You could check out the
Habitat for Humanity - Infrared Insulation Test. It seems they got a special camera from the DOE. I remember a few years back my utility company had a camera that they would use to check out your house if you gave them a call. You can also get IR film for 35mm cameras, but not sure it would do a very good job.
I understand what you are feeling. You've learned some cool stuff and now you want to do something with it. Think of it as a "hello world" program in hardware.
I remember going to a local college's "Engineering Fair" when I was in highschool. Lots of cool stuff: A tic-tac-toe computer made out of discrete parts A program which printed random poetry. Various "Op-art displays on a monitor (This was in the early '70s) ...
A couple of suggestions:
Implement a simple two player game in hardware. Like the little poker calculators. Check out sites like Viridian which have thingamajiggy design contests from time to time.
Interesting that court decisions are also called opinions. In fact, Bush's presidency is just a majority opinion. Gore is president too, according to a dissenting opinion.
So I guess we can't sue the court for libel now either...
consumers should have the same rights they'd enjoy under existing copyright legislation when buying a CD or a book. They can't make copies, but they can resell what they own.
Makes sensee to me, but the EUlA makes it clear that they don't own anything!
The RIAA seems clearly out-of-line in their legal attempt to stop the publication of your work. Hopefully your legal case against them will set usable boundaries for Intellectual Property disputes in future.
My question is: How did the RIAA get themselves in this situation? It appears really stupid for an organization of their stature. Didn't they know where to find a good mathematician when they developed SDMI? With all due respect, surely you weren't the only guy out there who could solve this problem. Then to lay it out on the table and bet the world, it couldn't be read. It just all seems like a comedy of bad management.
IANAL, but I keep re-reading your post, then re-reading the license, and I don't see a problem. The "Lesser" GPL was designed to allow combining free software with proprietary software. All the gyrations in point 5 regarding compiling vs. linking and uses vs. derives are just technical ways of keeping the free software distinct and free. Point 6 was written for situations such as yours. Since you expressed the desire to keep FLAC free, go for 6c or 6d and you should be home free.
Cute, but wrong! I've never attempted to play a game under wine. Hell, I've never attempted to play a game under Linux. (I don't think my video card would make it a very pleasant experience...)
Two programs that I remember using productively are SyStat and Inspiration. Yeah, I got a lot of segfaults at first, but after enough tweaking it ran stably. Which brings me to my point.
Let the gamers do the tweaking and we'll all benefit!
If the first 11 posts are any indication, gamers are a bunch of idiots.
I've fussed with WINE for a couple of years now, occasionally getting some useful work out of it. I think WineX is a great idea. Games should give WINE a pretty good workout. And if it crashes, hey, it was only a game. This should benefit all WINE users.
Bf is a lot of fun, but not light in the sense of perl or scheme. Since the article didn't define light language, I'll give it a shot. Looking at their choice of languages, light appears to mean: easy to program, easy to understand, but powerful, interpreted languages. Bf is none of the above. About all you can say for it is Turing-complete!
Of course I RTFA! And I almost wrote a comment like yours, but
Boeing Commercial Airplanes will develop and test an electrically powered demonstrator airplane,
so they are building a plane. It looks to me like they are setting the bar low. No, I don't expect them to come out with a fuel-cell powered business jet, that wouldn't be possible would it, but they are exploring environmentally friendly fuel cell technology for future Boeing products. Note the plural.
The exciting thing about this announcement is that a sector which uses huge amounts of fossil fuel is looking into environmentally sound alternatives!
The Net can, in fact, be used to make money and suppress freedom.
I'm not sure quite what Jon means here. Sure some companies make money by restricting information, but that's been true for a long time. Most school districts in the U.S. have some sort of filtering software in place and there are plenty of firewall companies out there, some are even Open Source.
But suppressing freedom? I think that even heavily filtered Internet access is better than nothing. How are Saudis less free by having 90% of the Internet available to them than by having no Internet?
Finally, if I'm reading it correctly, even the Open Source Definition wouldn't prevent companies from doing business with Saudi Arabia, so I'm not sure how critical we can be of companies doing business as usual.
Most micromotors demonstrated to date have simply succeeded to overcome the viscous drag on the rotor, leaving no power to drive other com-ponents and limiting their use for low-load actuation.
