Actually, patents were invented to promote what today is called "piracy". It began in the early renaissance with glaziers and silkmakers; governments granted them exclusive national rights to the industry in return for their ripping off foreign inventors' processes. It was only later expanded to include genuinely "novel" inventions, but patents' national character still allows the original intent of reducing imports by ripping off foreign ideas.
Only oddballs like RMS think people will continue to invent things without any prospect of reward and benefit.
You seem to be implying that patent schemes are the only way that people can have a prospect of financial reward and benefit from their inventions. This claim is absurd on its face.
Patents are a governmental intrusion into the free market. Like any governmental intrusion, they can be good or bad depending on how they are done. And like any governmental intrusion, "less" is usually better unless a clear case can be made that the particular intrusion in question will be of benefit to the market.
There's no "magic" universally-agreed-upon scheme for transliterating Arabic words into European languages. The short vowels in question can be transliterated as u and o, and as i and e. Partly this is due to the relatively lesser role short vowels play in Semitic languages as compared to European ones; it's also partly due to differences in the vowels' values in different European languages.
For American English, the closest phonetic transliteration (from Gulf Arabic) might be "mwislamun" with some indication that the "w" and the "u" are very very slight, and the final "n" practically or often even entirely inaudible-- this, incidentally, is how the word is transliterated in Kiswahili (with the added bonus that it perfectly matches their own noun-formation rules).
So, muslim is fine, moslem is fine, muslem is fine, moslim is fine. They're all attempts to kludge a perfectly normal Semitic word into the European mindset of "every vowel must be notated with a single value", so none of them are perfect.
Personally I've come to favor the method used in Arabic writing of simply noting the consonants and long vowels, so in this case maybe we should write "mslm" and "mslmt" ("mslmh"?) for male and female muslims, respectively.
When you use GPL'd software you are getting that software for free (as in beer)
Maybe some GPL'd software is beerfree, but we pay quite a bit for a lot of the GPL software we use (good custom-developed code can cost a good deal of money). The caveat is that if we distribute the binaries we have to distribute the source. We don't distribute the binaries, so we don't distribute the source. Why would we let our competitors get it for free when we paid for it?
Part of the problem is a lot of the "how can people make money giving away code for free" whiners don't seem to realize how much GPL'ed software never ends up on sourceforge or freshmeat; I'd be willing to bet a significant percentage is like the software we used: custom developed, distributed from one development team to one paying end user site, and never again redistributed.
I dunno. Like I said, it makes sense to me: at least a lot more sense than all system executables AND libraries being in C:\WINNT\System32 and all user programs and software packages being in C:\Program Files and all configuration being in HKEY_SOMETHINGTHATDOESNTMAKEANYSENSE->{34873DF}->{ 348AEFB3498}
To each his own. Not to mention the fact that all of C: has to be on the same partition; if there's a way to have System32 on C: and Documents and Settings on D:, I've never figured it out.
This is not, I believe, caused by Windows, but rather by poor applications and drivers.
Ask yourself what it says about an Operating System if an application or device driver can bring the entire system down. Why is that possible? I've still never (knock wood) had all of Linux actually crash on me. I've had X freeze once or twice (that's what control-alt-backspace is for) and obviously several application crashes.
Drivers and applications don't crash operating systems. Operating systems crash themselves.
Maybe I read that wrong? Save your resume as a Microsoft Word Document in OpenOffice. Write a cover email in your mail client. Attach the document. Send. What was so hard about that?
Personally I send documents as PDFs or HTMLs because even when I use Microsoft Office I've never been able to make a document that always looks exactly the same on another person's MS Office installation.
OK, I'll come clean. I've never used a journalled filesystem on my/boot partition. It just never seemed important, and the Gentoo install guide said it required extra configuring and I was tired of messing with it. OK, are you satisfied?
Oddly enough, I've had my ass kicked by a Hell's Angel in Oceanside, CA (I figured since I was a Marine the other Marines in the bar would leap to my aid... ah, to be young and naive again).
It was painful, but not terribly embarassing (though explaining to the MP's as I crawled back onto Camp Pendleton the next morning why I had 2 black eyes and shredded clothing was a little humiliating; I said I picked up a stripper and her pimp rolled me, it seemed less pathetic).
I personally am not humiliated when I get my ass kicked in chess, because I suck at chess even though I enjoy studying it. But if my job were to play chess, I could definitely see getting humiliated by the sort of wins Kasparov gets against people (if you've never looked at his games, they're fascinating. He'll avoid a sure win in order to get the most cruel win possible.) Just my own thoughts on his style....
Not OT at all, IMO. Compare how easy it is to beat whatever version of Go comes with your Linux distro with how hard it is to beat a COTS chess program on "hard" setting.
