I could care less about having any kind of 'doze interface on Linux. However often when I'm working contracts I have no choice but to use 'doze replete with braindead 2-button mouse and key bindings.
Has anyone ported X/unix window managers to run on win32?
The only thing I've found along these lines is TweakUI from MS themselves -- which really only addresses pointer-focus.
I'd be real happy to be able to run anything even remotely like enlightnenment running on win32, retraining fingers to the incredibly low function interface on w2k/xp is just plain painful on a daily basis.
Microsoft has already paid $1.6 billion in its efforts to settle consumer antitrust claims filed in 10 states.
In both the US Fed. and EC cases the fine/penalty/remedy is not really the big economic point.
Once a company has a gulty verdict against it in a federal anti-trust case the door is open for all kinds of civil cases.
Realistically, materially punitive federal judgements would hardly fly even in the EC, let alone the US (where an amazing majority of people actually like the applications that MS produces and a highly vocal segment figure if they're so successful they must be 'good' both technically and in customer service).
So really this kind of suit could sink MS, and in fairness to the feds (even the shamefully inept way the Bush administration runs the show) There is a case to be made that letting the market take care of itself is more efficient in the long run.
As the 'market' has access to the courts MS can look forward to more of these.
Coupled with the likelihood that more and more of their products will become materially irrelevant due to opensourcing of better alternatives I think MS's future isn't as gold plated as it surely looked before the whole anti-trust thing started.
Well that's now it goes with trade, it works better if there's some commonality about the rules. You can ascribe it to hegemony I suppose, however DMCA-like legislation is, I think also adopted in the EU. I don't like it but then I don't like IP theft / warez traders more.
In any case the 'work both ways' comment was intended to say that the rules of international trade and extradition agreements are symmetrical / reciprocal.
US people are going to flock to AU product
Well actually. I own a pair of 'staintune' mufflers for my bike, two bullwhips and have bought a fair amount of kangaroo hide for various projects; all of which were sourced from.au.
"it does not take an MIT rocket scientist to think it would make sense for the largest software company in the world to increase their rights by taking another license"
This is all I can really give you considering the NDA. As for the PIPE deal, I cannot comment at all, but I also would have nothing of interest to add beyond what has already been made public.
I will file close to 20 patents this year for companies in many spaces [mars?]
Anderer's patents:
6,546,418 Method for managing printed medium activated revenue sharing domain name system schemas
6,448,979 Printed medium activated interactive communication of multimedia information, including advertising
6,314,457 Method for managing printed medium activated revenue sharing domain name system schemas
This 'article' is just barely better-written than Halloween X itself, no doubt this is the guy (and hey, there's open-source in action, he writes in (marginally) better style when he knows it's gonna be read by people who actually know about style(1) and diction(1)).
Anyhow, great, he's worked for SCO under NDA, he's got a lot of Darl-like bombast about economic justification for his actions.
He *thinks* he's a rocket scientist (mostly people who say 'it's not rocket science' do think this:-).
He's writing junk patents, apparently for people who haven't figured out that the.com bubble has burst.
Autos are sold at barely over cost, and have been for decades.
The auto companies indeed make most of their profit on manufacturing parts. I don't know the exact figure but if you price the dealer-parts-counter cost of assembling a vehicle it comes up to several times the purchase price of the whole thing.
The dealership probably makes most of *it's* profit on the combination of repair labor and parts mark-up.
And while I'm the exception I do nearly all of my own work thanks. The *only* vehicle work that I've had done by a shop in the last 8 years were recall / warranty repair issues.
Shop labor rates run $75/hour. I don't clear anywhere near 1/2 that much after taxes so it's a clear win to do my own maint. / repair. See Thoreau for the full discussion:-)
And both of them, 'principles' and 'action plan' include language along these lines:
Access to information and knowledge can be promoted by increasing awareness among all stakeholders of the possibilities offered by different software models, including proprietary, open-source and free software, in order to increase competition, access by users, diversity of choice, and to enable all users to develop solutions which best meet their requirements. Affordable access to software should be considered as an important component of a truly inclusive Information Society
_
Now that looks to me like oss/free software is in there. and personally I guess I'm inclined to be pleased that it's there at all, rather than bitching that it's not how 'we' might like it.
And then declaring the entire ting to be a failure.
Which is why I don't rely on 'pundits' such as Barr, Perens or FSF to do my thinking for me.
Anyone who's expecting oss/free to be some major plank in a guidance document under the auspices of the UN is either dreaming or stupid.
As for what the US position might or might not be frankly I don't care. Foreign policy is an arcane art at best, and if the US doesn't often fairly represent *my* views in FP, well I don't think many nations' FP's come much closer.
So for my $0.02 (yes, US) I'm glad to call this a (limited) win and go back to doing what I do which is software and engineering and occasionally bitching out / voting out the pols who can't figure out their ass from a hole in the ground. but ultimately they don't matter I do, I do stuff I make stuff, I write stuff and I'm happy enough to leave the politicing to others.
