remember this article a theory about the origin of oil as non-fossel fuel.
I got his book and read much of it. Basically he theorises that free hydrogen comes from slow oxidation of hydrocarbon molecules trapped underground. It's worth a read if you're interested in geology.
Did you stop to think that maybe some people have been bitching about Mozilla all along, and other people have been cheering Mozilla all along and most of these people have been very consistant? They just outnumber eachother at different times?
Then you come along and notice "Hey, yesterday that guy poo-poo-ed Mozilla, but today this other guy said it was good. What gives?"
Well clearly what gives is that you think this is the same person when in fact it is different people saying different things.
SIDE NOTE: Complaining about how Slashdot people are inconsistant is just STOOPED. There is not one voice here, there are many. If you came to compalin about inconsistancy, then track one person and look for inconsistancy.
Well, their typical marketing scheme was to release a moderate speed bump every few months to keep the upgrade mill going. But when AMD jumped into the fray and passed them up with Athlon, they had to jump quick to catch up.
I'd bet that they probably feel somewhat comfortable being a little bit faster than AMD. They will likely keep to smaller speed bumps and go back to the standard update path so long as they keep just a little bit ahead of AMD.
They probably could jump to 3 Ghz if they wanted to, but want to keep their profitable upgrade cycle going as much as possible. They'll stay just with or a little ahead of AMD, but not too far ahead.
"If someone's trying to make money trying to ruin my software, I have to take appropriate action," said Richard Eaton, president of WinWhatWhere.
And in related news, SeeWhatWhere, makers of binoculars favored by people who like to watch their neighbors through 'Windows', is attacking the venetian blind company for manufacturing a product specifically designed to block their product. "If someone's trying to make money trying to ruin my spytools, I have to take appropriate action," said Richard Eater, president of SeeWhatWhere.
Hollings and the MPAA are going on about how broadband is being hindered because large video content is not available online.
If the MPAA is suddenly flooded with lots of open media and home grown video with a somewhat open license, would it kill yet another one of their lame excuses?
I'd like to see something like this take off just to see how the open content would fly in an open environment. If open video content takes off like open source has, then the MPAA would not be able to restrict hardware as much as they would like to.
The MPAA would like to see home entertainment as read-only, not only to make it that much harder to copy, but also to eleminate competition from independant producers. Private individuals would demand to have high performance mixing/editing studios in their PCs and home entertainment systems to edit home movies and private projects. Congress would have a harder time shutting down that type of demand. Once the editing capabilities are available, the content protection becomes that much harder to maintain, and that much more obvious to those facing it. It would no longer be a "hacker" problem, but visible to a large percentage of the population.
With that thought in mind, maybe the idea is to have the consumers buy more than one PS3, and install them in a rack. Or maybe have in-box rack space to add in extra mother-boards for multiple PS3s. With a custom bus/interconnect they could have fairly high bandwidth for distribution.
Then you have distributed right in your own home. Just add more PS3s until your performance reaches tolerable levels, different for each game.
Sony sells many more PS3s, multiple to each customer. What a marketing plan!
So all these cards do high speed polygon drawing plus fancy stuff.
Has anyone tried to make a GPU for ray tracing? Good ray tracing scenes can be much better than the scenes drawn by polygon engines.
Yeah, it would mean a whole change of code for current software. D3D would have to change, or maybe have another API beside it, say DirectRay. But the rendering would really get better. Todays hardware should be able to handle the load. And they should scale well also. More GPU's equals more parallel rendering of pixels.
Imagine a truely ray traced virtual world. {shudder with anticipation}
Yoda and Obi Wan certainly demonstraited their range ok knowledge by completely missing Sidious comming at them like a freight train. They didn't know the Sith were active, maybe they missed other people as well.
How many times have you said "this is my only chance" when what you really mean is "The is the easiest/first solution I've found, and I haven't bothered to look for another"?
The Mule did change the original pattern set in motion by Harry Seldon. But he was eventually found and removed by the second foundation, sort of the "Jedi" of their universe". The Foundation continued to grow. The occurance of the Mule was an event, but it did not ultimately prevent the growth of the Foundation.
