If you guys are in the U.S., shouldn't you be able to file a Class Action Suit?
I mean, I too am one of those who embarked in that ship of fools, thinking I was surfing the wave of the future with my 8 Cell processors.
It'd be nice to see an international Class Action Suit (like those with breast implants, etc.)
Not to mention they ruined YellowDog's business.
I fucking hate Sony. You don't do that to customers.
And, BTW, look how they marketed the PS3...such a lame way. What they should have done was set up PS3s with Linux, demonstrating that not only you also get a Blu-Ray player but, in addition to that, get to install a cool OS so you can read your e-mail from your huge HD screen in your living room.
Sony is severely idiotic in so many ways it's pathetic.
The thing in Europe AFAIK is that if you're a scientist you live under tremendous pressure but you make just a tiny more money than if you were a lab technician that leaves 17:00 sharp (while you get to spend your weekend with your test tubes).
So why would you wanna have a career that offers no job security, little money and puts you under a lot of stress?
You have absolutely no fucking idea how hard it is to start up a "start up" in, say, Brazil. You should meet some people I know. Imagine I make advanced ceramic tips for deep-water off-shore drilling. Now, come into my tiny, tiny office...
Americans have it easy, way easy. Some dude from an elite university comes up with a half-baked obvious idea and venture capitalists whop a shitload of cash on his lap that will put food on his mouth for two years (like he has money problems...) while he develops the product. And if it fails, well, it happens...
Meanwhile, in other shores, some dude with a PhD is loosing his hair over how he's gonna secure a miserable grant to put food on his table to buy milk for the kids, while being pressured to publish in international journals, competing with American scientists with millionaire budgets, until finally the referee will reject his article complaining of his "poor English" (Yeah, well, fuck you referee. Let's see how well you write in Chinese...). But not to worry, someone at some Ivy League institution scans periodically journals where these idiots come from so he can steal some ideas.
Have some respect, will you?
PS: All true stories. PS2: Capitalism was not a US American invention...Can you be any more ignorant?
Your comment is of a very simple-minded, bottom-line thinking. This funding returns in terms of expanded international cooperation, something the US universities have realized a long time ago. These scientific ties last a lifetime, usually.
Besides, it's very arrogant of you to think other countries have nothing to give back. For instance, does Europe have the number of plant species that can be found in Asia or South America? I'll answer that: no, not by a long shot. I would think it'd be in the interest of European Big Pharma to have some sort of deal with the scientists and governments in those countries, in order to develop better drugs.
And this is but one example. Let me give you another: while the US and Europe discuss what to do with gas-powered cars, Brazil has solved that problem with their gigantic flex-fuel cars that can run on sugar cane ethanol - that's a whole production cycle Europe is not even close to having, which runs the gambit from advanced plant genetics to fuel-processing engineering and advanced logistics.
First of all, it seems to me, according to what I've read from political analysts, that India and Brazil are fundamentally different. Both BRIC countries are huge democracies, with a gigantic poor population, and are becoming global players (both will probably secure a seat at the UN Security Council, with the recent announcements of the US backing up India, and the UK supporting Brazil).
Similarities end just about there. Similar in size, India is a hodgepodge of religion and languages. Brazil has managed, despite the influx of immigrants, Africans and Europeans, compounded on the matrix of original Native Americans, to maintain a single unity in language and territory. Brazil has no ethnic or religious conflicts with its neighbors. Both countries are nuclear powers. Brazil has developed advanced Uranium-enrichment cycle technology. India has nuclear missiles (and so has Pakistan), while Brazil's Constitution explicitly forbids development of nuclear weapons (there was a time, during the 80s, that Argentina and Brazil might have gotten into a nuclear weapons arms race but this was defused).
Religion does not play a huge role where you have solid institutions (example: the USA). Freedom of religion is constitutional writ in Brazil. The Supreme Federal Tribunal, in 2008 has ruled in favor of research with frozen embryos, ruling that there is no legal concept of a "person" until it is effectively born unto this world.
From what I read, India is much worse from an institutional standpoint, whereas it's ahead of Brazil in having a more business-friendly environment.
There's a decline in Catholicism in Brazil. Evangelicals OTOH are on the rise, and they have ties to the American Evangelical movement. These are ties via funding (religious "foundations") and commercial (stuff evangelicals sell - books, music, etc. - and possibly some channeling of funds to TV stations). They have recently been able to push their anti-abortion agenda in the recent presidential elections. The woman elected President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has had to eat her own words on the topic, much to the embarassment of the feminist movement in her own Worker's Party.
