But when you're taking it as a full time job? I mean, this puts him below the poverty limit, at least in the U.S. I don't see a whole lot of incentive in taking a full-time job that will still leave me eligible for welfare.
I don't know what the cost of living's like in his area, but here a single person could live on that much quite happily. It would be trickier if you had to support a family; but I presume that's not his situation.
/dev/urandom is not a pseudo-random generator, because it uses truly random data which accumulates across the kernel over time. Well, it does use a pseudo-random generator when there aren't enough truly random bits lying around, so if you're/really/ paranoid then you should use/dev/random, which doesn't. Nevertheless, it is much, much better than using an entirely deterministic rand() function.
Why 20 or 30 times? Why random data? Why not just write all zeros?
If you overwrite your data with zeros, then the original magnetic signal is still there, but weaker. If you overwrite a signal with a sufficiently strong random signal then you get a random signal. The 20 or 30 times is to ensure that the amplitude of the random signal is much greater than the amplitude of the data (if I understand correctly).
Sounds like a simple free market question to me. Is it worth the money to have everybody and their sisters be able to listen to your broadcast without installing additional software?
I'm not sure why you associate this with free markets. MP3 has this advantage purely because it is bigger than equally good alternatives (like Ogg Vorbis). The reason this works as an advantage is because of the market-distorting effects of the patent system.
The author seems to have heard from somewhere that UCS-2 can only encode 65536 characters, and blithely extended that statement to Unicode/ISO-10646 as a whole. That Unicode has a big enough codespace for everyone should be manifest from the following fact: the creators of almost every other character standard now describe their standards by saying how they map into Unicode.
Ah well. Shame things this ignorant get any credence. Thanks for correcting it.
To reject IP as a legal fiction only leads us back to a terrifying fact that all property is, in essence, a lie. But it is a useful lie, which is why we Civilized People argue for it so strongly.
Right; but the particulars of these two fictions (physical property and intellectual property) are quite different (difference in duplication costs and everything else that implies), and so a justification of one doesn't, per se, justify the other. I might say that a life-plus-70 copyright term for software strongly encourages monopolisation.
Besides, the point here is not that the DCMA protects intellectual property. The point is that it can be used to prevent people from doing things which they were allowed to do in the previously existing Intellectual Property framework. Like writing software to play DVDs, or fast-forwarding through the trailers, or watching a DVD bought in a different part of the world, that has a built-in artificial incompatibility with local players. Or writing a report about the lack of security in an encryption system.
Re:Cross-platform thanks to Apple...
on
GIMP And OS X
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· Score: 1
Actually, WinNT/2000 is (theoretically) POSIX compliant.
Yes, but (at least with NT, and I presume with W2K too) your program has to choose *either* the posix subsystem *or* the Win32 API, so it's no good for porting something like GIMP.
Also, Windows has the cygwin tools to ease porting.
I agree that could make life a lot easier.
Meanwhile, OS 9 not only has a completely different API but also adifferent processor architecture and no gcc.
The processor shouldn't be a problem - GIMP runs on PPC Linux doesn't it?
That should read "...that one can do in one's head." I could no soonervdo that in my head than I could give birth.
I take it you're a man, then? OTOH if it took you nine months and excruciating pain to calculate the day of the week, I guess your point would still be valid.
Flatland is social sattire
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Flatterland
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· Score: 3
For example, colours are banned in Flatland. Why?
Some private individual [...] having casually discovered the constituents of the simpler colours and a rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun decorating first his house, then his slaves, then his Father, his Sons, and Grandsons, lastly himself. The convenience as well as the beauty of the results commended themselves to all. [...] The fashion spread like wildfire. within two generations no one in all Flatland was colourless except the Women and the Priests. The Art of Sight Recognition [which is difficult in a monochrome 2D world] was no longer practised [...] Year by year the Soldiers and Artisans began more vehemently to assert -- and with increasing truth -- that there was no great difference between them and the very highest class of Polygons, now that they were [...] enabled to grapple with all the difficulties and solve all the problems of life, by the simple process of Colour Recognition. [...] Soon, they began to insist that the Law should follow in the same path, and
[...] all individuals and all classes should be recognized as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights.