Seriously, something like 8 years ago I was doing some work with a then-new thermal imaging system, running on an Unix / big-endian hardware platform. I needed to extract data from the images and had done so in the past with data sets collected and processed on dos & os/2.
On contacting the vendor for data formats etc I was told that a group at NASA was doing the same thing so I contacted them and they were able and willing to send me their sources. No license, no problem.
Honestly the results were pretty disappointing. The code was less well-done than what I'd written 2 years before and I didn't / don't consider myself to be all that strong a 'C' coder.
Now I've also seen some of their technology-access programs some of which were effectively free (beer sense for those who care) and programs which were arranged to recoup the costs of 'supporting' something for external release.
All code I've worked with on all of these bases was non-polished stuff, no or little cleanup around the typical hacks involved in in-house development. (i.e. it's great stuff and well suited for moving to open source)
No an ad-hominem is 'he smells bad therefor he is wrong' (your accusing me of being a troll e.g.)
I've read a lot of what Perens says about patents and having a fair bit of experience with the patent system and hold 6 patents total (no not software). Perens does not show up anywhere on the USPTO, and his writing does not lead me to think he understands patent law or practice. So I'm in a fair position to judge whether his opinion is well informed and yes I believe I bring the average up (not hard to do here).
If I made a mistake it was arguing with an idiot (because often people can't tell the difference). (And yes that's an ad-hominem). But let's take on your actual points:
That's why we have expermental physicists, but no expermental mathematicians Allow me to refer you to http://www.expmath.org/ http://www.expmath.info http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/PhilVisMath/ www.geom.umn.edu/locate/expmath
If there were no patents at all, 'free' software (as you call it) would be just as possible.
I was particularly thinking of copyright, on which GPL and all other free licenses I know of depend.
Yes, they [algorithms] are, or at least the study of them is,
No, they are not. Algorithms are widely studied and mostly developed in computer science by people who by and large have little formal mathmatical training, conversely not many mathmaticians concern themselves with algorithms (in either practical or theoretical terms)
Because, like, there's no incentive to industrial espionage now, right?
Not none, simply many orders of magnitude less. I have simply presented a consequence of not adopting patent laws.
Trade secret in a world of patents is a generally less-useful approach because people don't keep secrets well, on the other hand methods and inventions which are practically difficult to enforce are better suited to TS.
Nor is CS entirely limited to algorithms, nor are algorithms a strict subset of mathematics. (Mathematicians (i.e. people with PhD's in math) are notoriously bad at writing efficient software algorithms). In any case as someone else replying to this comment points out are in fact not patentable.
If all technology could be reduced to physics (which it can't), and by extention to maths then by your logic everything is math / not patentable.
Furthermore, "IP" generally includes the very foundation that happens to make 'free' software possible in the current context.
So what preceeded this context? Trade Secret, which in some instances is still the better strategy and is favored by some organizations. If it weren't for the patent system then most inventions would be instead held as trade secrets, which according to the 'mantra' of free/oss would be worse still.
Personally I prefer the exchange of requiring disclosure in exchange for a limited time monopoly is a better system than one which would strongly incentivize industrial espionage.
Perens seems to be a perennial supplier of ill informed *opinion* (as opposed to knowlege) on patents. Slashdot is, of course on average even less well informed about the mechanism and rules of the patent systems.
Correct, I don't think this is necessarily 'fair use' (the decision of the 'first' judge). Obviously it's a legal question, so my opinion really doesn't matter all that much.
I don't think it's vague. People are lazy, too lazy to type 'playboy.com' and so they type 'playboy' into the search bar. If the engine is delivering unsponsored, non-commercial content, then it's almost certainly fair use.
If a search company is going to make commercial use of this behavior, however it's not at all clear that they or their advertisers are allowed to use the competitor's TM in this way.
I don't think the analogy to Comparison advertizing holds. These people are directly driving traffic to their sites *using* a competitor's trademark. Admittedly the search site need not *show* the luser the Playboy(TM) in human-visible form, and this is a nuance that clearly TM law has not had to deal with yet, which is exactly the point.
And yes, Google does an excellent job of separating sponsored from index links. One of the reasons that they've killed other engines in their market is because they don't *do* this kind of sleazy/questionable stuff. Other comments on this story have indicated that Google has been removing TMs from addwords, thus it would seem that they think there's something to this case / point.
That you haven't got the first fscking clue how these systems are developed in practice, and that you've hook, line and sinker bought into the political slants of the license 'theories'.
1. Linux, not BSD is run like an anarchy. The kernel is done by one group, Gnu, the utils, libs and applications are another, they're not even vaguely in sync with one another and like a sloppy carpenter they're leaving it to the plasterers and painters (Distributions) to make it look good.
