1) Send more bogus "infringement notices" of your *own* for programs that you wrote. 2) Get people overwhelmed to the point where they start automatically filtering/ignoring infringement notices. 3) Deprive the MPAA of the outlet that they're abusing.
Actually if it was threaded it could probably run on even slightly lower end machines, you cant really buffer frames without multithreading... a couple of slow frames get you into trouble fast with mplayer on formats which dont allow easy resyncing.
That is absolutely absurd. You can buffer up as many frames as you want, and multithreading is completely irrelevant.
Preemptive multithreading (at the program level, not the OS level) is, as everyone knows (at least until they actually write a significant quantity of multithreaded software and non-multithreaded software or write a server that actually, y'know, uses select()), is awesome. Then their earlier enthusiasm is replaced with the realization that:
1) Multithreading doesn't let you do anything that single-threaded programs don't do.
2) Multhreaded programs are really hard to profile well.
3) Multithreaded programs are *incredibly* hard to debug. Just recently, I watched a (good, experienced) systems engineer that had built threading systems write a small (but crucial) system to demo his threads system -- with a nasty race condition. Incredibly hard. The number of ways you can screw up a multithreaded program is vast and numerous. Pan (the multithreaded GNOME newsreader) suffered from bugs for *ages*.
4) There is one time that one uses multithreading. One does not use multithreading because it is necessary for latency. One uses it because it can make code structure simpler, mean that you don't have to remember the state of an ongoing operation. Multithreading hides the work of storing and resuming a task correctly in favor of the work of avoiding ordering problems in data interaction between tasks. As most experienced folks can tell you, storing and resuming is almost always a lot less work than avoiding race conditions.
The problem is that for beginning programmers, blocking threaded APIs look so easy, so seductively simple (I just call "SendFile()" in my FTP server, and when the call returns, I'm done sending the file!") They don't factor in the costs that slink along with threading.
Better -- a form of "evaluation network" in which a rating for each post is computed for each user based on how they have previously agreed with other users.
That way the system itself can cluster users around memes.
You missed the part about the type system, then. Any program can access the data, because the data is packed in nice structured.NET types -- arrays, lists, instances, etc.
Sure, but all data structures in C are made of C primitives. That doesn't ensure that two programs can interoperate. The Windows Registry contains structured data. UNIX config files contain text. I can read almost every UNIX config file with little trouble (though I might need to look up what an option is to get precise data about it). The text files are intended to be read by people -- the config format is thus self-documenting. The Windows Registry is intended for programs to talk to programs. The interface *might* be human-readable but often devolves into cryptic encodings jammed into strings that aren't documented anywhere -- the interface is not self-documenting.
The same thing goes for *IX programs. You have a mass of programs that spit out human-readable text output. A self-documenting format, one intended to be read by humans. Now, depending on how benevolent the.NET application author is feeling, an application *might* be able to spit out data that can be understood by a human. It also might just expose data that can't be used worth a damn except by another program.
Now, I agree that the idea of data pipelines of more complex data can be useful. Frankly, I like the idea of even-more-powerful graph programming languages, as certain data-processing environments sometimes use -- image-processing, audio-processing. However, I've rather more dubious when it comes to general-purpose pipelines.
Also, think about the social issues. *IX world -- do the bare minimum to be usable by a human, and your program is interfaced with. Microsoft world -- you need to go above and beyond.
And the roles that data pipeline programs play. *IX world -- data pipelines are generally quick 'n dirty tools. They let you write custom and personal tools in a snap. If you want to interface functionality, you use full-blown libraries, with an API that isn't limited by the structure of a pipeline. Microsoft world -- new program structure for introducing a limited interface between programs, intended for more serious programming.
Kerry had a French grandfather (seriously, what the heck?) Kerry is a rich aristocrat...
Bush pretends to be a man of the people, but is also a rich aristocrat...