This is very bad, as evangelicals are notoriously anti-science. However, again, Brazil's institutions provide some grounds for sanity - for instance, the educational curriculum is set by the Ministry of Education. This means there's no way a local school board can attempt to, for example, wipe off Darwin off of the curriculum, as has happened in the US.
The "decline" of the US etc. in science and tech is, of course, a relative decline. All it means is that other countries are developing. This is, of course, a +/+ game for everyone.
It would be nice if someone from India could enlighten us of stem-cell research and education there.
Uh, I should probably link to Nepomuk, as Mandriva's Smart Desktop riles on it. Nepomuk is " Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge
NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations."
Now, when will I hear big buzzwords like "ontology-based management" in Gnome?That's right...Never. They're not cutting edge. Never were, never will be...
I fully agree. This GNOME thing is moronic. Like so many of their stuff, it reveals utter lack of clue wrt to usability. Yes, I hate GNOME. They are so Mac OS 8 interface guidelines...
This ain't free-as-in-Shuttleworth-candybar software, though. Mandriva being a company, and people actually having to work for a living to feed the kids, they reserved this for their paying customers (me, for instance). Those who oppose such model can grow a beard and use a notebook with a lame Linux and no GUI (i.e., emulate Stallman) or seek to hit the jackpot and become an instant millionaire (such as Shuttleworth). PS: How such people manage to not pay for their actual hardware is beyond my comprehension? Using their shirts? Large pants?
Put USB pen drive in Linux. Where is it? Ah, there. Filddle with something. Loose it. Where is it? Climb, climb, climb the folder hierarchy until you find/whatever/media. The down, down, down to you home. Divide Dolphin. (Note: there's at least one Linux distro who reconsidered exposing the whole file tree to ordinary users - Gobo Linux) Try Windows. All folders are what MS decided. Whatever you want is in My Documents. But, is it? Search for a item. Retarded interface (in XP, a retarded dog, even). Use a Mac. Clickity-click. Wife tested. Power-user tested. And I'm tired of writing scripts. Automator tasks are so much better.
Not to call bullshit on your calling bullshit but...as I mentioned in another post, I'm a fan of shorthand writing (tremendous use for me in conferences). My shorthand teacher is a shorthand court room specialist. He regularly attends session with debate. They don't use speech recognition software.
First, because of microphone issues (not always a person will remember to speak directly in the microphone). Second, in sessions with over 12 magistrates or judges debating (NB: this is not the US), there are licensing issues (every head a license, rght?). Third, the training part... the defendant's lawyer, for example...must he train the software too? It's not feasible to demand that of lawyers (to begin with, that costs them their time, and you know how expensive they charge). Also, will the software handle the long Latin citations (the whole thick book of Roman law citations)? It better...All three ways of pronouncing Latin (reconstructed, historical, Vatican), or else it's a fake. Finally, in criminal courts there's - besides the issue of training the software to understand the uncooperative criminal - there's an issue regarding how criminals speak: often from a lower social class, they'll not speak like the judge or the lawyers; also, they'll use a very different vocabulary (street lingo, gang slang, whatever you want to call it). These, of course, will always change, and will also be diffent from city to city, etc. I don't think Dragon has the manpower to keep with the streets and continously update their Markov chain/database with the new slang. Does anyone?
The place where speech recongition fits well is when the shorthand specialist transcribes the notes.
Otherwise, it's a stupid proposition that your PC can replace a functioning human cortex. Not yet. Speech recognition only works in fairly limited domains (such as medical terminology). This is like automatic translation by Google, etc. It's this view that only things processed by computers are "tech". Writing is "tech". Auxiliary language design (i.e., "eo", or Esperanto) is also "tech". But in come the computer nerds and think they can solve every fucking problem with their programming shite, without ever taking the time to learn what people came up with eons ago (and then build on it, e.g., "eo" as an intermediary step, mapping language to language). But stick around another 50 years. NP-hard problems be damned. Humans are just stupid, anyway. What good is an expert? Sex, physical exercises, armies, and doctors will be replaceable in the new distopia, so will your brain. Let's give you a problem, then we'll sell you the solution and make the economy go 'round and 'round.