Unlike scientists who keep research secret until it is published in a peer-review journal, some software developers -- who get little credit when their code leads to a genetic breakthrough -- want to share their work as soon as it leaves their keyboards.
It's an old debate in the world of computing -- and a new culture clash in bioinformatics...
It seems like there is some confusion here. Sure there is some time-lag between the research and its publication, but peer-reviewed journals are in fact similar to bugzilla.
The problem being addressed by the petition isn't what is published in peer-reviewed journals, its what isn't being published. Making scientific techniques proprietary not only slows the advance of science, but takes technology which could benefit the public and allows a few people to benefit disproportionate to their contribution.
If some goofball left some link to a Word document with his passwords in it, he gets what he deserves.
This seems to be the most common early response to the article and I agree up to a point. The problem is where to stop. Several times I've found stuff in Google's cache that I know were password-protected on the website. I was grateful, but wondered how they retrieved them. Did they purchase a subscription? Did the owners give them access for the benefit of having the site catalogued?
Another issue appears when they start crawling directories. It's never obvious which directories were meant to be public readable and which ones weren't, but Google undoubtedly uses techniques beyond that of the casual browser. As what point do they become crackers?
A number of years ago, I had a shell account on a Unix system. It was amazing where I could go, what I could see on the system with a little bit of ingenuity. When I pointed this out to the sysadmin, he treated me like a criminal. Okay, maybe I should have stopped when I started getting warning messages;-), but the fact is that Google could probably get behind at least 50% of firewalls if they wanted to.
This essay is probably the best explanation of the philosophic difference between Free Software and Open Source Software. This difference is real and significant; RMS is not just making this up or being obstinate. Criterion 9 of the Open Source Definition is the main point of contention.
My reading of the debate is that at this point it is healthy and indicates the continued evolution and dynamism of OS/Free software. The danger is that the current popularity of the Open Source model would sideline advocates of the Free Software model and lead to a destructive schism. All voices need to be heard and understood.
"Since we don't know how to effectively modify these machines or create new ones just yet, the trick is to find naturally existing machines that, when combined, can be steered to actually compute."
This sounds more like learning to control chemical reactions than building computers! They used an existing "computer", they didn't build it.
When I was a boy, thirty-five years ago, Frontier Airlines flew into my hometown, pop. 12,000. I can only assume that this was not exceptional at the time.
What has changed? Highways have gotten a lot better. Airlines have been deregulated. High tech safety/navigation equipment have made airports much more costly to run.
I kind of like the idea of small airports being used again by normal travelers, but I'm not convinced that it can happen without huge government spending.
This is not a problem with distros or package management systems as much as it is an issue of poor system administration.
This may have held water when most *nix users were IT professionals, but most Linux users today are not, and if Linux is going to gain any desktop market share, they will not be.
The whole point of distros is that most users are incapable of administering a system. Joe user will burn a CD, make choices during the install process, update/install packages using a package manager and cross their fingers when they have to tweak the system.
I've been using Mandrake for a couple of years and hadn't noticed this problem. (RPMs provide some insulation) But I totally agree that its not the way things should be done. The biggest problem, as I see it is that it allows for no redundancy in the names of binaries. What if someone slips up and includes a filename in a package duplicating one already in/usr/bin. If its a new install I'll be alert enough to abort, but if its a re-install I'll assume it just didn't get cleaned up from the previous install and overwrite.
Interestingly enough,/usr/share/doc, does install each app in a separate directory...
Slashdot Mirror
While looking up info on IR film I came across * Why you can't record heat with IR film, nor with ordinary videocams: IR & heat.
Apparently anything longer than red is IR, but the film or sensor only goes slightly past visible.
You could check out the Habitat for Humanity - Infrared Insulation Test. It seems they got a special camera from the DOE. I remember a few years back my utility company had a camera that they would use to check out your house if you gave them a call. You can also get IR film for 35mm cameras, but not sure it would do a very good job.
I'll ask the question everyone is thinking. Has it been hacked. How does it do Linux?
I understand what you are feeling. You've learned some cool stuff and now you want to do something with it. Think of it as a "hello world" program in hardware.