And I ask you, American Slashdotters -- do you care? Do you really care at all? Do any of these issues have anything to do with how solid of a president someone would be? I'd say it's even less relevant than whether a president has oral sex or not. I don't care.
Here's what I want to know. Bush and Kerry have been awfully quiet on these points. They're:
* I want to know how fast we can get out of Iraq/Afghanistan and get the UN in. I don't like being there, and I think it causes more long-term problems.
* I want to know what stances on public health and safety problems like auto accidents and smoking are. They kill a lot more people and cause far more damage than 9/11, but guess where our money goes?
* I want to know what stances on VoIP are. I want government regulation out.
* I want to know what stances on IP are. How is the patent system going to be fixed, especially with respect to software patents? Will the government open-source contracted code?
* I want to know what stances on research funding are. And not just stem cell research, that's an incredibly tiny area of research. How many dollars to the NSF, how many to DARPA, etc.
* I want to know how soon the candidates can get rid of Social Security.
If there's one thing I'm sick and tired of hearing about, it's candidate character issues. I'd love to have a guy that liked to screw Chihuahuas in the Oval Office while being fed grapes by midgets be my President -- *if* he can do a good job of dealing with our national problems.
Bush has taken to portraying himself as a strong father figure, a tough leader who we can look to to protect us. Kerry has spent time hashing on Bush and not actually offering solutions. I don't give a damn about Badnarik, because he just plain isn't going to win, and the same goes for Nader (sorry, that's the way it is -- ask for vote reform if you want anything to change).
Yeah, you get the occasional wackos, but welcome to the internet.
"Wackos" or "kooks" are often those that just don't conform to the social norms. There are points on which I feel that society at large is in the wrong on -- if I came into an argument on those points, I'd be labeled a "wacko".
It's awfully frusterating when people refuse to hear out an argument because someone's a "wacko". Every revolutionary new idea would have warranted such a brand at one point.
But here is something interesting: the liberal slashdot posters have fewer FOES than FRIENDS. And the conservative posters have more FOES than friends. And you know what, that is not surprising to me, judging from what I see as a principal characteristic of conservatism in America, in general--it is a meanspirited, hypocritical politics.
This phenomenon can also be explained by the following hypothesis:
1) Members of a group tend to mod as friend those that are in their ideological group, and mod as foe those opposed to them.
2) There are more liberals than conservatives on Slashdot.
Frankly, I don't think that this is the case. I find that the most vocal group on Slashdot is the Libertarians.
Frankly, I agree with some of the Libertarian points.
Obviously, members of each party vary a bit, but it's possible to get an idea of where they stand.
Libertarians are politically conservative ("Don't touch my Consitituion", small government, noninterventionism, non-regulation") and socially liberal ("If two lesbians want to get married, fine by me").
Republicans are theoretically politically conservative but have become more politically liberal recently, and are socially conservative ("Don't touch my Constitution *unless* it's to keep gays from marrying, in which case I want it", small government *unless* it benefits the elderly or is in the name of military strength, pro-military force, and somewhat anti-regulation) and socially the most conservative of the major parties (religion in schools, big federal law enforcement, anti-drug, anti-abortion). The recent Iraq war has come to dominate the issues, and a lot of traditionally non-Republicans have been pulled into the fold because they are pro-war.
Democrats are politically liberal (big government, social programs, nonlinear taxes, pro anti-trust) and socially liberal (Just a titch less anti-drug than the Republicans, eliminating religion in schools, pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage).
Frankly, I like the Libertarians, except for two major points:
* Libertarians are in favor of restoring Indian land rights. This is silly.
* Libertarians absolutely refuse to recognize well-known economic factors like natural monopolies, and refuse to deal with them -- I've heard Libertarians insist that monopolies *only* derive from government intervention or some such nonsense. They are anti-regulation in the extreme. While I can see the argument for reduced regulation, the argument for no regulation is, in my mind, pretty silly.
For all the shit it's going to create, I will say that the American population is to blame for the terrorist attacks.
