quoth pclminion: "I think it's a juvenile attitude. 'I willfully don't profit off my stuff so nobody else should either.'"
That is completely wrong. The GPL claims profits, it does not give them away. It is more like "I demand repayment for giving you my code. My price is that if you make and distribute modifications to my code that you give those to me for free."
The GPL is NOT a selfless license. The person assigning the GPL often intends to profit from his choice. The form of payment which he demands is labor: the labor of every programmer that touches and redistributes the code thereafter.
Didn't Spirit and Opportunity run a Wind River RTOS? So now that a NASA supplier offers Linux, is there some possibility that the next generation of Mars rovers will run Linux?
"What Microsoft really needs is some way of ensuring that software wears out at a similar speed to hardware. Unfortunately for them, although fortunately for the consumer, it is quite hard to build planned obsolescence into software."
WTF? That is utter nonsense. The Windows security model dates from before ubiquitous internet. It was not designed for a modern threat level and has NOT been adequately updated to deal with it. It does not get any more worn out than that.
The article makes it out that Microsoft's problem is that there is no market for innovation in operating systems. Bullshit. There is a huge market for innovation. Just look at all the features Apple is adding to MacOS (quartz extreme, spotlight..) and look at how the Linux Kernel continues to improve (real time support, reentrent kernel, massive multi-CPU scaling and clustering, constant time scheduler, ever more platforms). Microsoft's real problem is that their Windows development operation has become so bloated and inept that they can not supply timely improvements. They have not kept up with the competition or with the hackers, and are only falling further behind. And most of the "innovative" features announced in Longhorn seem to be inspired by OS X.
This does not seem to be a problem with Microsoft generally. They do execute well in other areas. IMHO Halo and the Xbox are good products, whatever their profitability. The.Net architecture seems like a sensible (more generality) and well-executed improvement over Java ideas.
On a conference call with reporters, executives said Fiorina was not terminated for cause and that she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman told CNN she'll get a payout of $21.1 million, not including stock options.
Shares of HP (Research) jumped about 9 percent in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday morning on the news.
As others here have already pointed out, it says something about the quality of your corporate executive when firing her makes your company 9% more valuable.
she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman told CNN she'll get a payout of $21.1 million, not including stock options.
Appropriate that her parting act is to suck even more money from HP.
Fiorinia was the classic corporate parasite and the HP corporate immune system was too slow to react. But I am glad to see that it rejected her before she killed the host. Like John Scully at Apple, Ms. Fiorina's two greatest skills seem to have been corporate infighting and self promotion. She has modeled her career on the tapeworm. It was only after years of thinning revenues that enough people recognized the problem and sought treatment. But then there are lots of people who recognize a problem only after their pets have lost weight and appear quite ill and then have them dewormed.
I see many complaints here about how this is going on in China but not the U.S. and how that will hurt the U.S. I disagree.
China's adoption of pebble bed reactors would benefit the entire world, not only China. In the simplest possible terms: The less petroleum China consumes, the more left for the rest of us.
With trade, local increases in energy supply become global increases in energy supply. Global increases in energy supply benefit energy consumers globally.
Everyone "knows" that China's rapid economic growth will increase global demand of petroleum, driving up its price. China's substitution of nuclear power for petroleum would mitigate that price increase.
Speaking as a Mac OS X programmer who really wants one, but does not expect HP and Verbatim to port to OS X right away, my question is: Do HP and Verbatim tell me what I need to program this thing?
Are there published specifications? Like the communications protocol between the drive and the driver, or between the driver and the application?
Sorry if this is answered in TFA, I could not R becaused it is/.ed.
"The statement he made was that it would be EASIER to harvest new stem cells and grow them in serum which does not contain Neu5Gc"
True, that is how he is quoted in The Register. But the evidence given does not support that proposition for exactly the same reasons which I gave in my refutation of a similar argument.
You state correctly that I left out the "easier" part in summary. That is irrelevent, for the more complicated argument which involves "easier" is not valid either. In characterizing another's argument, it is fair to simplify by omission only if return of the omitted points does not invalidate criticism. Well what I have done is certainly legitimate, for the weaker stance of "easier" is no better supported on the evidence than the strong stance, as I characterized it.
"BTW, if you can figure out how to make SERUM not derived from an animal, let me know, would ya?"
I have absolutely no moral or ethical objections to harvesting stem cells. I don't consider undiferentiated cells to be " a human life". I also have a close family member who has Parkinsons disease. I am strongly-pro stem cell reasearch.
