Oh yes ! And air travel should be totally unregulated ! And shipping ! And telephone lines, they also cross borders ! And electrical power grids !
While the ruling does make not very much sense at all from a technical point of view apparently the technical people involved in this case where not able to explain convincingly to the judge why this is a bad idea. But to cry foul and trying to declare the Internet a law-free zone as a reaction is not very useful either.
You react in the same way doctors used to think some decades ago (at least over here in Germany, and yes, I am an MD) that laypeople were too stupid and uninformed to make any medical decisions of their own, even if it was their body. Thank god we have overcome this for the most part and have come to think it to be the fault of the doctor if he/she is not able to explain things sufficiently. I know there are really stupid people who will never get things, but most people are able and willing to learn and understand new things given you really try to explain them in laymans terms in not in technobabble and geekspeech.
Don't underestimate MS's ability to do 180 degree turns in the whim of an eye. On the 3rd WWW conference in spring of '95 MS presented its vision for the back-then new MSN which was initially thought to counter and totally obsolete the then still young WWW. However, it got clear very soon that this never would be the case and MS engaged in a manic race to catch up on the Internet and Web field. They only needed 3-4 years to destroy Netscape (ok, Netscape's own incompetence helped them greatly) and establish IE and other Internet-related products firmly.
So never underestimate MS, they are capable of unbelievable things if feeling threatened, and they have a lot of money in their pockets.
You don't think that they had that idea by themselves if they though it made sense for them ? "Ohhhhhhhh ! User JohnDoe on Slashdot suggests we sue just all producers of third-party clients ! Why didn't we think of this ourselves ?"
I think you overestimate the relevancy of Slashdot to the world outside of Slashdot.
Yes, GNU was around long before Linux, no question, but the motivation for Linus to write Linux was not to topple evil closed source and promote freedom but to do a pet project to make most use of his new hardware.
People like to talk about technology but forget why the whole thing started.... which was mainly because Linus Thorvalds wanted to make proper use of his new and shiny 386 and none of the systems available to him back then enabled him to do this. The whole freedom shebang (while not necessarily bad) got added later on.
While basically an interesting idea the main problem with that type of outages is that usually noone can say with certainty how long they will last ("Hey guys ! When will the net finally back up again ?" "Any moment now, boss !" "Yeah, you said so three hours ago."). So it would be hard to really give useful information.
Also you would generate a lot of additional traffic due to the error message packages.
Some years ago (IIRC something around '96-'98) SuSE regularly produced a multi-CD set with several popular distributions (SuSE certainly, Redhat, and perhaps Slackware and something else, too long ago to remember). Was also not too expensive, something around 25 EUR for six or seven CDs. Back then it came quite handy as downloading a whole distro via dialup was not really fun.
Everytime something comes up about technology in developing countries someone or other posts something like this.
Guess what ? The Western world and lots of Asian countries didn't get those necessities by some nice person donating them a 100 gallon container of fresh water, some cheap pills and some old school books. They got there by educating their people to a point where they become able to take their fate into their own hands. To do this, you need more than just basic schooling, you need something a project like this might provide.
For music it doesn't make much sense indeed. But consider the following: You are reading a respected magazine or newspaper where you read an interview with (so the article says) world-famous researcher Prof. Dr. Smithson who says that he was able to create a breakthrough in the treatment of , say, migraine. As you are suffering from migraine, you certainly are interested. But you will judge the content of the article differently if it is editorial content of the magazine and therefore perhaps true or if it is something saying "Advertisement", which means that Smithson guy might be a quack and the new medicine nothing but a ripoff.
Therefore it really makes sense to have to mark advertisements that are not clearly distinguishable from content as such.
Oh yeah, I see it right before me. It will work right like with the Internet, all those numerous prospering small local Mom and Pop ISPs, no large corporations to be seen. Right ?
Maybe because if you really paranoic about filters you double-check the spam before deleting ? (yes, it really sucks, like sifting through feces, but the only way to be sure). For me Thunderbird's spam filter has drastically improved with 0.6, with 0.5 it was just a joke, especially compared to SpamBayes. But SpamBayes is very slow for me in comparison (have running the Outlook plugin at work) while Thunderbird's filter is blazingly fast. What really is missing from T-Bird IMO is a separate folder for "Uncertain" spam as SpamBayes offers it. I never got a real false positive in Spam Bayes spam folder in about 9 months of heave usage, everything which is uncertain ends up in the uncertain folder which is much easier to check .