You blame the election of *Clinton* and *Bush*? I mean, yeah, neither one is pretty far my vision of a driven, competent leader, but there are a lot of worse world leaders around. You can't lay all of 9/11 at their feet.
If you want to blame Americans for 9/11, there are an awful lot of much more plausible points to call on. The Arab countries have a long and rich tradition of being, frankly, fucked over by the the West. Watch Lawrence of Arabia for a view of the Arabs being exploited by the West during World War I (well, and a good movie). If you screw over a people for a long enough period of time, eventually they get a little irritable.
Those of us who prefer our keyboard to our mouse. And other folks.
It's bloated. On both linux and MacOS X, it consumes considerable CPU resources- and that's with the fancy interpolation it supposedly does turned off. My Powerbook G4, for example- mplayer consumes about 60% CPU, enough to bake my lap and turn on the fan after a while. VLC, on the other hand- needs about 20%, keeping my lap happy.
You misconfigured it. This is, admittedly, not hard to do, but mplayer is the fastest of movie players if used correctly.
Try using the following command: mplayer -vo xv -fs=yes moviename.
Hmm, upon checking the manual, perhaps if Mac OS X lacks support for xv you should be using -vo quartz.
Mplayer has been under "development" for several years. It hasn't seen any major or even minor feature additions./me boggles.
You've got to be joking. What about the latest ChangeLog?
The user interface sucks, especially on OS X.
Actually, mplayer has some kind of bitmapped interface, which I always compile out. I hate all of those damned bitmapped interfaces, the pseudo-VCR things. It has a CLI interface which is exactly the same on OS X as on the other platforms.
Yes, everything's dandy, until you happen to be using two programs that don't export and import data in compatible formats.
In the *IX world, stuff moves around in simple text formats. You can glue *any* two programs together, even if the original author didn't intend that you do so.
In the Microsoft world (well, the new Microsoft world), you can glue together programs that are designed to be glued together.
Note that Plan 9 did some similar stuff to this (IIRC there was a project called xmlterm that deal with program output that wasn't purely text). It didn't catch on. Dunno how many programs could parse said output, though, or whether it was intended for data representation directly to the user.
On the other hand:
a) Microsoft has clearly realized that administrators need a good shell environment and they have not been providing it. This is a Good Thing, and they get points for picking up on this and trying to do something about it. This may be a positive new start. I dunno who started this project, but they clearly weren't blinded by NIH -- people like Linux partly because there's very little NIH associated with it. People like the *IX shell, and Microsoft is responding. Thumbs up on that.
b) Microsoft is clearly doing something with their Microsoft Research people that is actually going into the OS, and trying to push the envelope instead of just copying. (While the Plan 9 thing above is *similar*, this is not just something they bought from someone.) That also is good.
Common English, yes. You're talking about a legal term.
Whats the difference between manslaughter and murder? Semantics.
If you ever hit someone with your car, I'll bet you hope that your lawyer doesn't feel the same way.
For instance, if you had a summer home and left a car there so that you could just fly in and go with it, and some fuck wad took it over the winter and then put it back -- ensuring that nothing was damaged, the engine was serviced and the oil was changed and had someone on the inside so that if you were anywhere near a thousand mile fucking radius, they could put it back as good as new (or better) -- would this be theft?
Yes. You were still deprived of it.
In the virtual world, you are deprived of the benefits of being its sole owner and all the perks that come with it.
You don't own the right to get money from someone. You haven't been deprived of anything legally defined to be your property.
I'd like to ask the counter-question. Those people who argue for the use of the term "copyright infringement" are asking people to be objective and legally correct. The only reason that I can see to argue for use of "theft" is because you want to attach overly negative connotations to the infringing of someone's copyright. And someone that attempts to get me to make irrational decisions and judgements is not acting in my best interest. If "copyright infringement" is bad to degree N, it can damn well stand on its own merits as being bad to degree N. There's no reason to try to manipulate someone's emotions.