I remember going to a local college's "Engineering Fair" when I was in highschool. Lots of cool stuff:
A tic-tac-toe computer made out of discrete parts
A program which printed random poetry.
Various "Op-art displays on a monitor (This was in the early '70s)
...
A couple of suggestions:
Implement a simple two player game in hardware. Like the little poker calculators.
Check out sites like Viridian which have thingamajiggy design contests from time to time.
Interesting that court decisions are also called opinions. In fact, Bush's presidency is just a majority opinion. Gore is president too, according to a dissenting opinion.
So I guess we can't sue the court for libel now either...
Case law on EULAs is still a little muddled, but at least one synopsis page is up at Dan Bernstein's site [cr.yp.to]
Dan Bernstein's site is more than a little muddled, but at least he gave a good link to the applicable Federal law.
The law makes a clear distinction between ownership and possession.
The pdf is still slash-dotted...
Has anyone mirrored it yet?
consumers should have the same rights they'd enjoy under existing copyright legislation when buying a CD or a book. They can't make copies, but they can resell what they own.
Makes sensee to me, but the EUlA makes it clear that they don't own anything!
This one will go to the Supreme Court.
First, congratulations on a nice piece of work!
The RIAA seems clearly out-of-line in their legal attempt to stop the publication of your work. Hopefully your legal case against them will set usable boundaries for Intellectual Property disputes in future.
My question is: How did the RIAA get themselves in this situation? It appears really stupid for an organization of their stature. Didn't they know where to find a good mathematician when they developed SDMI? With all due respect, surely you weren't the only guy out there who could solve this problem. Then to lay it out on the table and bet the world, it couldn't be read. It just all seems like a comedy of bad management.
How did it happen???
IANAL, but I keep re-reading your post, then re-reading the license, and I don't see a problem. The "Lesser" GPL was designed to allow combining free software with proprietary software. All the gyrations in point 5 regarding compiling vs. linking and uses vs. derives are just technical ways of keeping the free software distinct and free. Point 6 was written for situations such as yours. Since you expressed the desire to keep FLAC free, go for 6c or 6d and you should be home free.
Cute, but wrong! I've never attempted to play a game under wine. Hell, I've never attempted to play a game under Linux. (I don't think my video card would make it a very pleasant experience...)
Two programs that I remember using productively are SyStat and Inspiration. Yeah, I got a lot of segfaults at first, but after enough tweaking it ran stably. Which brings me to my point.
Let the gamers do the tweaking and we'll all benefit!
If the first 11 posts are any indication, gamers are a bunch of idiots.
I've fussed with WINE for a couple of years now, occasionally getting some useful work out of it. I think WineX is a great idea. Games should give WINE a pretty good workout. And if it crashes, hey, it was only a game. This should benefit all WINE users.
try the Brainfuck language
Bf is a lot of fun, but not light in the sense of perl or scheme. Since the article didn't define light language, I'll give it a shot. Looking at their choice of languages, light appears to mean: easy to program, easy to understand, but powerful, interpreted languages. Bf is none of the above. About all you can say for it is Turing-complete!
Of course I RTFA! And I almost wrote a comment like yours, but
Boeing Commercial Airplanes will develop and test an electrically powered demonstrator airplane,
so they are building a plane. It looks to me like they are setting the bar low. No, I don't expect them to come out with a fuel-cell powered business jet, that wouldn't be possible would it, but they are exploring environmentally friendly fuel cell technology for future Boeing products. Note the plural.
The exciting thing about this announcement is that a sector which uses huge amounts of fossil fuel is looking into environmentally sound alternatives!
Check out the book's online community.
Excerpts, discussions and more!!
The Net can, in fact, be used to make money and suppress freedom.
I'm not sure quite what Jon means here. Sure some companies make money by restricting information, but that's been true for a long time. Most school districts in the U.S. have some sort of filtering software in place and there are plenty of firewall companies out there, some are even Open Source.
But suppressing freedom? I think that even heavily filtered Internet access is better than nothing. How are Saudis less free by having 90% of the Internet available to them than by having no Internet?
Finally, if I'm reading it correctly, even the Open Source Definition wouldn't prevent companies from doing business with Saudi Arabia, so I'm not sure how critical we can be of companies doing business as usual.