Asimov tied Psychohistory closer to detail than I would. I think more in terms of Chaos Theory. Chaotic fields may not be predictable in detail but can often be bounded and/or cyclic in long patterns. Weather is not predictable in detail beyond a few days, but it can be bounded (like tempertures are not likely to suddenly jump to 200 degrees, even if you can't predict exactly what it will be) and cyclic. History has cyclic patterns. Even if you can't predict exactly who or how or when it will happen, you see the pattern a lot. The growth of a powerful figure, the growth of empire, the corruption/weakening of that empire, eventually the fall (whether by revolution as in Russia, or by corruption like Rome, or defeat by opponents like Germany)
The Mule was taken down by a force he was attempting to invade. The Republic was taken down by corruption. Sidious was taken down by rebelion.
Sooooo, what will take the USA down? My bet, corruption.
... And this is exactly the mistake that I just described in so many words...
What makes you think that Luke/Leah are the only people capable of beating Sidious?
Just like Sidious could find another apprentice besides Vader, the rebels could find another hero to defeat him. The details of how would be different when viewed closely, but the eventual outcome would be basicly the same:
Greedy monster seeks power. Greedy mosnter userps power through various devious secret power plays. Greedy monster conquers known universe. Oppressed people dislike greedy monster. Opressed people form a rebelion. Rebelion eventually beats greedy monster.
There's room for hundreds of variations, but the overall outcome (whether in a holywood movie or a corporate hostile raid or foreign government or even the US government) is likely to follow that type of pattern. Try reading some history.
My only problem is your inference that if Anakin had been left behind or not become involved in later events, that the whole of the univers would be different. Do you think that Sidious would just stop and fail without Vader? Wouldn't he find another apprentice and go on about his business of conquering the galaxy?
Sure, it would be a major change for the particular people and events of this series of stories, but probably not a big shift in the overall history of the timeline.
I think of Asimov / Harry Seldon and Psychohistory. Small groups of people may affect small events, but the greater line of history has at most a minor perterbation and most likely no real change at all.
I always think of this when I here people talk about how one little thing would change the world. They usually think in terms of "all other things remaining the same, but this little change". It doesn't happen that way. If you change one thing, then everyone around it is also changed and adjusts to the new situation, and then persues it on new terms.
The quick form is:
1. All system services are processes in Mach, including any form of I/O and authentication, They may be switched in/out be the administrator at will.
2. Users may create their own services that are available to themselves or to others. EX. A user can write their own encrypted filesystem that works out of a single large file in their regular home directory. When they log in, they start up their EFS server, mount the filesystem to their own process and work in it. It is not visible to anyone but themselves, and is visible to their own programs as if it was just another directory. Sound fun?
3. Network services start at low/no authority and gain authority based on the ID/password provided by the requesting client. This really reduces the threat of network service attacks. No more root exploits in FTP or HTTP or other services. (In traditional services, the server has high authority and lowers it based on ID authentication)
Unless you want to make a living off your work. Open sourcers usually have some other income. writers, musicians and other artists may want to actually make money off their work. Releasing it "GPL" doesn't help that particular cause much.
What it might do is increase awareness and hopefully get good reviews and a fan base going. That might convence a publisher to give them better contract terms when they do sign, but not likely.
So I guess we should be thanking open-minded, understanding Chinese government for their enlightened views on humanity and science.
I'd bet that Chinese scientest have about the same attitude as US or other scientest do about science: Learn more, Understand better.
I'd also bet that the chinese people, scientest, and government each have different attitudes about the role of science (the same is true in the US and other places). I don't give the chinese government any credit other than being smart enough to not tromp all over the advancement of learning and understanding (something GWB and the "Morality Police" haven't been able to do).
If you want to argue what is best for society via science, that's one thing. If you simply want to look for any reason to demean religion (let's cut to the chase...Christanity) don't expect people to give you much credence.
Point. I do not demonize religion in general (though I did not clearify that), I demonize those individual people who use religion as an excuse to enforce their opinions on others, to supress people, to supress the truth, to glorify theirselves, and to gather personal power in the name of their religion (Plenty of history on that count in any religion).
The "religious right" that currently influences much of the politics in the US embodies much of those qualities, and as far as I can tell embodies very little of the teachings of their namesake savior, Jesus Christ.