2. pass (aside from noting a Goodwin)
3. Small companies obviously vary, I've had both extraordinary good luck with some(most) and less good luck with others. That's called a market, caveat emptor. Particularly smaller software firms I've worked with have been extraordinarily good at listenting to customer requirements and actually responding.
4. Shared Source... ahh now that's an important license type. Didn't want to contrast Public Domain, Artistic, MIT...?
5. As with (1) you've reversed it. The BSD's in fact operate considerably more slowly than Linux in developement pace, however they do so with far better coordination of the various parts. Kernel, Libc, utilities are released together, and probably benefit from the faact that the whole assemblage is tested.
I have *nothing* against any of these systems, some I use, some I don't. Linux works, BSD works and I'm fluent in the advantages and disadvantages of each and can make educated decisions about which is appropriate to a given task.
You've also demonstrated that you don't understand crap about governments. The world has many flavors of democracies, the Linux, BSD, Gnu, Perl communities are all vibrant forms of demorcracies in action (as, by the way are commercial / proprietary vendor - customer environments.)
It's as simple as that. Let me guess you use Debian? or is it Windows?
This is (imo) clearly not a cut and dried case of 'removing a word from the English language'. From what I can read Excite and Nestscape were using trademarked keywords to sell banner advertizing directly competitive to Playboy Inc. business interests and doing so using their TMs.
"Linux" is TM to Linus Torvalds. The poster who thinks these judges decision is a "shame". I wonder if "Linux" were being used to drive search engine clients to Microsoft, Open/Free/NetBSD or whomever, would the politically correct (/.) views be different?
And who's to say that the Judge who "got it right" the first time had a decent understanding of the issues, or didn't have an axe to grind vs the pornography industry. Possibly she can't see the TM on the pages the way it would appear if it were used in a print-advertisement, and ruled accordingly, while anyone understanding that 'content' now exists in code that's not visible.
So it's pretty clear to me that yes PEI has a pretty good case here, that Excite, Netscape and their clients were profiting on PEI's TM's and that the use was commercial (i.e. it's much less of a free-speech issue - *yes* the rules for commercial speech are different). The article wasn't all that clear but it seems that all of this came about because Google was pro-actively seeking a judgement on it's own approach to TM's in search/advertising. Again no surprise here that Google would follow the letter of the law while Excite & Netscape would use a sleaze approach to gain revenues.
Particularly wrt what you say about NDA (although I think you mean drivers written in *violation* of NDAs I want to clarify). Linux contains many device drivers (and particularly Ultra-sparc) which are developed under NDAs. The only platform which I know to disallow code written under NDA is OpenBSD.
About non-compete, well we know they didn't, we know most of the details of the contracts (I think all, 'cause all are part of the court docs). And Novell's disclosures have been clear that IBM is entitled to use code they add to sysV *anywhere* they wish.
I (we) uniformly disagree on the theory that everything IBM added to AIX must not also be added to Linux. Because substantive technologies are not derivative works, specifically:
IBM pretty clearly took a very safe path with JFS, it came from the os/2 version (and I bet they read GPL and forsaw these issues before porting to Linux)
IBM almost certainly did not develop only in the context of AIX/systemV license (i.e. they use jfs, NUMA etc on other platforms),
However, to devil's-advocate this:
Device, filesystem drivers used with Linux may be considered derivative works, even if not shipped with the Linux distribution, and therefor subject to GPL. *Linus* has said exactly this, and while I personally doubt that SCO is going to prevail (see contract details between AT&T/Novell/SCO/IBM which decidedly establish that this type of additions are not restricted to confidentiality or considered deriviative works.
Which means basically that if the FSF had licensed a GPL Unix to IBM, they would right now be taking the reciprocal (but logically identical) position as SCO is with respect to license requirements.
I continue to think SCO loses (and continues to look like halfassed morons), with this tack but remember the Linux community does apply similar logic around IP.
A fair fraction of the 1200 people who live there have had their homes destroyed and/. decides to post an article focusing on the loss of their wifi and the TLD?
Ohh and that's not the 'geek' mind. Imo/imx most geeks/hackers I know actually have a lives and (gasp} do have a sense of proportion in thier lives. Too bad/. doesn't seem to reflect that.
Ok this is not a troll/flame but by all means mod me down, it's only/.
First, caffeine is highly addictive and weight/diet control when addicted to caffeine is extremely difficult, because it interferes with the epinephrine cycle, which in turn regulates blood sugar and blood pressure.
Second, caffeine is widely shown to substantially interfere with REM sleep, the only part of the sleep cycle which provides meaninful 'rest'. This is the particularly insidious element of the addiction: Less REM sleep -> greater 'reward' from consuming caffeine.
Third, caffeine in *Coffee* is among the most widely used drugs, becasue coffee is the 2nd largest commodity market on the planet (trailing far behind oil but still far ahead of all other 'foods'). So yeah lots of people take coffee regularly and lots are addicted to caffeine.