Should hire shorthand specialists. They're faster than transcibers. They'll capture audio and put into shorthand and then transcribe it. I know this sounds like it would take longer, because ou insert an intermediary step, but the fact is that transcribers are fast-typing from audio, and that is a stop-and-go process. Shorthand specialists will just fast-type from shorthand notes (and, lo and behold, international competitions - yes, they have that - shows that exccellent accuracy), so they don't stop all the time, because shorthand ttranscription is a start-to-finish process. Also, when people hire shorthand specialists ffor events they have faster results. The transcriber must first wait for the whole event to end, i.e., have audio file, whilst the shorthand specialists begins caputing speech the moment the event begins. I know this because I'm sort of a shorthand freak myself, so I'm speaking from experience (and that of my teachers).
You missed the part where they Ogg Theora is considered inferior? Do you actually think the FSF knows more about codecs than the YouTube team of engineers?
The parent has a point: this just throws all the small players out. You'll have to get Google
And what about Dirac? AFAIK, the FSF didn't give a damn about ('m too busy nowadays to engage in Stallman-watching). And the Holy (sanctimonious) Open Source community didn't flock to it in legions in order to hack on that C++ code. Do you know why? Because, if you know so much about codecs, you're probably holding a job right now, somewhere where they pay you, so you can put food on the table.
In your pefect daisy-filled and rainbow-colored world, getting a product out there with a big Google backing will increase competition, and not shift the market to the free choice, because it's free, not better.
This is really about cell phone wars. Don't be naive.
Give grants because, unlike banging on keyboards to write shell scripts, signal processing is fucking hard, and at the very minimum you'd best have an engineering, physics or maths degree in order to even understand the literature.
Could it be that the Linux Foundation or the FSF are so filled up to the brim (hence, content) with lawyers and bearded self-proclaimed haruspices that they do not know this or do not care about the skill level required for this?. The Canonical guy, I understand, he's an astronaut cum playboy, but Stallman, the MIT guy?!
Why does the FSF always bitch and moan about things, or always begs or threatens instead of actually doing something about the situations they perceive as "wrong"?
Here's an idea: take a problem that involves hard-earned engineering (= mathematics) expertise, such as being designing and coding performant audio/video codecs - i.e., things you *know* the self-delusional unixhead who likes to call himself a "free software developer" (meaning: he installs Debian on PCs) is *not* ever gonna be able to handle and, instead of begging or nagging others to release the source of their clearly superior and proprietary products, actually take money from the FSF, Canonical, or the Linux Foundation and give grants to qualified (e.g., graduate students) programmers who have a background on the field.
Too much money for the Linux Foundation? For the FSF? I think not. I'm pretty sure a lowly 2k grant would make a lot of people happy in, say, India or Brazil. But hey, pay more if you can.
But please, stop with the begging. I once used to give money to the FSF. Not anymore. Because, when you think about it, all the FSF has ever done is piggyback on proprietary software or government (i.e., tax payer's) money (ever since Stallmand invented Unix, just like when Al Gore invented the intertubes).
Funny that I should read this today. A couple of days ago, someone told me about the Wii gadgets for balance etc. I had a Jiu-Jitsu-related ankle injury that needs boring and expensive physiotherapy and I had pondered whether the Wii boards wouldn't allow me to ditch my sessions (basically balancing acts throughout the whole session).
And you also have the 500-meter dash away from the polling station, where the thug, army, or police officer was waiting for you with his nice wooden baton to crack your skull open, after you cast your open vote against the ruling party.
You don't watch much news on TV, do you? Remember: 1) all the world is not made of latte; 2) Star Trek ain't real; 3) Pakhistan is actual country; 4) Bin Laden is livin' large.
What's the most someone could do with this exploit?
A little context is needed in order to further explore this point. Brazil is a huge country, of continental dimensions. Voting is a mandatory civic duty (except for older citizens). In the remote and impoverished areas, intimidating voters or buying votes was a common, widespread practice, constituting what is termed an "electoral corral", that helped maintain veritable "political dynasties" in these areas for decades. One of the selling points of electronic voting was being tamper-proof, reducing the probability of fraud. There are myriad ways to make the political scale tip to the wrong side, the side that represents not what the people want, but what the-powers-that-be command...Remember the "pregnant chads" issue in Florida?