You know what? People *don't* generally get as upset when faced with the word "copyright infringement" as "theft". You know why? Because they *don't* happen to feel that "copyright infringement" is as bad as theft. That's the judgement that they've made. You attempting to associate "theft" with "copyright infringement" is simply attempting to get people to be irrational.
* Open source projects have trouble innovating, because they don't pay. That means the people who work on them have to make money somewhere else, which means they can't devote 100% of their energy to innovating the open source.
Take a look at how much research software in academia is open source -- it's significant. There are probably an order of magnitude significant new ideas being coded up for the first time in open source than in closed source software.
If someone made the "Microsoft Technology Lobbying Watch Website" that just kept a list of where Microsoft lobbyists have been seen poking about and what they're doing, maybe set up an RSS feed, and open source folks would have a lot more meat to sink their teeth into. Probably generate lots of Slashdot articles as well -- look what happened with the USPTO having a searchable database and Microsoft having publically visible new patents. Plenty of criticism and prior art showing up. If Microsoft's lobbying efforts were exposed, bullshit could be shot down before it starts to take off.
Incidently, this would be a worthwhile task for even a company to pay someone to do -- it'd be similar politically to what PJ is doing legally with SCO. Just providing useful, distilled information (though Groklaw has gotten less objective since the beginning, sadly enough).
Note that public domain would *also* prevent GPLed code from being used, which would hopefully keep Microsoft happy as well. Microsoft has been happy with BSD-licensed code in the past, as it can toss it into its own products wholesale without having to use an open source license.
Even your joke "innovations" from Microsoft aren't Microsoft innovations:
Microsoft "Bob".. YES!
That's not an innovation. That's a product.
The virus..YES! The worm.. YES!
Ideas that had been around for a long time. The Morris Internet Worm ran on UNIX, for instance.
NetBEUI (fixed spelling from NetBUI)
Nope, developed by IBM, warts and all.
The BSOD.. YES!
A name, not an innovation.
Obscurity.. YES!
I'm guessing that this is some kind of reference to security through obscurity, which *certainly* didn't originate at Microsoft and has real-world predecessors going back who knows how long.
Sharing an office/cubicle (well, assuming the thing is large enough) with someone working on the same project is great. It lets you bounce ideas off the other person and visa versa.
Actually, this isn't the case, for a number of reasons. Your parent post is incorrect as well.
The binary encoding of "B" in ASCII is 1000010. The binary encoding of "D" is 1000100. So just to start, there are two differing bits.
Second, the character set is not specified. If it were offset by one character from ASCII, the difference could be one bit. If it were non-alphabetic, the differing bits could come in any order.
Third, the size of the character set is not specified. If wide characters are used, more than eight bits might be involved.
Yahoo has a totally, completely different approach to their systems. I mean totally different.
Google is about churning out new ideas that are good enough that they can produce value that nobody else can produce. A lot of things that Google produces aren't immediately useful to users (take Google Sets for example -- cool, but nobody has an application for it yet).
Google, unlike Yahoo, demands that all of their data be buildable by computer, that it absolutely scale up with computer hardware.
Yahoo takes a "what does the customer want" approach, and often sticks a lot of people on things. Yahoo's directory was *possible* at the time Yahoo built it because they were willing to commit a lot of humans to it. A bunch of things, like Yahoo Quotes, are nothing particularly new or interesting, something that nobody but Yahoo can do -- but they are *useful*.
Put a bit more positively -- the grandparent poster might dick around with interesting problems less at work. But dicking around with ideas (well, as long as they're in the field you're researching) *is* relevant and valid as an activity in research. It's incredibly annoying if you're doing software development to have an employee doing this. If you want a FTP server written, you really don't want your employees trying to see whether they can optimize file copies in a database. At a CS research lab like Google Labs, that might be fantastic if it turns out that that ends up being something that they can use.