I love Firefox and Thunderbird. But everytime I install an extension I really wonder: Why does noone bother to sign their extensions ? As the browser complains that the extension is not signed a mechanism to do that must be there.
I'm sorry, but if you use WiFi for mission critical stuff it's your own fault. Perhaps if you are on a large construction site or something like that were you cannot lay cables, but besides that just use good old reliable cabling.
And they were demoing it on the great new 6 Ghz four-core Athlon 128 with the new WD 1 TB disk drive. Yeah right. And I just saw Tux gliding past my window.
Which incidentially is an illegal practise in Germany as proven by several higher court decisions. So what might be an usual business strategy in your country might be illegal in another.
Indeed my definition was incomplete in the respect that it focused on reproduction. Others are (from above link):
1. Shows evidence of growth and replication; 2. Shows evidence of purposeful energy transfer; 3. Responds to stimuli; 4. Acts in such a way as to ensure self-preservation; 5. Is significantly different from the surrounding environment.
The difference is that the tapeworm, while needing a certain environment for breeding (which applies to almost all organisms in one way or the other), can do the act of reproduction with everything it has "on-board".
Viridae basically have nothing but some DNA/RNA and some means of injecting it in a host (bacterium, cell...) as well as a capsid where the whole shebang is packaged into. Nothing to do the reproduction itself, no means to build new viridae, for which it borrows the respective funtional units of the host, more often than not killing it in the process.
Re:Guess it depends on the definition of "life"
on
Synthetic Life In The Lab
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IIRC the definition of life depends on an organism being able to reproduce in some way without having to depend on another species. By that definition viruses are not alive, as they depend on some kind of host.
We are doing biotech stuff, but our requirements for the business side of things should be quite vanilla: We are using an accounting and ERP system quite popular in Germany. Nothing special, but it does the job. Such systems are not really retail but have to be customized to a certain extent for your business needs. However, most products for this market segment are making this increasingly easy. Just tell the program your companies essential parameters like in which way you want your account scheme to be, tax numbers and the like, and you are ready to go. So one could say it's "semi-off-the-self" (as opposed to completely off-the-shelf products for small businesses that are completely ready to go but usually cannot be customized). Such systems start from 10000,- EUR, open end, plus consulting if needed.
Such a system has to support both keeping of inventories, doing invoices, delivery notes etc. and all the accounting vodoo the financial guys use (doing the sales tax stuff, reporting, dunning etc.). It has to support the respective national tax rules and usually should be recognized by the tax authorities as ok (don't know if it is a formal certification one has to do or how they do this). If you don't have the latter you can expect lots of fun with tax auditors camping in your office. Then it has to has some APIs for customizing the product and to interface external systems to it and to automate the billing and delivery processes as we have lots of orders with low volume.
There are dozens of comparable systems available on Windows, but none that are currently known to me for Linux.
The lab stuff is even worse: Here we rely on the software produced by the vendors of the individual measurement and synthesis machines which usually (one could say today almost exclusively) come for Windows. Until the late 90s at least one big vendor (ABI) used to use Macs to control their machines but has switched to Windows in the meantime. The same for most other vendors who used to supply Solaris versions of their stuff (e.g. Shimadsu and Bruker mass spectroscopy machines) but are mostly phasing them out now for Win32. So even if we do our own lab management system to keep everything together there is no much choice but windows.
Open Source has not to be free as in beer. I would already be glad if there would be any reasonable business apps available for small-to-medium businesses on Linux, commercial or otherwise. Currently you either can get very limited systems for personal finances or small businesses, or very large ones like SAP which are fine if you are Bank of America, but not for a small company. The midrange sector currently is more or less missing for Linux.
I even think that for-pay Open Source might be a great advantage for smaller companies entering the field as it would reduce the fears of potential customers that this new and small company will be gone tomorrow and with them all support for their software and all means to adapt the software and fix it.
Then show me the nice working and usable business apps I can use under Linux (WINE hacks need not apply). Or even better, create me an Open Source one.
There are barely any ? Welcome to the real world ! Oh, I should create my own Open Source one ? Great idea ! I have nothing else do the whole day anyway *rolls eyes*
Slashdot Mirror
Hello ? We are talking about phones here, not email spam. Got in the wrong topic ?
Given that customers can still place calls to these countries by using operator assistence I don't think this is too much of a problem.
Oh yes ! And air travel should be totally unregulated ! And shipping ! And telephone lines, they also cross borders ! And electrical power grids !