Chess relies to a large extent on intuition and imagination, but Go relies almost solely on it. I think it might have something to do with the more strict rules of chess. Show a grandmaster a chess board that was achieved by legal moves and (s)he can usually memorize it; show him/her a "random" board and (s)he cannot. Go is not so simple; almost any configuration can be the result of legal moves. I might say it's an East/West thing but that sounds trite.
You know, I was precisely thinking of Kramnik. Give Vlad a few years to build up some endurance (Christ, he's only 28) and I think he might do really well.
Mad props to your final sentence, though: computers can only beat good chess players after they get tired. I'm an extremely mediocre chess player who happens to enjoy studying the theory of the game. I can beat GNUChess readily in the first game, with difficulty in the second game, and almost never in the third and later games without a break of a few days. You have a great point.
Part of the problem is that Kasparov is this generation's GM. Kasparov plays very emotional games. He's not just looking to beat you in his first match; he's looking to utterly destroy, smash and humiliate you with a dramatic and embarrassing win.
This is a great strategy against people, but it's not so effective against computers. Kasparov is probably the worst chess master to pit against a machine since Ruy Lopez (I think he's won with the Ruy Lopez opening a few times, case in point: it's a brutal and humiliating play for the losing opponent).
Kasparov knows that the computer can "think through" future moves better than he can. Computers, in fact, do the opposite of human chess players: we set goals and try to find ways to get there while computers search through various ways to find a satisfactory goal they can achieve. So, Kasparov plays it very conservative and keeps himself out of any situations that give the computer too much range of foresight, which is why the Kasparov/computer matches tend to look like Verdun (though he's been surprised a few times).
Personally I'd like to see some of the younger generation take on the big programs. They tend to play more technically and less passionately than Kasparov and his generation.
targets listed in `make help` for 2.6(beta 6) are:
[dummy]:= all
clean
mrproper
config
menuconfig
xconfig
gconfig [GTK xconfig]
oldconfig
defconfig [user-obsequious xconfig]
allmodconfig [everything possible as modules]
allyesconfig [bloated kernel]
allnoconfig [anorexic kernel]
all:= vmlinux modules bzImage
vmlinux
modules
modules_install
dir
dir/[file]
rpm [?!]
tags
sgmldocs
htmldocs
bzImage
install
bzdisk
fdimage
Hmmm... "all" doesn't run "modules_install". I just noticed that and it explains a problem I'm having. RTFSTDOUT, I guess. `make dep`, btw, yields "warning: make dep is obsolete".
But the point remains that the HD sellers are using the wrong count and the question that comes to the person who knows is "why?". The answer is simple - to mislead
Maybe I'm being a naive optimist here, but there seems to be a much more sensible reason:
The way memory is addressed makes it convenient to use the base-2 units.
Storage is not addressed in a way that makes it particularly convenient to use base-2 units.
Got that? That's why we use them on memory. Storage is not addressed that way, so like everything else we tend to use base 10 to describe it.
Somebody mentioned KVM above; I have a keyboard in one of the cages at a co-lo (looks like an Aura but I'm not sure) that called the scroll lock "Scr Lock / KVM Switch". I thought that was neat.
Maybe TFA mentions that, but I can't RTFA because you selfish insensitive clods have/.'ed it.
Koppel: Mr. Forbes, the reference in your book to "Teve Torbes" clearly refers to you! Forbes:I just don't know, Ted. Whoever wrote this book did a great job at concealing identities. He could have been thinking of Fleve Fnorbes.
Easy: the one way to guarantee us geeks will get our panties in a BIND (heh heh) is to have a Responsible Designated Party (tm) violate an RFC or standard. The standard says a DNS server does not return an IP address when no such host or domain exists, NOT that the DNS server resolves the request to some "default no such domain" domain.
I think it also irked a lot of people because it really shows how much the Web has been pushing out all other Internet protocols to the point that the rest don't seem to matter to the Powers That Be anymore. Quite a few Internet users, I imagine, access email and news (and even chat) through the Web. But the other protocols are still there, and still in use.
Personally, it pissed me off because I administer several nameservers and when I mistype a domain in a dig or nslookup I want to SEE IMMEDIATELY that no such domain exists rather than remembering "oh right that's the Sitefinder IP address". Some of the scripts I've written depend, in fact, on nslookup saying "server can't find yaoho.com" and I've had to instead look for the sitefinder IP address.
Anyways, short answer is: geeks hate it because we tend to believe in standards since adhering to standards is the only reason the Internet got off the ground in the first place and it's just as important nowadays that we keep them up.
I've worked on UN ops before. Let me assure you: the biggest barrier ANY goal can ever have is having the UN supporting it. Now that that's out of the way, Open Source software should have no trouble flourishing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious about what kind of person would buy 18% of a company with the stipulation that they would have *NO* say in how that company is run.
kernel32.dll is more like glibc than vmlinuz. The "dll" bit should have tipped you off.