As pointed out above, it's entirely possible that a fair fraction of the benefits found in the study are attributable to the anti-oxidants in coffee, coffee also contains a bunch of other alkaloids besides the caffeine.
Finaly, the myth that caffeine is required to do geek/technical work is just that, a myth. Wired, jittery programmers don't do well at sustained/quality output (ymmv). When I need to work really extended hours, caffeine is the first thing I eliminate. I can, at a pinch work thru technical problems for 24-hour or longer stints, caffiene will just interfere more once serious fatigue begins to set in, learned this nearly 3 decades ago:-).
All of which I've learned over the years to avoid by trying to plan work out so that emergency sessions aren't needed, I'm to damned old to put in that kind of burnout time on a regular basis.
Weather patterns are *observed* to be the largest (hard to predict), cause of variation in earth's position. in particular as I said, the effect of monsoons impacting the himalayas.
I've now read a few of your other posts and seen that you have a bit of mistrust of government spending, not a bad thing in and of itself. However in this case as in many others the assumption that something is unwarranted leads to erroneous conclusions.
I'm reminded of the US Senator who used to hand out the 'Golden Fleece' awards standing before congress waiving a swatch of Kevlar(tm) and complaining that it was not an effective armor for battleships. Great soundbite, smart politics, stupid and wrong point.
It is also my understanding that leap-seconds were an artifact of atomic clocks and has been discontinued.... The atomic clocks, you see, are more accurate than the Earth; what are we trying to measure after all?
We already established that, we're establishing the frame of reference with a degree of accuracy necessary to hit a target with meter-accuracy. Because CEP directly limits the effectiveness of weaponry (each time you reduce the target-delivery error by half you increase the payload effectiveness by a factor of 4). I would think that someone with military experience would grok this.
Before even considering the political advantages of being able to use conventional weapons for tasks that used to require tactical nukes, the direct savings of lives and money is obviously paid off by the ability to use smaller payloads.
I have an acquaintance at whom (or whose behavior) this is directly aimed; who routinely drives a 3 ton pickup truck, often with his laptop affixed to a installed bracket playing DVDs. Dumb.
Thankyou, because I expect there are a lot of people doing this crap I'm perfectly glad if the law wants to also restrict the front-seat passenger also watching DVDs which would likely distract the vehicle operator.
Toys are toys, if you want to play with your car rather than drive it then buy a big enough piece of land that you can get in a wreck without killing anyone else.
Re:As no one got it right in the earlier article
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Happy ny to you also!
Well it's called bootstrapping for a reason;-) And yes this amounts to someone's job but its more useful (necessary) than your post suggests.
Anyhow no, this is not bogus, here roughly was my friend's conversation with the guy at NIST:
Engineer How do you calculate spatial position (exactly)? NIST Obviously first we know precession and nutation, these are easily predictable. Engineer So that's exact, the whole story? NIST No, there are some additional varriations. Engineer What are those? NIST That's my job I don't know what was discussed about tides etc .... discussion of effects of e.g. monsoon -> himalayas
It shouldn't be too hard to think why this is useful. A one second error in time frame of reference can result in a.24 nautical mile (444 meter) navigational meter.
When doing offshore navigation manually by sextant of course this might be acceptable, it's damned hard to shoot a LOP to better than a half mile accuracy anyway. However GPS obviously is intended to be accurate down to a few meters.
Whether or not you agree that the ability to drop weapons at precise locations is important, the military certainly does consider it to be so( remember, that a conventional weapon dropped with meter-accuracy can be more effective than a far more expensive nuclear munition if dropped with say 200 meter accuracy.
Because the variations we're discussing have matierial impact on precision navigation which is probably how they found out that some of the larger variations are generated by monsoon and other 'large' weather patterns. I find it interesting whether or not it's useful but that's how science often is: someone cares about a phenomenon, usually for a practical reason, and often the answer is not what was expected (i.e. it's science).
And not it's probably not even a fully closed system. at some scale the solar wind must act to provide friction against the atmosphere which in turn transmits the resultant shear forces to the globe and how those forces are transmitted in turn would depend on global weather patterns.
Personally I see value, not pork-barrel cost in tools which allow the military to fulfill it's mission with weapons involving far less collateral damage than would be otherwise possible.
As noone got it right in the earlier article
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In addition to the fact that tides and the moon influence earth's rotation, so does weather.
Particularly, the monsoon season I believe has the largest effect, particularly because the generated winds impact the himalayan mountains.
The combination of a large (albeit distributed) force impacting a large object (himalayas) affects the angular velocity of the earth.
I learned this first because a friend was writing an ephermeris program and got in contact with the guy an NIST who tracks these things. I beleive they can make some predictions of change in rotational velocity based on the force of observed storms.
Also the Navy has built an array of (radio or laser, I forget) interferrometers located in (I believe) the rocky mountains which are used to measure the actual variances against star positions.
The conceptual framework they're working under is wrong. They assume that a single person is the author of a program.