While the ruling does make not very much sense at all from a technical point of view apparently the technical people involved in this case where not able to explain convincingly to the judge why this is a bad idea. But to cry foul and trying to declare the Internet a law-free zone as a reaction is not very useful either.
You react in the same way doctors used to think some decades ago (at least over here in Germany, and yes, I am an MD) that laypeople were too stupid and uninformed to make any medical decisions of their own, even if it was their body. Thank god we have overcome this for the most part and have come to think it to be the fault of the doctor if he/she is not able to explain things sufficiently. I know there are really stupid people who will never get things, but most people are able and willing to learn and understand new things given you really try to explain them in laymans terms in not in technobabble and geekspeech.
Don't underestimate MS's ability to do 180 degree turns in the whim of an eye. On the 3rd WWW conference in spring of '95 MS presented its vision for the back-then new MSN which was initially thought to counter and totally obsolete the then still young WWW. However, it got clear very soon that this never would be the case and MS engaged in a manic race to catch up on the Internet and Web field. They only needed 3-4 years to destroy Netscape (ok, Netscape's own incompetence helped them greatly) and establish IE and other Internet-related products firmly.
So never underestimate MS, they are capable of unbelievable things if feeling threatened, and they have a lot of money in their pockets.
You don't think that they had that idea by themselves if they though it made sense for them ? "Ohhhhhhhh ! User JohnDoe on Slashdot suggests we sue just all producers of third-party clients ! Why didn't we think of this ourselves ?"
I think you overestimate the relevancy of Slashdot to the world outside of Slashdot.
Yes, GNU was around long before Linux, no question, but the motivation for Linus to write Linux was not to topple evil closed source and promote freedom but to do a pet project to make most use of his new hardware.
People like to talk about technology but forget why the whole thing started. ... which was mainly because Linus Thorvalds wanted to make proper use of his new and shiny 386 and none of the systems available to him back then enabled him to do this. The whole freedom shebang (while not necessarily bad) got added later on.
While basically an interesting idea the main problem with that type of outages is that usually noone can say with certainty how long they will last ("Hey guys ! When will the net finally back up again ?" "Any moment now, boss !" "Yeah, you said so three hours ago."). So it would be hard to really give useful information.
Also you would generate a lot of additional traffic due to the error message packages.
Some years ago (IIRC something around '96-'98) SuSE regularly produced a multi-CD set with several popular distributions (SuSE certainly, Redhat, and perhaps Slackware and something else, too long ago to remember). Was also not too expensive, something around 25 EUR for six or seven CDs. Back then it came quite handy as downloading a whole distro via dialup was not really fun.
Everytime something comes up about technology in developing countries someone or other posts something like this.
Guess what ? The Western world and lots of Asian countries didn't get those necessities by some nice person donating them a 100 gallon container of fresh water, some cheap pills and some old school books. They got there by educating their people to a point where they become able to take their fate into their own hands. To do this, you need more than just basic schooling, you need something a project like this might provide.
For music it doesn't make much sense indeed. But consider the following: You are reading a respected magazine or newspaper where you read an interview with (so the article says) world-famous researcher Prof. Dr. Smithson who says that he was able to create a breakthrough in the treatment of , say, migraine. As you are suffering from migraine, you certainly are interested. But you will judge the content of the article differently if it is editorial content of the magazine and therefore perhaps true or if it is something saying "Advertisement", which means that Smithson guy might be a quack and the new medicine nothing but a ripoff.
Therefore it really makes sense to have to mark advertisements that are not clearly distinguishable from content as such.
Oh yeah, I see it right before me. It will work right like with the Internet, all those numerous prospering small local Mom and Pop ISPs, no large corporations to be seen. Right ?
Maybe because if you really paranoic about filters you double-check the spam before deleting ? (yes, it really sucks, like sifting through feces, but the only way to be sure). For me Thunderbird's spam filter has drastically improved with 0.6, with 0.5 it was just a joke, especially compared to SpamBayes. But SpamBayes is very slow for me in comparison (have running the Outlook plugin at work) while Thunderbird's filter is blazingly fast. What really is missing from T-Bird IMO is a separate folder for "Uncertain" spam as SpamBayes offers it. I never got a real false positive in Spam Bayes spam folder in about 9 months of heave usage, everything which is uncertain ends up in the uncertain folder which is much easier to check .