But I take issue with Dr Ajit Varki foisting fake science on the public.
from The Register:
"The human embryonic stem cells remained contaminated by Neu5Gc even when grown in special culture conditions with commercially available serum replacements, apparently because these are also derived from animal products.
The argument for the necessity of harvesting new human stem cells goes like this:
Having established that culturing stem cells in a serum replacment derived from animal products contaminates the cells with Neu5Gc, scientists attempt to rid existing cell lines of Neu5Gc by culturing them in serum replacement derived from animal products. This fails to rid the stem cells of Neu5Gc. Therefore, they conclue that existing cell lines can not be rid of Neu5Gc by growing them in a in serum not derived from animal products. It is therefore necessary to harvest new cell lines and grow them in culture not derived from animal products.
Try growing existing cell lines in serum not derived from animals and see if that rids them Neu5Gc. Then get back to us.
So, logically... If... she.. weighs the same as a duck, she's made of
wood!
'Powell.. collected some of the largest indecency fines against U.S. broadcasters
Now is that because FCC indecency policy became more strict under Powell, or because policy remained unchanged but the culture is becoming publicly more sexual and profane?
On LCDs you can trade off chromatic resolution for improved spacial resolution. Apparently ClearType does this.
On CRTs you can trade off chromatic resolution for improved luminance resolution. The technique was was first described by Christ Tyler et al. and termed "Bit Stealing".
Tyler C.W., Chan H., Liu L., McBride B. & Kontsevich L.L. (1992) Bit-stealing: How to get 1786 or more grey levels from an 8-bit color monitor. Proc. SPIE 1666, 351-364.
"It's hard to believe that the WSJ is equating prominently disclosed campaign consulting with secret payments from the U.S. Government treasury to TV personalities in order to promote Republican policies, but they are."
"The Dean campaign, unlike the Education Department, didn't spend tax dollars. But the bloggers who benefited from its largesse appear to be as compromised ethically as Williams."
I could find no statement in the Wall Street Journal equating the two scandals, notably in the article which michael links. The editorial opinion expressed in the Journal in fact does not equate the scandals, rather it points to a prominent difference between the two: the use of tax dollars.
"Over the next six or seven years, the team would use the facility to test components for a craft that could take off and land vertically, carrying three or more riders to the edge of space."
Was anyone besides me expecting to so, and disappointed not to find, an actual timeline, a graphical chart in the form of a line with labeled tic marks demarcating events?
The link is over-billed. I'ts only a chronologically ordered table, not really a timeline.
Q: OK, so now what's going to stop police from hiding GPS units on many cars parked on the street in high crime neighborhoods and tracking thousands of potential suspects?
A: The likelihood that abusing a power will cause courts to rescind or curtail it. We could argue that cops are authorized to GPS bug one suspect with cause, but that cops are not authorized to GPS bug an entire neighborhood on the chance that someone might commit a crime. So could a judge.
So this case is a precedent set by one judge in one case. It is NOT a universal guarantee to cops that they can GPS bug everyone in any circumstance, nor that even that other judges will uphold this one precedent. If cops are obviously abusing the power in some circumstances, it could be revoked by the courts in just circumstances of abuse, or in all circumstances. Judges would decide whether the particular circumstances of a case before them, such as indiscriminate GPS bugging of an entire neighborhood, match those of this case, bugging one particular suspect, and whether this case serves as a precedent. And even if a judge concludes that indiscriminate GPS bugging of an entire neighborhood is the same thing as GPS bugging with cause of one particular suspect, then he could still overturn the precedent.
"Everyone bet on the eggplant, figuring if a vegetable challenges a live animal with four legs to a race, it must be that the vegetable knows something."
IMHO it is a somewhat bogus article, because it incorrectly assumes that the previous problem, the one of reataining documents from the past into the present, is the same as the next problem, the one of preserving documents from the present into the future. Those are in fact quite different problems and solutions to one do not apply to the other.
In particular:
1- The problem with carrying along your data when you upgrade to a new computer no longer really exists. If you stored copies of your writings on a TRS-80 I tape cartridge how did you tranfer that to 5 1/4 floppy when you upgraded to a C-64 with a 5150 floppy drive? You could not. What do you do with Mac HFS Syquest cartridges when you upgraded to an 386 Linux box with Zip drives? Storage formats were ideosyncratic but are not now. There are now popular mediums of data exchange between all platforms, not to mention that everthing is networked. Futhermore, the rate of growth in hard drive storage capacity now more than doubles every format generation, so there is usually plenty of room on your new hard drive for all your old files from that old drive. So- Data transfer to new computers: problem in the past, not a problem for the future.