Actually, patents were invented to promote what today is called "piracy". It began in the early renaissance with glaziers and silkmakers; governments granted them exclusive national rights to the industry in return for their ripping off foreign inventors' processes. It was only later expanded to include genuinely "novel" inventions, but patents' national character still allows the original intent of reducing imports by ripping off foreign ideas.
You seem to be implying that patent schemes are the only way that people can have a prospect of financial reward and benefit from their inventions. This claim is absurd on its face.
Patents are a governmental intrusion into the free market. Like any governmental intrusion, they can be good or bad depending on how they are done. And like any governmental intrusion, "less" is usually better unless a clear case can be made that the particular intrusion in question will be of benefit to the market.
That's, what, a US nickel?
There's no "magic" universally-agreed-upon scheme for transliterating Arabic words into European languages. The short vowels in question can be transliterated as u and o, and as i and e. Partly this is due to the relatively lesser role short vowels play in Semitic languages as compared to European ones; it's also partly due to differences in the vowels' values in different European languages.
For American English, the closest phonetic transliteration (from Gulf Arabic) might be "mwislamun" with some indication that the "w" and the "u" are very very slight, and the final "n" practically or often even entirely inaudible-- this, incidentally, is how the word is transliterated in Kiswahili (with the added bonus that it perfectly matches their own noun-formation rules).
So, muslim is fine, moslem is fine, muslem is fine, moslim is fine. They're all attempts to kludge a perfectly normal Semitic word into the European mindset of "every vowel must be notated with a single value", so none of them are perfect.
Personally I've come to favor the method used in Arabic writing of simply noting the consonants and long vowels, so in this case maybe we should write "mslm" and "mslmt" ("mslmh"?) for male and female muslims, respectively.
In light of that, I propose they call it "Slashdot II"
Maybe some GPL'd software is beerfree, but we pay quite a bit for a lot of the GPL software we use (good custom-developed code can cost a good deal of money). The caveat is that if we distribute the binaries we have to distribute the source. We don't distribute the binaries, so we don't distribute the source. Why would we let our competitors get it for free when we paid for it?
Part of the problem is a lot of the "how can people make money giving away code for free" whiners don't seem to realize how much GPL'ed software never ends up on sourceforge or freshmeat; I'd be willing to bet a significant percentage is like the software we used: custom developed, distributed from one development team to one paying end user site, and never again redistributed.
Much more "organized" than HKEY_FOO.
I dunno. Like I said, it makes sense to me: at least a lot more sense than all system executables AND libraries being in C:\WINNT\System32 and all user programs and software packages being in C:\Program Files and all configuration being in HKEY_SOMETHINGTHATDOESNTMAKEANYSENSE->{34873DF}->{ 348AEFB3498}
To each his own. Not to mention the fact that all of C: has to be on the same partition; if there's a way to have System32 on C: and Documents and Settings on D:, I've never figured it out.
Ask yourself what it says about an Operating System if an application or device driver can bring the entire system down. Why is that possible? I've still never (knock wood) had all of Linux actually crash on me. I've had X freeze once or twice (that's what control-alt-backspace is for) and obviously several application crashes.
Drivers and applications don't crash operating systems. Operating systems crash themselves.
Maybe I read that wrong? Save your resume as a Microsoft Word Document in OpenOffice. Write a cover email in your mail client. Attach the document. Send. What was so hard about that?
Personally I send documents as PDFs or HTMLs because even when I use Microsoft Office I've never been able to make a document that always looks exactly the same on another person's MS Office installation.
OK, I'll come clean. I've never used a journalled filesystem on my /boot partition. It just never seemed important, and the Gentoo install guide said it required extra configuring and I was tired of messing with it. OK, are you satisfied?
Oddly enough, I've had my ass kicked by a Hell's Angel in Oceanside, CA (I figured since I was a Marine the other Marines in the bar would leap to my aid... ah, to be young and naive again).
It was painful, but not terribly embarassing (though explaining to the MP's as I crawled back onto Camp Pendleton the next morning why I had 2 black eyes and shredded clothing was a little humiliating; I said I picked up a stripper and her pimp rolled me, it seemed less pathetic).
I personally am not humiliated when I get my ass kicked in chess, because I suck at chess even though I enjoy studying it. But if my job were to play chess, I could definitely see getting humiliated by the sort of wins Kasparov gets against people (if you've never looked at his games, they're fascinating. He'll avoid a sure win in order to get the most cruel win possible.) Just my own thoughts on his style....
Not OT at all, IMO. Compare how easy it is to beat whatever version of Go comes with your Linux distro with how hard it is to beat a COTS chess program on "hard" setting.