It's easy to imagine setting up electronic gadgets in these very remote, impoverished and forsaken little towns in Brazil, in order to verify that the voter indeed kept his/her word when he "sold" his/her vote or to enhance intimidation or voter harassment, all under the unknowing eyes of the Electoral Justice officer (in Brazil, there's a branch of the Judiciary specifically to take care of electoral issues, such as enforcing legislation, etc.).
Besides, one of the pillars of democracies is having the right to vote and this right must be protected from prying eyes of the State (and by extension, the ruling political party), lest the voting process becomes thwarted and non-representative of the will of the people, as well as to avoid political persecution of those who dared to vote for an opposing party. This is so in any country that has a serious voting process and now, you, noble tech nerd and Slashdot reader, knows why this is so.
But gestures are already here to stay in (you've seen the Microsoft products, right?)
And brain-computer interfaces will come Real Soon Now. Very hard to do in an environment like F/OSS. Need dough for them EEGs, you know? How's GNOME gonna do that? Can't just use git...hahahahaha
Aw gawd, Linux is such a losing proposition...Look at it from the right angle: even in places where there's money, like RedHat or Shuttleworth's play pen, the lack of vision and creativity is huge. They are complete idiots, painting themselves into a corner. Ubuntu is pathetic ("how do I install this, that, make Flash play...etc" ad nauseum, ad eternum...)
GNOME just signalled that the brain dead have completely taken over the Linux landscape.
So you're saying the top priority for the Linux desktop is being able to actually launch apps and just not even have the eye candy that Macs and Win boxen have?
Do you see the sad predicament Linux fanboys are in, caused by the mighty F/OSS developers that just can't seem to stick their heads out of each other's ass, except for more mutual ass-licking and mutual asinine autistic congratulation?
Slashdot Mirror
HI --
If you guys are in the U.S., shouldn't you be able to file a Class Action Suit?
I mean, I too am one of those who embarked in that ship of fools, thinking I was surfing the wave of the future with my 8 Cell processors.
It'd be nice to see an international Class Action Suit (like those with breast implants, etc.)
Not to mention they ruined YellowDog's business.
I fucking hate Sony. You don't do that to customers.
And, BTW, look how they marketed the PS3...such a lame way. What they should have done was set up PS3s with Linux, demonstrating that not only you also get a Blu-Ray player but, in addition to that, get to install a cool OS so you can read your e-mail from your huge HD screen in your living room.
Sony is severely idiotic in so many ways it's pathetic.
Next time, I might just buy me an XBox.
Pics or it didn't happen
The thing in Europe AFAIK is that if you're a scientist you live under tremendous pressure but you make just a tiny more money than if you were a lab technician that leaves 17:00 sharp (while you get to spend your weekend with your test tubes).
So why would you wanna have a career that offers no job security, little money and puts you under a lot of stress?
You have absolutely no fucking idea how hard it is to start up a "start up" in, say, Brazil. You should meet some people I know. Imagine I make advanced ceramic tips for deep-water off-shore drilling. Now, come into my tiny, tiny office...
Americans have it easy, way easy. Some dude from an elite university comes up with a half-baked obvious idea and venture capitalists whop a shitload of cash on his lap that will put food on his mouth for two years (like he has money problems...) while he develops the product. And if it fails, well, it happens...
Meanwhile, in other shores, some dude with a PhD is loosing his hair over how he's gonna secure a miserable grant to put food on his table to buy milk for the kids, while being pressured to publish in international journals, competing with American scientists with millionaire budgets, until finally the referee will reject his article complaining of his "poor English" (Yeah, well, fuck you referee. Let's see how well you write in Chinese...). But not to worry, someone at some Ivy League institution scans periodically journals where these idiots come from so he can steal some ideas.
Have some respect, will you?
PS: All true stories.
PS2: Capitalism was not a US American invention...Can you be any more ignorant?
Your comment is of a very simple-minded, bottom-line thinking. This funding returns in terms of expanded international cooperation, something the US universities have realized a long time ago. These scientific ties last a lifetime, usually.
Besides, it's very arrogant of you to think other countries have nothing to give back. For instance, does Europe have the number of plant species that can be found in Asia or South America? I'll answer that: no, not by a long shot. I would think it'd be in the interest of European Big Pharma to have some sort of deal with the scientists and governments in those countries, in order to develop better drugs.
And this is but one example. Let me give you another: while the US and Europe discuss what to do with gas-powered cars, Brazil has solved that problem with their gigantic flex-fuel cars that can run on sugar cane ethanol - that's a whole production cycle Europe is not even close to having, which runs the gambit from advanced plant genetics to fuel-processing engineering and advanced logistics.