Most micromotors demonstrated to date have simply succeeded to overcome the viscous drag on the rotor, leaving no power to drive other com-ponents and limiting their use for low-load actuation.
Luc Frechette just published ASSESSMENT OF VISCOUS FLOWS IN HIGH-SPEED MICRO ROTATING MACHINERY FOR ENERGY CONVERSION APPLICATIONS in which he lays out the constraints of micro-motors and how he hopes to overcome them.
Unlike scientists who keep research secret until it is published in a peer-review journal, some software developers -- who get little credit when their code leads to a genetic breakthrough -- want to share their work as soon as it leaves their keyboards.
It's an old debate in the world of computing -- and a new culture clash in bioinformatics...
It seems like there is some confusion here. Sure there is some time-lag between the research and its publication, but peer-reviewed journals are in fact similar to bugzilla.
The problem being addressed by the petition isn't what is published in peer-reviewed journals, its what isn't being published. Making scientific techniques proprietary not only slows the advance of science, but takes technology which could benefit the public and allows a few people to benefit disproportionate to their contribution.
Similar, but the differences are important.
The GPL is saying you don't compromise the proprietary license by packaging some free software with it.
The Open Source Definition is saying you don't compromise the Open Source license by packaging proprietary software with it.
If some goofball left some link to a Word document with his passwords in it, he gets what he deserves.
;-), but the fact is that Google could probably get behind at least 50% of firewalls if they wanted to.
This seems to be the most common early response to the article and I agree up to a point. The problem is where to stop. Several times I've found stuff in Google's cache that I know were password-protected on the website. I was grateful, but wondered how they retrieved them. Did they purchase a subscription? Did the owners give them access for the benefit of having the site catalogued?
Another issue appears when they start crawling directories. It's never obvious which directories were meant to be public readable and which ones weren't, but Google undoubtedly uses techniques beyond that of the casual browser. As what point do they become crackers?
A number of years ago, I had a shell account on a Unix system. It was amazing where I could go, what I could see on the system with a little bit of ingenuity. When I pointed this out to the sysadmin, he treated me like a criminal. Okay, maybe I should have stopped when I started getting warning messages
How far is too far in the search for information?
This essay is probably the best explanation of the philosophic difference between Free Software and Open Source Software. This difference is real and significant; RMS is not just making this up or being obstinate. Criterion 9 of the Open Source Definition is the main point of contention.
My reading of the debate is that at this point it is healthy and indicates the continued evolution and dynamism of OS/Free software. The danger is that the current popularity of the Open Source model would sideline advocates of the Free Software model and lead to a destructive schism. All voices need to be heard and understood.
"Since we don't know how to effectively modify these machines or create new ones just yet, the trick is to find naturally existing machines that, when combined, can be steered to actually compute."
This sounds more like learning to control chemical reactions than building computers! They used an existing "computer", they didn't build it.
When I was a boy, thirty-five years ago, Frontier Airlines flew into my hometown, pop. 12,000. I can only assume that this was not exceptional at the time.
What has changed? Highways have gotten a lot better. Airlines have been deregulated. High tech safety/navigation equipment have made airports much more costly to run.
I kind of like the idea of small airports being used again by normal travelers, but I'm not convinced that it can happen without huge government spending.
This is not a problem with distros or package management systems as much as it is an issue of poor system administration.
This may have held water when most *nix users were IT professionals, but most Linux users today are not, and if Linux is going to gain any desktop market share, they will not be.
The whole point of distros is that most users are incapable of administering a system. Joe user will burn a CD, make choices during the install process, update/install packages using a package manager and cross their fingers when they have to tweak the system.
I've been using Mandrake for a couple of years and hadn't noticed this problem. (RPMs provide some insulation) But I totally agree that its not the way things should be done. The biggest problem, as I see it is that it allows for no redundancy in the names of binaries. What if someone slips up and includes a filename in a package duplicating one already in /usr/bin. If its a new install I'll be alert enough to abort, but if its a re-install I'll assume it just didn't get cleaned up from the previous install and overwrite.
/usr/share/doc, does install each app in a separate directory...
Interestingly enough,