The framework they're working under is that of Engineering practice. When a PE signs off on a job (s)he was no more the sole author of the work product than a software development lead or architect is the sole author.
Is software practice generally anywhere near ready to be held to the kinds of standards applied in structural/civil/electrical/chemical/... engineering practice?
Hell no, it's a no-brainer so in the send of today's standards of quality no this isn't a solution. Also 'software construction' (in general) is far too busy adding (mostly marginally useful) features, generating complexity, generating bugs.
That reality, however does not imply that this is the only way it can be.
100 years ago explosions of steam boilers were not uncommon and our understanding of material science and structural design had some very large holes. Today there are very conservative codes restricting steam power design and PE's who work with these things are required to meet / certify those codes.
Iff the only way to begin to hold software to a similar level of quality requires establishing a PE-stamp for software, then the lawmakers may well come to require same. They don't any more care how it happens then thier predecessors did about setting up the current system of PE licenses, all they care about is getting results and ultimately that will have to mean assigning liability.
That could come about thru several approaches, the point I think is that when (not if) it happens there will be a lot of pain in the process, because the currently sloppy standards of quality in software design will have to go.
So I don't think it's a matter of whether or how but of when. And the pain will probably be felt across all sectors.
Frankly, however by the time any practical progress is made I think OSS will be an even more deeply embedded part of the landscape. I for one hope we're succeeding more in improving actual code quality and less on 'looking like windows' which seems to be the current trend in many OSS systems.
Yup, I've worked with them on a couple of things and while I didn't bother to state it, I fully expect that IBM's investment and technology are well ahead of Sun on this.
Otoh, an intermediate language may still be a good idea, and the better (from my POV) if it were portable.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone ported X/unix window managers to run on win32?
The only thing I've found along these lines is TweakUI from MS themselves -- which really only addresses pointer-focus.
I'd be real happy to be able to run anything even remotely like enlightnenment running on win32, retraining fingers to the incredibly low function interface on w2k/xp is just plain painful on a daily basis.
In both the US Fed. and EC cases the fine/penalty/remedy is not really the big economic point.
Once a company has a gulty verdict against it in a federal anti-trust case the door is open for all kinds of civil cases.
Realistically, materially punitive federal judgements would hardly fly even in the EC, let alone the US (where an amazing majority of people actually like the applications that MS produces and a highly vocal segment figure if they're so successful they must be 'good' both technically and in customer service).
So really this kind of suit could sink MS, and in fairness to the feds (even the shamefully inept way the Bush administration runs the show) There is a case to be made that letting the market take care of itself is more efficient in the long run.
As the 'market' has access to the courts MS can look forward to more of these.
Coupled with the likelihood that more and more of their products will become materially irrelevant due to opensourcing of better alternatives I think MS's future isn't as gold plated as it surely looked before the whole anti-trust thing started.
In any case the 'work both ways' comment was intended to say that the rules of international trade and extradition agreements are symmetrical / reciprocal.
US people are going to flock to AU product
Well actually. I own a pair of 'staintune' mufflers for my bike, two bullwhips and have bought a fair amount of kangaroo hide for various projects; all of which were sourced from .au.
And in anycase in both cases international agreements generally work both ways.
Certainly extradition is reciprocal.
Anyhow, great, he's worked for SCO under NDA, he's got a lot of Darl-like bombast about economic justification for his actions.
He *thinks* he's a rocket scientist (mostly people who say 'it's not rocket science' do think this :-).
He's writing junk patents, apparently for people who haven't figured out that the .com bubble has burst.
The auto companies indeed make most of their profit on manufacturing parts. I don't know the exact figure but if you price the dealer-parts-counter cost of assembling a vehicle it comes up to several times the purchase price of the whole thing.
The dealership probably makes most of *it's* profit on the combination of repair labor and parts mark-up.
And while I'm the exception I do nearly all of my own work thanks. The *only* vehicle work that I've had done by a shop in the last 8 years were recall / warranty repair issues.
Shop labor rates run $75/hour. I don't clear anywhere near 1/2 that much after taxes so it's a clear win to do my own maint. / repair. See Thoreau for the full discussion :-)
Diversity is certainly a strength of Linux.
Now that looks to me like oss/free software is in there. and personally I guess I'm inclined to be pleased that it's there at all, rather than bitching that it's not how 'we' might like it.
And then declaring the entire ting to be a failure.
Which is why I don't rely on 'pundits' such as Barr, Perens or FSF to do my thinking for me.
Anyone who's expecting oss/free to be some major plank in a guidance document under the auspices of the UN is either dreaming or stupid.
As for what the US position might or might not be frankly I don't care. Foreign policy is an arcane art at best, and if the US doesn't often fairly represent *my* views in FP, well I don't think many nations' FP's come much closer.