[...] The Circles hastily convened an extraordinary Assembly of the States; [...] the Chief Circle Pantocyclus arose to find himself hissed and hooted by a hundred and twenty thousand Isosceles. But he secured silence by declaring that henceforth the Circles would enter on a policy of Concession; yielding to the wishes of the majority, they would accept the Colour Bill. The uproar being at once converted to applause, he invited Chromatistes, the leader of the Sedition, into the centre of the hall. [...] Then followed a speech, a masterpiece of rhetoric, which occupied nearly a dayin the delivery, and to which no summary can do justice.
[...]With a grave appearance of impartiality he declared that [...] it was desirable that they should take one last view of the perimeter of the whole subject, its defects as well as its advantages. [...] Turning now to the Workmen he asserted that their interests must not be neglected. [...] Many of them, he said, were on the point of being admitted to the class of the Regular Triangles; others anticipated for their children a distinction they could not hope for themselves. [...] With the universal adoption of Colour, all distinctions would cease; [...] the Workman would in a few generations be degraded to the level of the Military, or even the Convict Class; political power would be in the hands of the greatest number, that is to say the Criminal Classes. [...] "Sooner than this," he cried, "Come death."
At these words, the Regular Classes [attacked supporters of the revolution]. The Artisans, imitating the example of their betters, also opened their ranks. [...] The battle, or rather carnage, was of short duration. [...] the rabble of the Isosceles did the rest of the business for themselves. Surprised, leader-less, attacked, [they] raised the cry of "treachery". This sealed their fate. Every Isosceles now saw and felt a foe in every other. In half an hour not one of that vast multitude was living; and the fragments of seven score thousand of the Criminal Class slain by one another's angles attested the triumph of Order.
The Circles delayed not to push their victory to the uttermost. The Working Men they spared but decimated. [...] every town, village, and hamlet was systematically purged of that excess of the lower orders. [...] Henceforth the use of Colour was abolished, and its possession prohibited. Even the utterance of any word denoting Colour, except by the Circles or by qualified scientific teachers, was punished by a severe penalty. Only at our University in some of the very highest and most esoteric classes it is understood that the sparing use of Colour is still sanctioned for the purpose of illustrating some of the deeper problems of mathematics. [...] Elsewhere in Flatland, Colour is now non-existent. The art of making it is known to only one living person, the Chief Circle for the time being; and by him it is handed down on his death-bed to none but his Successor. [...] So great is the terror with which even now our Aristocracy looks back to the far-distant days of the agitation for the Universal
Colour Bill.
The whole of the book is social commentary such as this. That's what makes its 40000 words interesting to read, more so than any mathematical insight it might lend. Of course, Stewart's book is aiming at different goals from this; and Stewart is an excellent expositor of Mathematics. But the original is well worth reading even if you aren't at all interested in geometry. Take a look at it for free, thanks to Project Gutenberg.
Heh.. the Blair government's share of the vote in the last election was almost as high as Microsoft's share of the desktop OS market.
They actually only got 43% of the vote, less than the Conservatives got in 1992. Of course, due to our First Past The Post voting system, that translated into about 3/4 of the parliamentary seats.
I personally didn't expect [RMS] to lay into Ransom Love. "Caldera's not a free software company at all. They are just a parasite," Stallman claimed
Well, do you think that Caldera actually does contribute much to the free software community? I would say they contribute less than CheapBytes, for example - the most you can say for Caldera is that they bundle free software in the package which they sell. You may not think that's a bad thing, of course. But compare them to Red Hat or SuSE who freely license a lot of their code. Caldera don't really contribute.
The notion that the GPL model will do anything is laughable, considering how many companies are making money on GPL software
Consider the huge number of businesses that use Samba. Now consider the significant number of those who have contributed something towards Samba development (e.g. a bug report or a bugfix). All those businesses are helping themselves by helping to develop Samba. This applies to any other GPLed package, too.
Without intellectual property, and associated copywright laws, where is the incentive for the thinkers of this world to produce any more of the intangible goods? [...] Music [...] SOFTWARE.
Hmmm, I hope I'm not replying to a troll, but here goes.
Music: Are you saying that composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart et al. would never have written anything without copyright existing? Does anyone seriously believe that it's possible to stop a true musician (classical or popular) from composing or performing?
Software: (1) the amount of free software that gets written must show you that intellectual property is not necessary to make this happen. I think it's been shown that financial incentives to write software can still exist in a world without copyright restrictions and patents.