Galileo suffered not because his opinions went against the teachings of the church, but because he challanged the authority of the church by claiming that his discoveries disproved a few items in the bible and therefore the bible as a whole must be considered suspect. It was a power struggle, not a religious one.
Darwin suffered because Rightious people would not accept a less superior place in the order of life as described by evolution.
The poor boy is now solidly stuck between his Oh So Rightous right wing religious supporters and the need to keep the United States up with the rest of the world in genetic research. It looks like science suffers at the hands of the Morality police.
Hasn't this happened before?... (Galileo, Darwin,...)
Re:Hmm, not sure about that one
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Just the license statement and license file wouldn't tell you much about where the original source came from. Preserving the original authors name would at least tell you where to go to narrow down the search.
It sounded like they removed as much telling information as they could get away with.
That appears to be the point that is still under debate.
It is not a DIRECT violation because the GPL says nothing specific about obfuscation. Nor does it say anything more specific about what "source code" is other than the quote that has already been thrown around here already. Whether it is an indirect/interpreted violation is still up for grabs.
At best, you might get a comment from FSF or RMS as to the nature of "source code", followed by a favorable ruling from a judge in court. Perhaps they could change the GPL Version X+1 to more clearly define "source". At worst, this is perfectly valid and nothing can be done about it.
But either way, it has NOT been decided yet.
Re:Hmm, not sure about that one
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
I was not refering to the whole BSD license, just the clause. There was a bit of a dispute a while back that the advertising clause was not compatible with the GPL, therefore code could not be mixed. The clause was eventually dropped from some BSD licenses.
If that specific clause was made compatible in the GPL, and allowed to exist in GPL code, then at least that one comment would still exist.
That's all I meant.
Re:Your lawyer is a fucking retard
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you start with the code, remove comments, change variable names and whitespace... it's still the same code, AND it's a derivative work, subject to the restrictions on the GPL.
From my reading, that is not the problem. It appeared that the company did release the code with source as GPL along with their product. They just obfuscated it before releasing it. That is not directly a GPL violation.
There have been cases before of obfuscated GPL code (Some video drivers in the Linux Kernel I believe) but those were original source from the manufacturer.
This article is about taking someone elses GPL code, obfusacting it, then re-releasing it with GPL intact.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why do I spend all my time watching PBS and the Discover channel? Becuase ABC, NBC and CBS are filled with ABSOLUTE CRAP that I would never watch if they paid me. I don't even know what channels they are on in my area. The major channels are so worried about getting EVERY VIEWER possible that they worry more about not putting on something that would loose audience than they do about attracting more audience. What you get is lukewarm, stale, rehashes of old stories cleaned up for "the family" audience. Anything with any Zing might offend someone. Can't do that. Anything educational might bore someone. Can't do that.
At least FOX has some interesting comedies. So they offend people. Some offend me, I just don't watch those. But many others are really funny and I watch them a lot.
PBS is sponsered, but that does not drive their programming. PBS makes their lineup, and the sponsers come and add support to particular shows by name.
Any company that is driven too much by the business side of TV and not by the content side is just going to put out drek. Those really interested in making good material (PBS!) do it and get by.
I got his book and read much of it. Basically he theorises that free hydrogen comes from slow oxidation of hydrocarbon molecules trapped underground. It's worth a read if you're interested in geology.
The Deep Hot Biosphere.
Their dynamic linking and EPF format has yet to be surpassed by any other OS that I've seen. It makes Windows DLL hell all the worse by comparison.
But the Single thread per user login got old after a while, and Phantoms didn't really make up for it.
A fellow at our college wrote a full screen editor that became quite good, including word processing capabilities.
Then you come along and notice "Hey, yesterday that guy poo-poo-ed Mozilla, but today this other guy said it was good. What gives?"
Well clearly what gives is that you think this is the same person when in fact it is different people saying different things.
SIDE NOTE: Complaining about how Slashdot people are inconsistant is just STOOPED. There is not one voice here, there are many. If you came to compalin about inconsistancy, then track one person and look for inconsistancy.
I'd bet that they probably feel somewhat comfortable being a little bit faster than AMD. They will likely keep to smaller speed bumps and go back to the standard update path so long as they keep just a little bit ahead of AMD.