So for my $0.02 (yes, US) I'm glad to call this a (limited) win and go back to doing what I do which is software and engineering and occasionally bitching out / voting out the pols who can't figure out their ass from a hole in the ground. but ultimately they don't matter I do, I do stuff I make stuff, I write stuff and I'm happy enough to leave the politicing to others.
Seriously, something like 8 years ago I was doing some work with a then-new thermal imaging system, running on an Unix / big-endian hardware platform. I needed to extract data from the images and had done so in the past with data sets collected and processed on dos & os/2.
On contacting the vendor for data formats etc I was told that a group at NASA was doing the same thing so I contacted them and they were able and willing to send me their sources. No license, no problem.
Honestly the results were pretty disappointing. The code was less well-done than what I'd written 2 years before and I didn't / don't consider myself to be all that strong a 'C' coder.
Now I've also seen some of their technology-access programs some of which were effectively free (beer sense for those who care) and programs which were arranged to recoup the costs of 'supporting' something for external release.
All code I've worked with on all of these bases was non-polished stuff, no or little cleanup around the typical hacks involved in in-house development. (i.e. it's great stuff and well suited for moving to open source)
I've read a lot of what Perens says about patents and having a fair bit of experience with the patent system and hold 6 patents total (no not software). Perens does not show up anywhere on the USPTO, and his writing does not lead me to think he understands patent law or practice. So I'm in a fair position to judge whether his opinion is well informed and yes I believe I bring the average up (not hard to do here).
If I made a mistake it was arguing with an idiot (because often people can't tell the difference). (And yes that's an ad-hominem). But let's take on your actual points:
That's why we have expermental physicists, but no expermental mathematicians
Allow me to refer you to http://www.expmath.org/ http://www.expmath.info http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/PhilVisMath/ www.geom.umn.edu/locate/expmath
If there were no patents at all, 'free' software (as you call it) would be just as possible.
I was particularly thinking of copyright, on which GPL and all other free licenses I know of depend.
Yes, they [algorithms] are, or at least the study of them is,
No, they are not. Algorithms are widely studied and mostly developed in computer science by people who by and large have little formal mathmatical training, conversely not many mathmaticians concern themselves with algorithms (in either practical or theoretical terms)
Because, like, there's no incentive to industrial espionage now, right?
Not none, simply many orders of magnitude less. I have simply presented a consequence of not adopting patent laws.
Trade secret in a world of patents is a generally less-useful approach because people don't keep secrets well, on the other hand methods and inventions which are practically difficult to enforce are better suited to TS.
If all technology could be reduced to physics (which it can't), and by extention to maths then by your logic everything is math / not patentable.
Furthermore, "IP" generally includes the very foundation that happens to make 'free' software possible in the current context.
So what preceeded this context? Trade Secret, which in some instances is still the better strategy and is favored by some organizations. If it weren't for the patent system then most inventions would be instead held as trade secrets, which according to the 'mantra' of free/oss would be worse still.
Personally I prefer the exchange of requiring disclosure in exchange for a limited time monopoly is a better system than one which would strongly incentivize industrial espionage.
Perens seems to be a perennial supplier of ill informed *opinion* (as opposed to knowlege) on patents. Slashdot is, of course on average even less well informed about the mechanism and rules of the patent systems.
But then "it's only /.".
I don't think it's vague. People are lazy, too lazy to type 'playboy.com' and so they type 'playboy' into the search bar. If the engine is delivering unsponsored, non-commercial content, then it's almost certainly fair use.
If a search company is going to make commercial use of this behavior, however it's not at all clear that they or their advertisers are allowed to use the competitor's TM in this way.
I don't think the analogy to Comparison advertizing holds. These people are directly driving traffic to their sites *using* a competitor's trademark. Admittedly the search site need not *show* the luser the Playboy(TM) in human-visible form, and this is a nuance that clearly TM law has not had to deal with yet, which is exactly the point.
And yes, Google does an excellent job of separating sponsored from index links. One of the reasons that they've killed other engines in their market is because they don't *do* this kind of sleazy/questionable stuff. Other comments on this story have indicated that Google has been removing TMs from addwords, thus it would seem that they think there's something to this case / point.
1. Linux, not BSD is run like an anarchy. The kernel is done by one group, Gnu, the utils, libs and applications are another, they're not even vaguely in sync with one another and like a sloppy carpenter they're leaving it to the plasterers and painters (Distributions) to make it look good.
2. pass (aside from noting a Goodwin)
3. Small companies obviously vary, I've had both extraordinary good luck with some(most) and less good luck with others. That's called a market, caveat emptor. Particularly smaller software firms I've worked with have been extraordinarily good at listenting to customer requirements and actually responding.
4. Shared Source ... ahh now that's an important license type. Didn't want to contrast Public Domain, Artistic, MIT ...?
5. As with (1) you've reversed it. The BSD's in fact operate considerably more slowly than Linux in developement pace, however they do so with far better coordination of the various parts. Kernel, Libc, utilities are released together, and probably benefit from the faact that the whole assemblage is tested.