Haha, great idea! How about the Flying Backpack index?
"How many flying backpacks models can you buy in your country?"
(Oh, looky! An article about "mass production" of a flying backpack made in New Zealand in a Russian newspaper! Wait, WOT?!)
This, together with the Big Mac and IPod indexes, is everything an economist needs!
me needs personal Grammar Nazi.
First of all, it seems to me, according to what I've read from political analysts, that India and Brazil are fundamentally different. Both BRIC countries are huge democracies, with a gigantic poor population, and are becoming global players (both will probably secure a seat at the UN Security Council, with the recent announcements of the US backing up India, and the UK supporting Brazil).
Similarities end just about there. Similar in size, India is a hodgepodge of religion and languages. Brazil has managed, despite the influx of immigrants, Africans and Europeans, compounded on the matrix of original Native Americans, to maintain a single unity in language and territory. Brazil has no ethnic or religious conflicts with its neighbors. Both countries are nuclear powers. Brazil has developed advanced Uranium-enrichment cycle technology. India has nuclear missiles (and so has Pakistan), while Brazil's Constitution explicitly forbids development of nuclear weapons (there was a time, during the 80s, that Argentina and Brazil might have gotten into a nuclear weapons arms race but this was defused).
Religion does not play a huge role where you have solid institutions (example: the USA). Freedom of religion is constitutional writ in Brazil. The Supreme Federal Tribunal, in 2008 has ruled in favor of research with frozen embryos, ruling that there is no legal concept of a "person" until it is effectively born unto this world.
From what I read, India is much worse from an institutional standpoint, whereas it's ahead of Brazil in having a more business-friendly environment.
There's a decline in Catholicism in Brazil. Evangelicals OTOH are on the rise, and they have ties to the American Evangelical movement. These are ties via funding (religious "foundations") and commercial (stuff evangelicals sell - books, music, etc. - and possibly some channeling of funds to TV stations). They have recently been able to push their anti-abortion agenda in the recent presidential elections. The woman elected President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has had to eat her own words on the topic, much to the embarassment of the feminist movement in her own Worker's Party.
This is very bad, as evangelicals are notoriously anti-science. However, again, Brazil's institutions provide some grounds for sanity - for instance, the educational curriculum is set by the Ministry of Education. This means there's no way a local school board can attempt to, for example, wipe off Darwin off of the curriculum, as has happened in the US.
The "decline" of the US etc. in science and tech is, of course, a relative decline. All it means is that other countries are developing. This is, of course, a +/+ game for everyone.
It would be nice if someone from India could enlighten us of stem-cell research and education there.
Uh, I should probably link to Nepomuk, as Mandriva's Smart Desktop riles on it. Nepomuk is " Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge
NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations."
Now, when will I hear big buzzwords like "ontology-based management" in Gnome?That's right...Never. They're not cutting edge. Never were, never will be...
I fully agree. This GNOME thing is moronic. Like so many of their stuff, it reveals utter lack of clue wrt to usability. Yes, I hate GNOME. They are so Mac OS 8 interface guidelines...
Mandriva's Smart Desktop looks way....smarter.
This ain't free-as-in-Shuttleworth-candybar software, though. Mandriva being a company, and people actually having to work for a living to feed the kids, they reserved this for their paying customers (me, for instance). Those who oppose such model can grow a beard and use a notebook with a lame Linux and no GUI (i.e., emulate Stallman) or seek to hit the jackpot and become an instant millionaire (such as Shuttleworth). PS: How such people manage to not pay for their actual hardware is beyond my comprehension? Using their shirts? Large pants?
Put USB pen drive in Linux. Where is it? Ah, there. Filddle with something. Loose it. Where is it? Climb, climb, climb the folder hierarchy until you find /whatever/media. The down, down, down to you home. Divide Dolphin. (Note: there's at least one Linux distro who reconsidered exposing the whole file tree to ordinary users - Gobo Linux)
Try Windows. All folders are what MS decided. Whatever you want is in My Documents. But, is it? Search for a item. Retarded interface (in XP, a retarded dog, even).
Use a Mac. Clickity-click. Wife tested. Power-user tested.
And I'm tired of writing scripts. Automator tasks are so much better.
You, sir, are right on the money.