They probably could jump to 3 Ghz if they wanted to, but want to keep their profitable upgrade cycle going as much as possible. They'll stay just with or a little ahead of AMD, but not too far ahead.
And in related news, SeeWhatWhere, makers of binoculars favored by people who like to watch their neighbors through 'Windows', is attacking the venetian blind company for manufacturing a product specifically designed to block their product. "If someone's trying to make money trying to ruin my spytools, I have to take appropriate action," said Richard Eater, president of SeeWhatWhere.
So their selection/identification has some basis on actual use.
If the MPAA is suddenly flooded with lots of open media and home grown video with a somewhat open license, would it kill yet another one of their lame excuses?
I'd like to see something like this take off just to see how the open content would fly in an open environment. If open video content takes off like open source has, then the MPAA would not be able to restrict hardware as much as they would like to.
The MPAA would like to see home entertainment as read-only, not only to make it that much harder to copy, but also to eleminate competition from independant producers. Private individuals would demand to have high performance mixing/editing studios in their PCs and home entertainment systems to edit home movies and private projects. Congress would have a harder time shutting down that type of demand. Once the editing capabilities are available, the content protection becomes that much harder to maintain, and that much more obvious to those facing it. It would no longer be a "hacker" problem, but visible to a large percentage of the population.
With that thought in mind, maybe the idea is to have the consumers buy more than one PS3, and install them in a rack. Or maybe have in-box rack space to add in extra mother-boards for multiple PS3s. With a custom bus/interconnect they could have fairly high bandwidth for distribution.
Then you have distributed right in your own home. Just add more PS3s until your performance reaches tolerable levels, different for each game. Sony sells many more PS3s, multiple to each customer. What a marketing plan!
Now hundreds of people are hiring lawyers and showing up in court on dates they were never expected for summons that were never issues.
There are reasons why papers must be served in person; so everyone on both sides knows it happened for real. Summons by regular mail is bad enough.
Has anyone tried to make a GPU for ray tracing? Good ray tracing scenes can be much better than the scenes drawn by polygon engines.
Yeah, it would mean a whole change of code for current software. D3D would have to change, or maybe have another API beside it, say DirectRay. But the rendering would really get better. Todays hardware should be able to handle the load. And they should scale well also. More GPU's equals more parallel rendering of pixels.
Imagine a truely ray traced virtual world. {shudder with anticipation}
How many times have you said "this is my only chance" when what you really mean is "The is the easiest/first solution I've found, and I haven't bothered to look for another"?
The Mule did change the original pattern set in motion by Harry Seldon. But he was eventually found and removed by the second foundation, sort of the "Jedi" of their universe". The Foundation continued to grow. The occurance of the Mule was an event, but it did not ultimately prevent the growth of the Foundation.
Asimov tied Psychohistory closer to detail than I would. I think more in terms of Chaos Theory. Chaotic fields may not be predictable in detail but can often be bounded and/or cyclic in long patterns. Weather is not predictable in detail beyond a few days, but it can be bounded (like tempertures are not likely to suddenly jump to 200 degrees, even if you can't predict exactly what it will be) and cyclic. History has cyclic patterns. Even if you can't predict exactly who or how or when it will happen, you see the pattern a lot. The growth of a powerful figure, the growth of empire, the corruption/weakening of that empire, eventually the fall (whether by revolution as in Russia, or by corruption like Rome, or defeat by opponents like Germany)
The Mule was taken down by a force he was attempting to invade. The Republic was taken down by corruption. Sidious was taken down by rebelion.
Sooooo, what will take the USA down? My bet, corruption.
What makes you think that Luke/Leah are the only people capable of beating Sidious?
Just like Sidious could find another apprentice besides Vader, the rebels could find another hero to defeat him. The details of how would be different when viewed closely, but the eventual outcome would be basicly the same:
Greedy monster seeks power. Greedy mosnter userps power through various devious secret power plays. Greedy monster conquers known universe. Oppressed people dislike greedy monster. Opressed people form a rebelion. Rebelion eventually beats greedy monster.
There's room for hundreds of variations, but the overall outcome (whether in a holywood movie or a corporate hostile raid or foreign government or even the US government) is likely to follow that type of pattern. Try reading some history.