I have *nothing* against any of these systems, some I use, some I don't. Linux works, BSD works and I'm fluent in the advantages and disadvantages of each and can make educated decisions about which is appropriate to a given task.
You've also demonstrated that you don't understand crap about governments. The world has many flavors of democracies, the Linux, BSD, Gnu, Perl communities are all vibrant forms of demorcracies in action (as, by the way are commercial / proprietary vendor - customer environments.)
It's as simple as that. Let me guess you use Debian? or is it Windows?
"Linux" is TM to Linus Torvalds. The poster who thinks these judges decision is a "shame". I wonder if "Linux" were being used to drive search engine clients to Microsoft, Open/Free/NetBSD or whomever, would the politically correct (/.) views be different?
And who's to say that the Judge who "got it right" the first time had a decent understanding of the issues, or didn't have an axe to grind vs the pornography industry. Possibly she can't see the TM on the pages the way it would appear if it were used in a print-advertisement, and ruled accordingly, while anyone understanding that 'content' now exists in code that's not visible.
So it's pretty clear to me that yes PEI has a pretty good case here, that Excite, Netscape and their clients were profiting on PEI's TM's and that the use was commercial (i.e. it's much less of a free-speech issue - *yes* the rules for commercial speech are different). The article wasn't all that clear but it seems that all of this came about because Google was pro-actively seeking a judgement on it's own approach to TM's in search/advertising. Again no surprise here that Google would follow the letter of the law while Excite & Netscape would use a sleaze approach to gain revenues.
Particularly wrt what you say about NDA (although I think you mean drivers written in *violation* of NDAs I want to clarify). Linux contains many device drivers (and particularly Ultra-sparc) which are developed under NDAs. The only platform which I know to disallow code written under NDA is OpenBSD. About non-compete, well we know they didn't, we know most of the details of the contracts (I think all, 'cause all are part of the court docs). And Novell's disclosures have been clear that IBM is entitled to use code they add to sysV *anywhere* they wish.
The point being that it's the same interpretations of copyright law that are at issue.
How FSF/GPL or SCO respectively are trying to use that leverage their positions are indeed as you point out different.
I (we) uniformly disagree on the theory that everything IBM added to AIX must not also be added to Linux. Because substantive technologies are not derivative works, specifically:
However, to devil's-advocate this:
Device, filesystem drivers used with Linux may be considered derivative works, even if not shipped with the Linux distribution, and therefor subject to GPL. *Linus* has said exactly this, and while I personally doubt that SCO is going to prevail (see contract details between AT&T/Novell/SCO/IBM which decidedly establish that this type of additions are not restricted to confidentiality or considered deriviative works.
Which means basically that if the FSF had licensed a GPL Unix to IBM, they would right now be taking the reciprocal (but logically identical) position as SCO is with respect to license requirements.
I continue to think SCO loses (and continues to look like halfassed morons), with this tack but remember the Linux community does apply similar logic around IP.
Ohh and that's not the 'geek' mind. Imo/imx most geeks/hackers I know actually have a lives and (gasp} do have a sense of proportion in thier lives. Too bad /. doesn't seem to reflect that.
Ok this is not a troll/flame but by all means mod me down, it's only /.
First, caffeine is highly addictive and weight/diet control when addicted to caffeine is extremely difficult, because it interferes with the epinephrine cycle, which in turn regulates blood sugar and blood pressure.
Second, caffeine is widely shown to substantially interfere with REM sleep, the only part of the sleep cycle which provides meaninful 'rest'. This is the particularly insidious element of the addiction: Less REM sleep -> greater 'reward' from consuming caffeine.
Third, caffeine in *Coffee* is among the most widely used drugs, becasue coffee is the 2nd largest commodity market on the planet (trailing far behind oil but still far ahead of all other 'foods'). So yeah lots of people take coffee regularly and lots are addicted to caffeine.
As pointed out above, it's entirely possible that a fair fraction of the benefits found in the study are attributable to the anti-oxidants in coffee, coffee also contains a bunch of other alkaloids besides the caffeine.
Finaly, the myth that caffeine is required to do geek/technical work is just that, a myth. Wired, jittery programmers don't do well at sustained/quality output (ymmv). When I need to work really extended hours, caffeine is the first thing I eliminate. I can, at a pinch work thru technical problems for 24-hour or longer stints, caffiene will just interfere more once serious fatigue begins to set in, learned this nearly 3 decades ago :-).
All of which I've learned over the years to avoid by trying to plan work out so that emergency sessions aren't needed, I'm to damned old to put in that kind of burnout time on a regular basis.
I've now read a few of your other posts and seen that you have a bit of mistrust of government spending, not a bad thing in and of itself. However in this case as in many others the assumption that something is unwarranted leads to erroneous conclusions.