And these are deep problems that only the gullible would ignore - perhaps buying many licenses from one of these speech recognition firms.
We live in times when journalists on TV will have the final word on what's feasible or not.
Not to call bullshit on your calling bullshit but...as I mentioned in another post, I'm a fan of shorthand writing (tremendous use for me in conferences). My shorthand teacher is a shorthand court room specialist. He regularly attends session with debate. They don't use speech recognition software.
First, because of microphone issues (not always a person will remember to speak directly in the microphone). Second, in sessions with over 12 magistrates or judges debating (NB: this is not the US), there are licensing issues (every head a license, rght?). Third, the training part... the defendant's lawyer, for example...must he train the software too? It's not feasible to demand that of lawyers (to begin with, that costs them their time, and you know how expensive they charge). Also, will the software handle the long Latin citations (the whole thick book of Roman law citations)? It better...All three ways of pronouncing Latin (reconstructed, historical, Vatican), or else it's a fake. Finally, in criminal courts there's - besides the issue of training the software to understand the uncooperative criminal - there's an issue regarding how criminals speak: often from a lower social class, they'll not speak like the judge or the lawyers; also, they'll use a very different vocabulary (street lingo, gang slang, whatever you want to call it). These, of course, will always change, and will also be diffent from city to city, etc. I don't think Dragon has the manpower to keep with the streets and continously update their Markov chain/database with the new slang. Does anyone?
The place where speech recongition fits well is when the shorthand specialist transcribes the notes.
Otherwise, it's a stupid proposition that your PC can replace a functioning human cortex. Not yet. Speech recognition only works in fairly limited domains (such as medical terminology). This is like automatic translation by Google, etc. It's this view that only things processed by computers are "tech". Writing is "tech". Auxiliary language design (i.e., "eo", or Esperanto) is also "tech". But in come the computer nerds and think they can solve every fucking problem with their programming shite, without ever taking the time to learn what people came up with eons ago (and then build on it, e.g., "eo" as an intermediary step, mapping language to language). But stick around another 50 years. NP-hard problems be damned. Humans are just stupid, anyway. What good is an expert? Sex, physical exercises, armies, and doctors will be replaceable in the new distopia, so will your brain. Let's give you a problem, then we'll sell you the solution and make the economy go 'round and 'round.
Should hire shorthand specialists. They're faster than transcibers. They'll capture audio and put into shorthand and then transcribe it. I know this sounds like it would take longer, because ou insert an intermediary step, but the fact is that transcribers are fast-typing from audio, and that is a stop-and-go process. Shorthand specialists will just fast-type from shorthand notes (and, lo and behold, international competitions - yes, they have that - shows that exccellent accuracy), so they don't stop all the time, because shorthand ttranscription is a start-to-finish process. Also, when people hire shorthand specialists ffor events they have faster results. The transcriber must first wait for the whole event to end, i.e., have audio file, whilst the shorthand specialists begins caputing speech the moment the event begins.
I know this because I'm sort of a shorthand freak myself, so I'm speaking from experience (and that of my teachers).
You missed the part where they Ogg Theora is considered inferior? Do you actually think the FSF knows more about codecs than the YouTube team of engineers?
The parent has a point: this just throws all the small players out. You'll have to get Google
And what about Dirac? AFAIK, the FSF didn't give a damn about ('m too busy nowadays to engage in Stallman-watching). And the Holy (sanctimonious) Open Source community didn't flock to it in legions in order to hack on that C++ code. Do you know why? Because, if you know so much about codecs, you're probably holding a job right now, somewhere where they pay you, so you can put food on the table.
In your pefect daisy-filled and rainbow-colored world, getting a product out there with a big Google backing will increase competition, and not shift the market to the free choice, because it's free, not better.
This is really about cell phone wars. Don't be naive.
I just wanna add this:
Give grants because, unlike banging on keyboards to write shell scripts, signal processing is fucking hard, and at the very minimum you'd best have an engineering, physics or maths degree in order to even understand the literature.
Could it be that the Linux Foundation or the FSF are so filled up to the brim (hence, content) with lawyers and bearded self-proclaimed haruspices that they do not know this or do not care about the skill level required for this?. The Canonical guy, I understand, he's an astronaut cum playboy, but Stallman, the MIT guy?!
Give grants and step off of the soapbox.
Why does the FSF always bitch and moan about things, or always begs or threatens instead of actually doing something about the situations they perceive as "wrong"?