My only problem is your inference that if Anakin had been left behind or not become involved in later events, that the whole of the univers would be different. Do you think that Sidious would just stop and fail without Vader? Wouldn't he find another apprentice and go on about his business of conquering the galaxy?
Sure, it would be a major change for the particular people and events of this series of stories, but probably not a big shift in the overall history of the timeline.
I think of Asimov / Harry Seldon and Psychohistory. Small groups of people may affect small events, but the greater line of history has at most a minor perterbation and most likely no real change at all.
I always think of this when I here people talk about how one little thing would change the world. They usually think in terms of "all other things remaining the same, but this little change". It doesn't happen that way. If you change one thing, then everyone around it is also changed and adjusts to the new situation, and then persues it on new terms.
<speculation>
RMS will interpret the GPL for Hurd as allowing only GPL apps and device drivers.
Even if you interpret drivers not as drivers but as apps, the statement still holds.
The quick form is:
1. All system services are processes in Mach, including any form of I/O and authentication, They may be switched in/out be the administrator at will.
2. Users may create their own services that are available to themselves or to others. EX. A user can write their own encrypted filesystem that works out of a single large file in their regular home directory. When they log in, they start up their EFS server, mount the filesystem to their own process and work in it. It is not visible to anyone but themselves, and is visible to their own programs as if it was just another directory. Sound fun?
3. Network services start at low/no authority and gain authority based on the ID/password provided by the requesting client. This really reduces the threat of network service attacks. No more root exploits in FTP or HTTP or other services. (In traditional services, the server has high authority and lowers it based on ID authentication)
If these aren't enough fun, read up to see more.
Do you like getting paid for your work?
I'd bet that Chinese scientest have about the same attitude as US or other scientest do about science: Learn more, Understand better.
I'd also bet that the chinese people, scientest, and government each have different attitudes about the role of science (the same is true in the US and other places). I don't give the chinese government any credit other than being smart enough to not tromp all over the advancement of learning and understanding (something GWB and the "Morality Police" haven't been able to do).
If you want to argue what is best for society via science, that's one thing. If you simply want to look for any reason to demean religion (let's cut to the chase...Christanity) don't expect people to give you much credence.
Point. I do not demonize religion in general (though I did not clearify that), I demonize those individual people who use religion as an excuse to enforce their opinions on others, to supress people, to supress the truth, to glorify theirselves, and to gather personal power in the name of their religion (Plenty of history on that count in any religion).
The "religious right" that currently influences much of the politics in the US embodies much of those qualities, and as far as I can tell embodies very little of the teachings of their namesake savior, Jesus Christ.
Galileo suffered not because his opinions went against the teachings of the church, but because he challanged the authority of the church by claiming that his discoveries disproved a few items in the bible and therefore the bible as a whole must be considered suspect. It was a power struggle, not a religious one.
Darwin suffered because Rightious people would not accept a less superior place in the order of life as described by evolution.
The entire CHINESE WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL TEAM all share ONE personality -- and have since BIRTH!!
Seems a little too relevant...
The poor boy is now solidly stuck between his Oh So Rightous right wing religious supporters and the need to keep the United States up with the rest of the world in genetic research. It looks like science suffers at the hands of the Morality police.
Hasn't this happened before?... (Galileo, Darwin, ...)
It sounded like they removed as much telling information as they could get away with.
It is not a DIRECT violation because the GPL says nothing specific about obfuscation. Nor does it say anything more specific about what "source code" is other than the quote that has already been thrown around here already. Whether it is an indirect/interpreted violation is still up for grabs.
At best, you might get a comment from FSF or RMS as to the nature of "source code", followed by a favorable ruling from a judge in court. Perhaps they could change the GPL Version X+1 to more clearly define "source". At worst, this is perfectly valid and nothing can be done about it.
But either way, it has NOT been decided yet.
If that specific clause was made compatible in the GPL, and allowed to exist in GPL code, then at least that one comment would still exist.
That's all I meant.
From my reading, that is not the problem. It appeared that the company did release the code with source as GPL along with their product. They just obfuscated it before releasing it. That is not directly a GPL violation.
There have been cases before of obfuscated GPL code (Some video drivers in the Linux Kernel I believe) but those were original source from the manufacturer.
This article is about taking someone elses GPL code, obfusacting it, then re-releasing it with GPL intact.