I'm reminded of the US Senator who used to hand out the 'Golden Fleece' awards standing before congress waiving a swatch of Kevlar(tm) and complaining that it was not an effective armor for battleships. Great soundbite, smart politics, stupid and wrong point.
It is also my understanding that leap-seconds were an artifact of atomic clocks and has been discontinued .... The atomic clocks, you see, are more accurate than the Earth; what are we trying to measure after all?
We already established that, we're establishing the frame of reference with a degree of accuracy necessary to hit a target with meter-accuracy. Because CEP directly limits the effectiveness of weaponry (each time you reduce the target-delivery error by half you increase the payload effectiveness by a factor of 4). I would think that someone with military experience would grok this.
Before even considering the political advantages of being able to use conventional weapons for tasks that used to require tactical nukes, the direct savings of lives and money is obviously paid off by the ability to use smaller payloads.
Thankyou, because I expect there are a lot of people doing this crap I'm perfectly glad if the law wants to also restrict the front-seat passenger also watching DVDs which would likely distract the vehicle operator.
Toys are toys, if you want to play with your car rather than drive it then buy a big enough piece of land that you can get in a wreck without killing anyone else.
Well it's called bootstrapping for a reason ;-) And yes this amounts to someone's job but its more useful (necessary) than your post suggests.
Anyhow no, this is not bogus, here roughly was my friend's conversation with the guy at NIST:
Engineer How do you calculate spatial position (exactly)?
....
NIST Obviously first we know precession and nutation, these are easily predictable.
Engineer So that's exact, the whole story?
NIST No, there are some additional varriations.
Engineer What are those?
NIST That's my job
I don't know what was discussed about tides etc
discussion of effects of e.g. monsoon -> himalayas
It shouldn't be too hard to think why this is useful. A one second error in time frame of reference can result in a .24 nautical mile (444 meter) navigational meter.
When doing offshore navigation manually by sextant of course this might be acceptable, it's damned hard to shoot a LOP to better than a half mile accuracy anyway. However GPS obviously is intended to be accurate down to a few meters.
Whether or not you agree that the ability to drop weapons at precise locations is important, the military certainly does consider it to be so( remember, that a conventional weapon dropped with meter-accuracy can be more effective than a far more expensive nuclear munition if dropped with say 200 meter accuracy.
Because the variations we're discussing have matierial impact on precision navigation which is probably how they found out that some of the larger variations are generated by monsoon and other 'large' weather patterns. I find it interesting whether or not it's useful but that's how science often is: someone cares about a phenomenon, usually for a practical reason, and often the answer is not what was expected (i.e. it's science).
And not it's probably not even a fully closed system. at some scale the solar wind must act to provide friction against the atmosphere which in turn transmits the resultant shear forces to the globe and how those forces are transmitted in turn would depend on global weather patterns.
Personally I see value, not pork-barrel cost in tools which allow the military to fulfill it's mission with weapons involving far less collateral damage than would be otherwise possible.
Particularly, the monsoon season I believe has the largest effect, particularly because the generated winds impact the himalayan mountains.
The combination of a large (albeit distributed) force impacting a large object (himalayas) affects the angular velocity of the earth.
I learned this first because a friend was writing an ephermeris program and got in contact with the guy an NIST who tracks these things. I beleive they can make some predictions of change in rotational velocity based on the force of observed storms.
Also the Navy has built an array of (radio or laser, I forget) interferrometers located in (I believe) the rocky mountains which are used to measure the actual variances against star positions.
The framework they're working under is that of Engineering practice. When a PE signs off on a job (s)he was no more the sole author of the work product than a software development lead or architect is the sole author.
Is software practice generally anywhere near ready to be held to the kinds of standards applied in structural/civil/electrical/chemical/... engineering practice?
Hell no, it's a no-brainer so in the send of today's standards of quality no this isn't a solution. Also 'software construction' (in general) is far too busy adding (mostly marginally useful) features, generating complexity, generating bugs.
That reality, however does not imply that this is the only way it can be.
100 years ago explosions of steam boilers were not uncommon and our understanding of material science and structural design had some very large holes. Today there are very conservative codes restricting steam power design and PE's who work with these things are required to meet / certify those codes.
Iff the only way to begin to hold software to a similar level of quality requires establishing a PE-stamp for software, then the lawmakers may well come to require same. They don't any more care how it happens then thier predecessors did about setting up the current system of PE licenses, all they care about is getting results and ultimately that will have to mean assigning liability.
That could come about thru several approaches, the point I think is that when (not if) it happens there will be a lot of pain in the process, because the currently sloppy standards of quality in software design will have to go.
So I don't think it's a matter of whether or how but of when. And the pain will probably be felt across all sectors.
Frankly, however by the time any practical progress is made I think OSS will be an even more deeply embedded part of the landscape. I for one hope we're succeeding more in improving actual code quality and less on 'looking like windows' which seems to be the current trend in many OSS systems.
Otoh, an intermediate language may still be a good idea, and the better (from my POV) if it were portable.