I'd say that a majority of good/interesting ideas get built up and fleshed out when grad students and researchers at labs/universities just start bouncing ideas around, even if they aren't part of their current project.
If you like CS research, you're likely to go to a conference and come back with a bunch of problems to bouncing around in your head, problems that you didn't immediately drop because they aren't directly applicable to what you're working on.
If you don't like stubbornly working on a problem that doesn't have any immediate application (and a hell of a lot of research doesn't have immediate application), you just might not like research, you know? I mean, I doubt that most research in mathematics could be considered applied. But research in math has given us a lot of tools -- but these tools are often built years after researchers went through solving problems.
Slashdot Mirror
And when was the last time you saw an "RPM" video file?
1) Send more bogus "infringement notices" of your *own* for programs that you wrote.
2) Get people overwhelmed to the point where they start automatically filtering/ignoring infringement notices.
3) Deprive the MPAA of the outlet that they're abusing.
Actually if it was threaded it could probably run on even slightly lower end machines, you cant really buffer frames without multithreading ... a couple of slow frames get you into trouble fast with mplayer on formats which dont allow easy resyncing.
That is absolutely absurd. You can buffer up as many frames as you want, and multithreading is completely irrelevant.
Preemptive multithreading (at the program level, not the OS level) is, as everyone knows (at least until they actually write a significant quantity of multithreaded software and non-multithreaded software or write a server that actually, y'know, uses select()), is awesome. Then their earlier enthusiasm is replaced with the realization that:
1) Multithreading doesn't let you do anything that single-threaded programs don't do.
2) Multhreaded programs are really hard to profile well.
3) Multithreaded programs are *incredibly* hard to debug. Just recently, I watched a (good, experienced) systems engineer that had built threading systems write a small (but crucial) system to demo his threads system -- with a nasty race condition. Incredibly hard. The number of ways you can screw up a multithreaded program is vast and numerous. Pan (the multithreaded GNOME newsreader) suffered from bugs for *ages*.
4) There is one time that one uses multithreading. One does not use multithreading because it is necessary for latency. One uses it because it can make code structure simpler, mean that you don't have to remember the state of an ongoing operation. Multithreading hides the work of storing and resuming a task correctly in favor of the work of avoiding ordering problems in data interaction between tasks. As most experienced folks can tell you, storing and resuming is almost always a lot less work than avoiding race conditions.
The problem is that for beginning programmers, blocking threaded APIs look so easy, so seductively simple (I just call "SendFile()" in my FTP server, and when the call returns, I'm done sending the file!") They don't factor in the costs that slink along with threading.
Better -- a form of "evaluation network" in which a rating for each post is computed for each user based on how they have previously agreed with other users.
That way the system itself can cluster users around memes.
You missed the part about the type system, then. Any program can access the data, because the data is packed in nice structured .NET types -- arrays, lists, instances, etc.
.NET application author is feeling, an application *might* be able to spit out data that can be understood by a human. It also might just expose data that can't be used worth a damn except by another program.
Sure, but all data structures in C are made of C primitives. That doesn't ensure that two programs can interoperate. The Windows Registry contains structured data. UNIX config files contain text. I can read almost every UNIX config file with little trouble (though I might need to look up what an option is to get precise data about it). The text files are intended to be read by people -- the config format is thus self-documenting. The Windows Registry is intended for programs to talk to programs. The interface *might* be human-readable but often devolves into cryptic encodings jammed into strings that aren't documented anywhere -- the interface is not self-documenting.
The same thing goes for *IX programs. You have a mass of programs that spit out human-readable text output. A self-documenting format, one intended to be read by humans. Now, depending on how benevolent the
Now, I agree that the idea of data pipelines of more complex data can be useful. Frankly, I like the idea of even-more-powerful graph programming languages, as certain data-processing environments sometimes use -- image-processing, audio-processing. However, I've rather more dubious when it comes to general-purpose pipelines.