HUH?!? You can resell your software... as long as you haven't kept any illegal copies lying around
If you look at the license on a recent copy of Windows (or Office?), you'll find that this is false. You can't resell the software. You can't even install it on a new computer if you upgrade!
One last thing... the invisible hand is guiding the markets in the direction that is best for the consumer...
This would be true in a completely free market. But today's software market is not very free; e.g. there's a desktop OS monopoly. I think that the excessive strength of today's copyright and patent rules is one thing which is distorting the software market, and making that market less able to evolve in a direction which is good for consumers.
One of the more annoying things about americans is how they think Europe is one place with one culture. Europe is 50 very different countries with very different cultures and political systems. There is pretty much nothing you can say that is true for all of them.
Ok, but "Europe" is commonly used to mean "The EU" (much as "America" usually means "The USA"). Member countries of the EU do have many things in common: a common bill of rights (and hence no death penalty), common competition law, converging regulatory frameworks for business, etc.. Yes there are differences, but I don't think it's unreasonable to refer to the EU in general.
Let us not forget that Hormel was also VERY upset with Muppet Treasure Island (I believe) for using their name for the head of the tribe of wild boars in the movie...
That's very funny. "We see you have boom-boom sticks. Bye bye!"
The web controls that you can program to using the upcoming ASP.net produce HTML 3.2-compliant code
Isn't the point of this technology that it "scales with the browser", i.e. presents a more sophisticated interface to an IE user than to a Netscape / Konqueror / Opera user (or to a user of a genuinely less advanced browser like Netscape 3.2)?
I'm wondering if Mozilla matters anymore. On the Linux side we already have alternatives in Konquerer and Opera. On Windows and MAC, IE does a good job.
ATM, it is an utter pain trying to design an interactive, HTML-based web site (even something comparatively simple like an online shop). It's incredibly labour-intensive. MS is gonna start pushing proprietory technology which will do this more easily. Oh, but your users have to be using Microsoft technology. Then you can start to kiss goodbye to things like Apache's market share.
There are a few things out there that may yet stop this happening. Java is one of them; XUL could potentially be another. Opera and Konqueror are "just trying to be browsers". That's fine for today, but if you're anxious about tomorrow then hope Mozilla takes off.
Now, who in his right mind can be interested in a biased response? Only neutral reviews are worth reading.
I disagree with this: firstly I don't think that it is logically possible to have a neutral review, because any review is an expression of an opinion; and secondly I think it is interesting to hear this author's rebuttal of criticism (even though I think he is mistaken in some places).
this guy needs his speech encoded in OGG cause he hates MP3s... how does he expect normal people to relate to him on any level if he wants them to discard MP3s as well?
How many people would actually download a 2.5 hour speech? Probably hardly any. Now how many people who never heard of ogg before will do so because of RMS's position about this speech? Again, hardly any - but probably at least as many as the previous question.
BTW you do know the problem with Fraunhofer's mp3 patents, don't you? People object to the format for a good reason - though different people take it to different lengths.
Second, how does bike usage compare in terms of efficiency to sailboats?
On a smooth surface, going uphill, a bike can utilise >95% of the energy you put in through the pedals. A boat is comparatively inefficient because it uses larg amounts of wind - but since there's plenty of wind, that's not a problem.
I am not quite knowledgable enough to know what to make of this comment: [...] "We're way ahead of [GNOME]". When GTK 2.0 is released sometime this year, they'll reach where we were, at version 1.4. QT 3 is going to come out later this year and that will take us even further.
I would read it as a comment which is meaningless unless you're given more details. (Although it's quite possible that he did give more details but they got edited out).
There's good reasons to point at certain bits of each project and say they're more advanced than the other project. I don't think your question can be answered more precisely in a way which is fair, without looking carefully at the technical details. I'd rather not get into the kind of flamewars that tend to emerge when people answer such questions here:-)
The GPL isn't about freedom. It's about forced openness, right in the FSF's own words.
Freedom to live in peace => forced non-violence.
Freedom to use, modify and distribute software => forced non-closedness.
The only way you can ever guarantee some freedoms is by restricting other, hopefully more unreasonable, freedoms.
Fountain is spraying FUD about GTK / QT i18n
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The Superior Motif?