2. Some photographic hardcopy has lasted, so the article suggests using that. However, as others here have already pointed out, longevity depends on the photographic process, and hardcopy from inkjet printers is not the same thing as photographic prints. So: hardcopy image storage: retained images for decades in the past, may not in the future .
3. Preserving image data in an analog format worked in the past because cameras were invented relativly recently and came into widespread use within living memory. But the future of photography will be longer than the history of photography. A preservation method good for 100 years might be useless for 1000 years. In particular, copy fidelity for analog data makes it almoust useless for millenial storage. Digital storage has perfect copy fidelity. So- Analog image storage: worked for all of photographic history in the past, will not work for all of photographic history into the future.
4. In the past, for each "original" that you wanted to exist into the future, you had to perserve one original from the past. With analog Mona Lisa, we have one copy now because we saved one from the past. But with digital copies, for any number of "originals" that you want in the future, you only need to preserve a constant number of copies, one, from the past. With digital Mona Lisa, we could have a million copies in the futrure becasue we preserve one from the present. So- original work: required multiple analog originals in the past, requires a single digital original in the future.
5. The cost of redundancy was high in the past and is low now. I can churn out multiple digital copies at home now real cheap and they take up little space. Analog photo copies were hard to make and took up lots of space.
The upshot is, despite what worked best in the past, the rules have changed. The only way to preserve your photos with perfect fidelity for unlimited time into the future is to get your photos into digital format ASAP on redundant media which you regenerate periodically by transfering to fresh media.
(shameless commercial plug) I have friend in the business of digitizing and restoring analog prints. He will start with your decaying analog photos and give you both digital copies and prints with Epson archival-quality paper and inks which, according to Epson, are good for decades. So if you are uncertain about the the digital format/ analog print issue, you can do both.
Slashdot Mirror
"The image can even remain on the screen for weeks without any power and doesn't need a backlight."
Warning: Do not browse porn before a power outage.
quoth pclminion:
"I think it's a juvenile attitude. 'I willfully don't profit off my stuff so nobody else should either.'"
That is completely wrong. The GPL claims profits, it does not give them away. It is more like "I demand repayment for giving you my code. My price is that if you make and distribute modifications to my code that you give those to me for free."
The GPL is NOT a selfless license. The person assigning the GPL often intends to profit from his choice. The form of payment which he demands is labor: the labor of every programmer that touches and redistributes the code thereafter.
The authors infer the existence of life on Mars from detected methane. If it emits methane, then it exists.
In about 3.5 centuries we have progressed from René Descartes to this: "I fart, therefore I am".
Didn't Spirit and Opportunity run a Wind River RTOS? So now that a NASA supplier offers Linux, is there some possibility that the next generation of Mars rovers will run Linux?
The article states, as a central premise:
.Net architecture seems like a sensible (more generality) and well-executed improvement over Java ideas.
"What Microsoft really needs is some way of ensuring that software wears out at a similar speed to hardware. Unfortunately for them, although fortunately for the consumer, it is quite hard to build planned obsolescence into software."
WTF? That is utter nonsense. The Windows security model dates from before ubiquitous internet. It was not designed for a modern threat level and has NOT been adequately updated to deal with it. It does not get any more worn out than that.
The article makes it out that Microsoft's problem is that there is no market for innovation in operating systems. Bullshit. There is a huge market for innovation. Just look at all the features Apple is adding to MacOS (quartz extreme, spotlight..) and look at how the Linux Kernel continues to improve (real time support, reentrent kernel, massive multi-CPU scaling and clustering, constant time scheduler, ever more platforms). Microsoft's real problem is that their Windows development operation has become so bloated and inept that they can not supply timely improvements. They have not kept up with the competition or with the hackers, and are only falling further behind. And most of the "innovative" features announced in Longhorn seem to be inspired by OS X.
This does not seem to be a problem with Microsoft generally. They do execute well in other areas. IMHO Halo and the Xbox are good products, whatever their profitability. The
On a conference call with reporters, executives said Fiorina was not terminated for cause and that she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman told CNN she'll get a payout of $21.1 million, not including stock options.
I found that here.
Shares of HP (Research) jumped about 9 percent in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday morning on the news.
As others here have already pointed out, it says something about the quality of your corporate executive when firing her makes your company 9% more valuable.
she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman told CNN she'll get a payout of $21.1 million, not including stock options.
Appropriate that her parting act is to suck even more money from HP.