Chess relies to a large extent on intuition and imagination, but Go relies almost solely on it. I think it might have something to do with the more strict rules of chess. Show a grandmaster a chess board that was achieved by legal moves and (s)he can usually memorize it; show him/her a "random" board and (s)he cannot. Go is not so simple; almost any configuration can be the result of legal moves. I might say it's an East/West thing but that sounds trite.
You know, I was precisely thinking of Kramnik. Give Vlad a few years to build up some endurance (Christ, he's only 28) and I think he might do really well.
Mad props to your final sentence, though: computers can only beat good chess players after they get tired. I'm an extremely mediocre chess player who happens to enjoy studying the theory of the game. I can beat GNUChess readily in the first game, with difficulty in the second game, and almost never in the third and later games without a break of a few days. You have a great point.
Part of the problem is that Kasparov is this generation's GM. Kasparov plays very emotional games. He's not just looking to beat you in his first match; he's looking to utterly destroy, smash and humiliate you with a dramatic and embarrassing win.
This is a great strategy against people, but it's not so effective against computers. Kasparov is probably the worst chess master to pit against a machine since Ruy Lopez (I think he's won with the Ruy Lopez opening a few times, case in point: it's a brutal and humiliating play for the losing opponent).
Kasparov knows that the computer can "think through" future moves better than he can. Computers, in fact, do the opposite of human chess players: we set goals and try to find ways to get there while computers search through various ways to find a satisfactory goal they can achieve. So, Kasparov plays it very conservative and keeps himself out of any situations that give the computer too much range of foresight, which is why the Kasparov/computer matches tend to look like Verdun (though he's been surprised a few times).
Personally I'd like to see some of the younger generation take on the big programs. They tend to play more technically and less passionately than Kasparov and his generation.
targets listed in `make help` for 2.6(beta 6) are:
Hmmm... "all" doesn't run "modules_install". I just noticed that and it explains a problem I'm having. RTFSTDOUT, I guess. `make dep`, btw, yields "warning: make dep is obsolete".
It's not the same thing without 'make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install'
Now it's just 'make menuconfig && make'
Linux has gotten soft... time to migrate to BSD. I would if I could get my laptop's touchpad to work. Sigh...
Because you rarely write to the boot partition, you shouldn't mount it, and it's a bitch to tell GRUB to ignore the length of the journal.
Tracert hops through VA/DC waaaaay too much (but it always does), then gets to WA state.
I get some slowness at cable&wireless in CA, then it hits Exodus (66.35.192.0/18) and just dies. Somebody go beat up Exodus...
Maybe I'm being a naive optimist here, but there seems to be a much more sensible reason:
The way memory is addressed makes it convenient to use the base-2 units.
Storage is not addressed in a way that makes it particularly convenient to use base-2 units.
Got that? That's why we use them on memory. Storage is not addressed that way, so like everything else we tend to use base 10 to describe it.
It's a number pad.... with diagonal arrows, which the normal arrow pad lacks. Try playing Civ without the number pad.
Somebody mentioned KVM above; I have a keyboard in one of the cages at a co-lo (looks like an Aura but I'm not sure) that called the scroll lock "Scr Lock / KVM Switch". I thought that was neat.
Maybe TFA mentions that, but I can't RTFA because you selfish insensitive clods have /.'ed it.
Koppel: Mr. Forbes, the reference in your book to "Teve Torbes" clearly refers to you!
Forbes:I just don't know, Ted. Whoever wrote this book did a great job at concealing identities. He could have been thinking of Fleve Fnorbes.
Easy: the one way to guarantee us geeks will get our panties in a BIND (heh heh) is to have a Responsible Designated Party (tm) violate an RFC or standard. The standard says a DNS server does not return an IP address when no such host or domain exists, NOT that the DNS server resolves the request to some "default no such domain" domain.
I think it also irked a lot of people because it really shows how much the Web has been pushing out all other Internet protocols to the point that the rest don't seem to matter to the Powers That Be anymore. Quite a few Internet users, I imagine, access email and news (and even chat) through the Web. But the other protocols are still there, and still in use.
Personally, it pissed me off because I administer several nameservers and when I mistype a domain in a dig or nslookup I want to SEE IMMEDIATELY that no such domain exists rather than remembering "oh right that's the Sitefinder IP address". Some of the scripts I've written depend, in fact, on nslookup saying "server can't find yaoho.com" and I've had to instead look for the sitefinder IP address.
Anyways, short answer is: geeks hate it because we tend to believe in standards since adhering to standards is the only reason the Internet got off the ground in the first place and it's just as important nowadays that we keep them up.
I've worked on UN ops before. Let me assure you: the biggest barrier ANY goal can ever have is having the UN supporting it. Now that that's out of the way, Open Source software should have no trouble flourishing.