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Fountain claims that you can't write GTK apps which support multibyte character sets like Japanese needs. Obviously he's never used GNOME in Japanese or Chinese. When Pango is stable, his comments will no longer be merely wrong, they will be laughable.
The thing about classical music is that anyone can do it. Find a good amateur orchestra which is willing to let people copy their Mozart's 41st Symphony performance, out of the goodness of their hearts or for publicity reasons, and that recording is genuinely worth having. Unlike with an amateur rock band, people will listen to the recording because it's Mozart and 99% of people can't tell a good orchestra from an amazing one.
Slashdot Mirror
The author seems to have heard from somewhere that UCS-2 can only encode 65536 characters, and blithely extended that statement to Unicode/ISO-10646 as a whole. That Unicode has a big enough codespace for everyone should be manifest from the following fact: the creators of almost every other character standard now describe their standards by saying how they map into Unicode.
Ah well. Shame things this ignorant get any credence. Thanks for correcting it.
Right; but the particulars of these two fictions (physical property and intellectual property) are quite different (difference in duplication costs and everything else that implies), and so a justification of one doesn't, per se, justify the other. I might say that a life-plus-70 copyright term for software strongly encourages monopolisation.
Besides, the point here is not that the DCMA protects intellectual property. The point is that it can be used to prevent people from doing things which they were allowed to do in the previously existing Intellectual Property framework. Like writing software to play DVDs, or fast-forwarding through the trailers, or watching a DVD bought in a different part of the world, that has a built-in artificial incompatibility with local players. Or writing a report about the lack of security in an encryption system.
Hmmm, I hope I'm not replying to a troll, but here goes.
Music: Are you saying that composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart et al. would never have written anything without copyright existing? Does anyone seriously believe that it's possible to stop a true musician (classical or popular) from composing or performing?
Software: (1) the amount of free software that gets written must show you that intellectual property is not necessary to make this happen. I think it's been shown that financial incentives to write software can still exist in a world without copyright restrictions and patents.
If you look at the license on a recent copy of Windows (or Office?), you'll find that this is false. You can't resell the software. You can't even install it on a new computer if you upgrade! This would be true in a completely free market. But today's software market is not very free; e.g. there's a desktop OS monopoly. I think that the excessive strength of today's copyright and patent rules is one thing which is distorting the software market, and making that market less able to evolve in a direction which is good for consumers.Ok, but "Europe" is commonly used to mean "The EU" (much as "America" usually means "The USA"). Member countries of the EU do have many things in common: a common bill of rights (and hence no death penalty), common competition law, converging regulatory frameworks for business, etc.. Yes there are differences, but I don't think it's unreasonable to refer to the EU in general.
ATM, it is an utter pain trying to design an interactive, HTML-based web site (even something comparatively simple like an online shop). It's incredibly labour-intensive. MS is gonna start pushing proprietory technology which will do this more easily. Oh, but your users have to be using Microsoft technology. Then you can start to kiss goodbye to things like Apache's market share.
There are a few things out there that may yet stop this happening. Java is one of them; XUL could potentially be another. Opera and Konqueror are "just trying to be browsers". That's fine for today, but if you're anxious about tomorrow then hope Mozilla takes off.
Just my 2p.
How many people would actually download a 2.5 hour speech? Probably hardly any. Now how many people who never heard of ogg before will do so because of RMS's position about this speech? Again, hardly any - but probably at least as many as the previous question.
BTW you do know the problem with Fraunhofer's mp3 patents, don't you? People object to the format for a good reason - though different people take it to different lengths.
I would read it as a comment which is meaningless unless you're given more details. (Although it's quite possible that he did give more details but they got edited out).
There's good reasons to point at certain bits of each project and say they're more advanced than the other project. I don't think your question can be answered more precisely in a way which is fair, without looking carefully at the technical details. I'd rather not get into the kind of flamewars that tend to emerge when people answer such questions here :-)
Freedom to live in peace => forced non-violence.
Freedom to use, modify and distribute software => forced non-closedness.
The only way you can ever guarantee some freedoms is by restricting other, hopefully more unreasonable, freedoms.Fountain claims that you can't write GTK apps which support multibyte character sets like Japanese needs. Obviously he's never used GNOME in Japanese or Chinese. When Pango is stable, his comments will no longer be merely wrong, they will be laughable.