Fiorinia was the classic corporate parasite and the HP corporate immune system was too slow to react. But I am glad to see that it rejected her before she killed the host. Like John Scully at Apple, Ms. Fiorina's two greatest skills seem to have been corporate infighting and self promotion. She has modeled her career on the tapeworm. It was only after years of thinning revenues that enough people recognized the problem and sought treatment. But then there are lots of people who recognize a problem only after their pets have lost weight and appear quite ill and then have them dewormed.
I see many complaints here about how this is going on in China but not the U.S. and how that will hurt the U.S. I disagree.
China's adoption of pebble bed reactors would benefit the entire world, not only China. In the simplest possible terms: The less petroleum China consumes, the more left for the rest of us.
With trade, local increases in energy supply become global increases in energy supply. Global increases in energy supply benefit energy consumers globally.
Everyone "knows" that China's rapid economic growth will increase global demand of petroleum, driving up its price. China's substitution of nuclear power for petroleum would mitigate that price increase.
"Thank god the "Soviet Russia" jokes have been dying off"
In Soviet Russia, God thanks you that jokes are dying off!
Speaking as a Mac OS X programmer who really wants one, but does not expect HP and Verbatim to port to OS X right away, my question is: Do HP and Verbatim tell me what I need to program this thing?
/.ed.
Are there published specifications? Like the communications protocol between the drive and the driver, or between the driver and the application?
Sorry if this is answered in TFA, I could not R becaused it is
Who wants a camera which enables anyone to remotely cripple it.
Something tells me this item is NOT going to be a big seller.
"The statement he made was that it would be EASIER to harvest new stem cells and grow them in serum which does not contain Neu5Gc"
True, that is how he is quoted in The Register. But the evidence given does not support that proposition for exactly the same reasons which I gave in my refutation of a similar argument.
You state correctly that I left out the "easier" part in summary. That is irrelevent, for the more complicated argument which involves "easier" is not valid either. In characterizing another's argument, it is fair to simplify by omission only if return of the omitted points does not invalidate criticism. Well what I have done is certainly legitimate, for the weaker stance of "easier" is no better supported on the evidence than the strong stance, as I characterized it.
"BTW, if you can figure out how to make SERUM not derived from an animal, let me know, would ya?"
Use human blood serum.
I have absolutely no moral or ethical objections to harvesting stem cells. I don't consider undiferentiated cells to be " a human life". I also have a close family member who has Parkinsons disease. I am strongly-pro stem cell reasearch.
But I take issue with Dr Ajit Varki foisting fake science on the public.
from The Register:
"The human embryonic stem cells remained contaminated by Neu5Gc even when grown in special culture conditions with commercially available serum replacements, apparently because these are also derived from animal products.
The argument for the necessity of harvesting new human stem cells goes like this:
Having established that culturing stem cells in a serum replacment derived from animal products contaminates the cells with Neu5Gc, scientists attempt to rid existing cell lines of Neu5Gc by culturing them in serum replacement derived from animal products. This fails to rid the stem cells of Neu5Gc. Therefore, they conclue that existing cell lines can not be rid of Neu5Gc by growing them in a in serum not derived from animal products. It is therefore necessary to harvest new cell lines and grow them in culture not derived from animal products.
Try growing existing cell lines in serum not derived from animals and see if that rids them Neu5Gc. Then get back to us.
So, logically... If... she.. weighs the same as a duck, she's made of wood!
Same thing, different century.
That sounds similar to "bit stealing".
On LCDs you can trade off chromatic resolution for improved spacial resolution. Apparently ClearType does this.
On CRTs you can trade off chromatic resolution for improved luminance resolution. The technique was was first described by Christ Tyler et al. and termed "Bit Stealing".
Tyler C.W., Chan H., Liu L., McBride B. & Kontsevich L.L. (1992)
Bit-stealing: How to get 1786 or more grey levels from an 8-bit color monitor. Proc. SPIE 1666, 351-364.
That's called the Laffer Curve.
A similar story was reported previously on Slashdot here.
michael:
"It's hard to believe that the WSJ is equating prominently disclosed campaign consulting with secret payments from the U.S. Government treasury to TV personalities in order to promote Republican policies, but they are."
The Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column:
"The Dean campaign, unlike the Education Department, didn't spend tax dollars. But the bloggers who benefited from its largesse appear to be as compromised ethically as Williams."
I could find no statement in the Wall Street Journal equating the two scandals, notably in the article which michael links. The editorial opinion expressed in the Journal in fact does not equate the scandals, rather it points to a prominent difference between the two: the use of tax dollars.