Also, think about the social issues. *IX world -- do the bare minimum to be usable by a human, and your program is interfaced with. Microsoft world -- you need to go above and beyond.
And the roles that data pipeline programs play. *IX world -- data pipelines are generally quick 'n dirty tools. They let you write custom and personal tools in a snap. If you want to interface functionality, you use full-blown libraries, with an API that isn't limited by the structure of a pipeline. Microsoft world -- new program structure for introducing a limited interface between programs, intended for more serious programming.
I thought that one of the rules of Burning Man was that you aren't supposed to run around photographing people.
I know you've all seen the following recently:
Bush tried to get out of Vietnam and...
Kerry won three Purple Hearts...
Kerry's service is in question...
Bush funded 527 groups. Kerry funded 527 groups.
Kerry had a French grandfather (seriously, what the heck?)
Kerry is a rich aristocrat...
Bush pretends to be a man of the people, but is also a rich aristocrat...
And I ask you, American Slashdotters -- do you care? Do you really care at all? Do any of these issues have anything to do with how solid of a president someone would be? I'd say it's even less relevant than whether a president has oral sex or not. I don't care.
Here's what I want to know. Bush and Kerry have been awfully quiet on these points. They're:
* I want to know how fast we can get out of Iraq/Afghanistan and get the UN in. I don't like being there, and I think it causes more long-term problems.
* I want to know what stances on public health and safety problems like auto accidents and smoking are. They kill a lot more people and cause far more damage than 9/11, but guess where our money goes?
* I want to know what stances on VoIP are. I want government regulation out.
* I want to know what stances on IP are. How is the patent system going to be fixed, especially with respect to software patents? Will the government open-source contracted code?
* I want to know what stances on research funding are. And not just stem cell research, that's an incredibly tiny area of research. How many dollars to the NSF, how many to DARPA, etc.
* I want to know how soon the candidates can get rid of Social Security.
If there's one thing I'm sick and tired of hearing about, it's candidate character issues. I'd love to have a guy that liked to screw Chihuahuas in the Oval Office while being fed grapes by midgets be my President -- *if* he can do a good job of dealing with our national problems.
Bush has taken to portraying himself as a strong father figure, a tough leader who we can look to to protect us. Kerry has spent time hashing on Bush and not actually offering solutions. I don't give a damn about Badnarik, because he just plain isn't going to win, and the same goes for Nader (sorry, that's the way it is -- ask for vote reform if you want anything to change).
Yeah, you get the occasional wackos, but welcome to the internet.
"Wackos" or "kooks" are often those that just don't conform to the social norms. There are points on which I feel that society at large is in the wrong on -- if I came into an argument on those points, I'd be labeled a "wacko".
It's awfully frusterating when people refuse to hear out an argument because someone's a "wacko". Every revolutionary new idea would have warranted such a brand at one point.
But here is something interesting: the liberal slashdot posters have fewer FOES than FRIENDS. And the conservative posters have more FOES than friends. And you know what, that is not surprising to me, judging from what I see as a principal characteristic of conservatism in America, in general--it is a meanspirited, hypocritical politics.
This phenomenon can also be explained by the following hypothesis:
1) Members of a group tend to mod as friend those that are in their ideological group, and mod as foe those opposed to them.
2) There are more liberals than conservatives on Slashdot.
Frankly, I don't think that this is the case. I find that the most vocal group on Slashdot is the Libertarians.
Frankly, I agree with some of the Libertarian points.
Obviously, members of each party vary a bit, but it's possible to get an idea of where they stand.
Libertarians are politically conservative ("Don't touch my Consitituion", small government, noninterventionism, non-regulation") and socially liberal ("If two lesbians want to get married, fine by me").
Republicans are theoretically politically conservative but have become more politically liberal recently, and are socially conservative ("Don't touch my Constitution *unless* it's to keep gays from marrying, in which case I want it", small government *unless* it benefits the elderly or is in the name of military strength, pro-military force, and somewhat anti-regulation) and socially the most conservative of the major parties (religion in schools, big federal law enforcement, anti-drug, anti-abortion). The recent Iraq war has come to dominate the issues, and a lot of traditionally non-Republicans have been pulled into the fold because they are pro-war.