Here's an idea: take a problem that involves hard-earned engineering (= mathematics) expertise, such as being designing and coding performant audio/video codecs - i.e., things you *know* the self-delusional unixhead who likes to call himself a "free software developer" (meaning: he installs Debian on PCs) is *not* ever gonna be able to handle and, instead of begging or nagging others to release the source of their clearly superior and proprietary products, actually take money from the FSF, Canonical, or the Linux Foundation and give grants to qualified (e.g., graduate students) programmers who have a background on the field.
Too much money for the Linux Foundation? For the FSF? I think not. I'm pretty sure a lowly 2k grant would make a lot of people happy in, say, India or Brazil. But hey, pay more if you can.
But please, stop with the begging. I once used to give money to the FSF. Not anymore. Because, when you think about it, all the FSF has ever done is piggyback on proprietary software or government (i.e., tax payer's) money (ever since Stallmand invented Unix, just like when Al Gore invented the intertubes).
Funny that I should read this today. A couple of days ago, someone told me about the Wii gadgets for balance etc.
I had a Jiu-Jitsu-related ankle injury that needs boring and expensive physiotherapy and I had pondered whether the Wii boards wouldn't allow me to ditch my sessions (basically balancing acts throughout the whole session).
The "chain of custody" was actually good argument (too bad you have to wrap your argument in foul language - not good job skills, dude...)
... then we have security by openness
And you also have the 500-meter dash away from the polling station, where the thug, army, or police officer was waiting for you with his nice wooden baton to crack your skull open, after you cast your open vote against the ruling party.
You don't watch much news on TV, do you? Remember: 1) all the world is not made of latte; 2) Star Trek ain't real; 3) Pakhistan is actual country; 4) Bin Laden is livin' large.
What's the most someone could do with this exploit?
A little context is needed in order to further explore this point. Brazil is a huge country, of continental dimensions. Voting is a mandatory civic duty (except for older citizens). In the remote and impoverished areas, intimidating voters or buying votes was a common, widespread practice, constituting what is termed an "electoral corral", that helped maintain veritable "political dynasties" in these areas for decades. One of the selling points of electronic voting was being tamper-proof, reducing the probability of fraud. There are myriad ways to make the political scale tip to the wrong side, the side that represents not what the people want, but what the-powers-that-be command...Remember the "pregnant chads" issue in Florida?
It's easy to imagine setting up electronic gadgets in these very remote, impoverished and forsaken little towns in Brazil, in order to verify that the voter indeed kept his/her word when he "sold" his/her vote or to enhance intimidation or voter harassment, all under the unknowing eyes of the Electoral Justice officer (in Brazil, there's a branch of the Judiciary specifically to take care of electoral issues, such as enforcing legislation, etc.).
Besides, one of the pillars of democracies is having the right to vote and this right must be protected from prying eyes of the State (and by extension, the ruling political party), lest the voting process becomes thwarted and non-representative of the will of the people, as well as to avoid political persecution of those who dared to vote for an opposing party. This is so in any country that has a serious voting process and now, you, noble tech nerd and Slashdot reader, knows why this is so.
I want a system that forces the user to organize his stuff. (...) Can't understand the concept of folders? No computer for you!
Oh, so you're one of those that actually thinks that machine learning algorithms are a setback from the Gopher era, right? LOL.
You and the moron who modded you up. LOL. LMAO at you, you poor thing.
Yeah, could be.
But gestures are already here to stay in (you've seen the Microsoft products, right?)
And brain-computer interfaces will come Real Soon Now. Very hard to do in an environment like F/OSS. Need dough for them EEGs, you know? How's GNOME gonna do that? Can't just use git...hahahahaha
Aw gawd, Linux is such a losing proposition...Look at it from the right angle: even in places where there's money, like RedHat or Shuttleworth's play pen, the lack of vision and creativity is huge. They are complete idiots, painting themselves into a corner. Ubuntu is pathetic ("how do I install this, that, make Flash play...etc" ad nauseum, ad eternum...)
GNOME just signalled that the brain dead have completely taken over the Linux landscape.
So you're saying the top priority for the Linux desktop is being able to actually launch apps and just not even have the eye candy that Macs and Win boxen have?
Do you see the sad predicament Linux fanboys are in, caused by the mighty F/OSS developers that just can't seem to stick their heads out of each other's ass, except for more mutual ass-licking and mutual asinine autistic congratulation?