"Over the next six or seven years, the team would use the facility to test components for a craft that could take off and land vertically, carrying three or more riders to the edge of space."
Carmack Envy.
Was anyone besides me expecting to so, and disappointed not to find, an actual timeline, a graphical chart in the form of a line with labeled tic marks demarcating events?
The link is over-billed. I'ts only a chronologically ordered table, not really a timeline.
Q: OK, so now what's going to stop police from hiding GPS units on many cars parked on the street in high crime neighborhoods and tracking thousands of potential suspects?
A: The likelihood that abusing a power will cause courts to rescind or curtail it. We could argue that cops are authorized to GPS bug one suspect with cause, but that cops are not authorized to GPS bug an entire neighborhood on the chance that someone might commit a crime. So could a judge.
So this case is a precedent set by one judge in one case. It is NOT a universal guarantee to cops that they can GPS bug everyone in any circumstance, nor that even that other judges will uphold this one precedent. If cops are obviously abusing the power in some circumstances, it could be revoked by the courts in just circumstances of abuse, or in all circumstances. Judges would decide whether the particular circumstances of a case before them, such as indiscriminate GPS bugging of an entire neighborhood, match those of this case, bugging one particular suspect, and whether this case serves as a precedent. And even if a judge concludes that indiscriminate GPS bugging of an entire neighborhood is the same thing as GPS bugging with cause of one particular suspect, then he could still overturn the precedent.
"..'celery' - the fastest of all vegetables."
That reminds me something I read years a ago...
"Everyone bet on the eggplant, figuring if a vegetable challenges a live animal with four legs to a race, it must be that the vegetable knows something."
I'm sure the RealNetworks customers who bougth tunes for their IPODS and now can't play them are going to be upset by this. Both the them.
This is typical of Pennsylvania's legislature to bendover backwards in favor of Verizon.
You misspelled "forwards"
IMHO it is a somewhat bogus article, because it incorrectly assumes that the previous problem, the one of reataining documents from the past into the present, is the same as the next problem, the one of preserving documents from the present into the future. Those are in fact quite different problems and solutions to one do not apply to the other.
In particular:
1- The problem with carrying along your data when you upgrade to a new computer no longer really exists. If you stored copies of your writings on a TRS-80 I tape cartridge how did you tranfer that to 5 1/4 floppy when you upgraded to a C-64 with a 5150 floppy drive? You could not. What do you do with Mac HFS Syquest cartridges when you upgraded to an 386 Linux box with Zip drives? Storage formats were ideosyncratic but are not now. There are now popular mediums of data exchange between all platforms, not to mention that everthing is networked. Futhermore, the rate of growth in hard drive storage capacity now more than doubles every format generation, so there is usually plenty of room on your new hard drive for all your old files from that old drive. So- Data transfer to new computers: problem in the past, not a problem for the future.
2. Some photographic hardcopy has lasted, so the article suggests using that. However, as others here have already pointed out, longevity depends on the photographic process, and hardcopy from inkjet printers is not the same thing as photographic prints. So: hardcopy image storage: retained images for decades in the past, may not in the future .
3. Preserving image data in an analog format worked in the past because cameras were invented relativly recently and came into widespread use within living memory. But the future of photography will be longer than the history of photography. A preservation method good for 100 years might be useless for 1000 years. In particular, copy fidelity for analog data makes it almoust useless for millenial storage. Digital storage has perfect copy fidelity. So- Analog image storage: worked for all of photographic history in the past, will not work for all of photographic history into the future.
4. In the past, for each "original" that you wanted to exist into the future, you had to perserve one original from the past. With analog Mona Lisa, we have one copy now because we saved one from the past. But with digital copies, for any number of "originals" that you want in the future, you only need to preserve a constant number of copies, one, from the past. With digital Mona Lisa, we could have a million copies in the futrure becasue we preserve one from the present. So- original work: required multiple analog originals in the past, requires a single digital original in the future.
5. The cost of redundancy was high in the past and is low now. I can churn out multiple digital copies at home now real cheap and they take up little space. Analog photo copies were hard to make and took up lots of space.
The upshot is, despite what worked best in the past, the rules have changed. The only way to preserve your photos with perfect fidelity for unlimited time into the future is to get your photos into digital format ASAP on redundant media which you regenerate periodically by transfering to fresh media.
(shameless commercial plug) I have friend in the business of digitizing and restoring analog prints. He will start with your decaying analog photos and give you both digital copies and prints with Epson archival-quality paper and inks which, according to Epson, are good for decades. So if you are uncertain about the the digital format/ analog print issue, you can do both.