I love Firefox and Thunderbird. But everytime I install an extension I really wonder: Why does noone bother to sign their extensions ? As the browser complains that the extension is not signed a mechanism to do that must be there.
I'm sorry, but if you use WiFi for mission critical stuff it's your own fault. Perhaps if you are on a large construction site or something like that were you cannot lay cables, but besides that just use good old reliable cabling.
And they were demoing it on the great new 6 Ghz four-core Athlon 128 with the new WD 1 TB disk drive. Yeah right. And I just saw Tux gliding past my window.
While Safari used to be painfully slow on my G4/450 with OS X 10.3, Firebird/-fox/-whatsoever was fine, so I used that.
Which incidentially is an illegal practise in Germany as proven by several higher court decisions. So what might be an usual business strategy in your country might be illegal in another.
I know replying to oneself is lame, but I found a nice URL with a very comprehensive definition of what currently is considered as life:
c ience/life.html
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/finalpresentation/s
Indeed my definition was incomplete in the respect that it focused on reproduction. Others are (from above link):
1. Shows evidence of growth and replication;
2. Shows evidence of purposeful energy transfer;
3. Responds to stimuli;
4. Acts in such a way as to ensure self-preservation;
5. Is significantly different from the surrounding environment.
More details at the link.
The difference is that the tapeworm, while needing a certain environment for breeding (which applies to almost all organisms in one way or the other), can do the act of reproduction with everything it has "on-board".
...) as well as a capsid where the whole shebang is packaged into. Nothing to do the reproduction itself, no means to build new viridae, for which it borrows the respective funtional units of the host, more often than not killing it in the process.
Viridae basically have nothing but some DNA/RNA and some means of injecting it in a host (bacterium, cell
IIRC the definition of life depends on an organism being able to reproduce in some way without having to depend on another species. By that definition viruses are not alive, as they depend on some kind of host.
Ok, so some details:
We are doing biotech stuff, but our requirements for the business side of things should be quite vanilla: We are using an accounting and ERP system quite popular in Germany. Nothing special, but it does the job. Such systems are not really retail but have to be customized to a certain extent for your business needs. However, most products for this market segment are making this increasingly easy. Just tell the program your companies essential parameters like in which way you want your account scheme to be, tax numbers and the like, and you are ready to go. So one could say it's "semi-off-the-self" (as opposed to completely off-the-shelf products for small businesses that are completely ready to go but usually cannot be customized). Such systems start from 10000,- EUR, open end, plus consulting if needed.
Such a system has to support both keeping of inventories, doing invoices, delivery notes etc. and all the accounting vodoo the financial guys use (doing the sales tax stuff, reporting, dunning etc.). It has to support the respective national tax rules and usually should be recognized by the tax authorities as ok (don't know if it is a formal certification one has to do or how they do this). If you don't have the latter you can expect lots of fun with tax auditors camping in your office. Then it has to has some APIs for customizing the product and to interface external systems to it and to automate the billing and delivery processes as we have lots of orders with low volume.
There are dozens of comparable systems available on Windows, but none that are currently known to me for Linux.
The lab stuff is even worse: Here we rely on the software produced by the vendors of the individual measurement and synthesis machines which usually (one could say today almost exclusively) come for Windows. Until the late 90s at least one big vendor (ABI) used to use Macs to control their machines but has switched to Windows in the meantime. The same for most other vendors who used to supply Solaris versions of their stuff (e.g. Shimadsu and Bruker mass spectroscopy machines) but are mostly phasing them out now for Win32. So even if we do our own lab management system to keep everything together there is no much choice but windows.
Open Source has not to be free as in beer. I would already be glad if there would be any reasonable business apps available for small-to-medium businesses on Linux, commercial or otherwise. Currently you either can get very limited systems for personal finances or small businesses, or very large ones like SAP which are fine if you are Bank of America, but not for a small company. The midrange sector currently is more or less missing for Linux.
I even think that for-pay Open Source might be a great advantage for smaller companies entering the field as it would reduce the fears of potential customers that this new and small company will be gone tomorrow and with them all support for their software and all means to adapt the software and fix it.
Doesn't necessarily have to be free as in beer. But should be worth its money, not just some half-done wreck of a project somewhere on Sourceforge.
Then show me the nice working and usable business apps I can use under Linux (WINE hacks need not apply). Or even better, create me an Open Source one.
There are barely any ? Welcome to the real world ! Oh, I should create my own Open Source one ? Great idea ! I have nothing else do the whole day anyway *rolls eyes*