Democrats are politically liberal (big government, social programs, nonlinear taxes, pro anti-trust) and socially liberal (Just a titch less anti-drug than the Republicans, eliminating religion in schools, pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage).
Frankly, I like the Libertarians, except for two major points:
* Libertarians are in favor of restoring Indian land rights. This is silly.
* Libertarians absolutely refuse to recognize well-known economic factors like natural monopolies, and refuse to deal with them -- I've heard Libertarians insist that monopolies *only* derive from government intervention or some such nonsense. They are anti-regulation in the extreme. While I can see the argument for reduced regulation, the argument for no regulation is, in my mind, pretty silly.
For all the shit it's going to create, I will say that the American population is to blame for the terrorist attacks.
You blame the election of *Clinton* and *Bush*? I mean, yeah, neither one is pretty far my vision of a driven, competent leader, but there are a lot of worse world leaders around. You can't lay all of 9/11 at their feet.
If you want to blame Americans for 9/11, there are an awful lot of much more plausible points to call on. The Arab countries have a long and rich tradition of being, frankly, fucked over by the the West. Watch Lawrence of Arabia for a view of the Arabs being exploited by the West during World War I (well, and a good movie). If you screw over a people for a long enough period of time, eventually they get a little irritable.
Who cares about mplayer support?
/me boggles.
Those of us who prefer our keyboard to our mouse. And other folks.
It's bloated. On both linux and MacOS X, it consumes considerable CPU resources- and that's with the fancy interpolation it supposedly does turned off. My Powerbook G4, for example- mplayer consumes about 60% CPU, enough to bake my lap and turn on the fan after a while. VLC, on the other hand- needs about 20%, keeping my lap happy.
You misconfigured it. This is, admittedly, not hard to do, but mplayer is the fastest of movie players if used correctly.
Try using the following command: mplayer -vo xv -fs=yes moviename.
Hmm, upon checking the manual, perhaps if Mac OS X lacks support for xv you should be using -vo quartz.
Mplayer has been under "development" for several years. It hasn't seen any major or even minor feature additions.
You've got to be joking. What about the latest ChangeLog?
The user interface sucks, especially on OS X.
Actually, mplayer has some kind of bitmapped interface, which I always compile out. I hate all of those damned bitmapped interfaces, the pseudo-VCR things. It has a CLI interface which is exactly the same on OS X as on the other platforms.
Oops, I lied. xmlterm is a FOSS project on SourceForge, but I don't believe it was part of Plan 9.
Yes, everything's dandy, until you happen to be using two programs that don't export and import data in compatible formats.
In the *IX world, stuff moves around in simple text formats. You can glue *any* two programs together, even if the original author didn't intend that you do so.
In the Microsoft world (well, the new Microsoft world), you can glue together programs that are designed to be glued together.
Note that Plan 9 did some similar stuff to this (IIRC there was a project called xmlterm that deal with program output that wasn't purely text). It didn't catch on. Dunno how many programs could parse said output, though, or whether it was intended for data representation directly to the user.
On the other hand:
a) Microsoft has clearly realized that administrators need a good shell environment and they have not been providing it. This is a Good Thing, and they get points for picking up on this and trying to do something about it. This may be a positive new start. I dunno who started this project, but they clearly weren't blinded by NIH -- people like Linux partly because there's very little NIH associated with it. People like the *IX shell, and Microsoft is responding. Thumbs up on that.
b) Microsoft is clearly doing something with their Microsoft Research people that is actually going into the OS, and trying to push the envelope instead of just copying. (While the Plan 9 thing above is *similar*, this is not just something they bought from someone.) That also is good.
Words are repurposed every day.
Common English, yes. You're talking about a legal term.
Whats the difference between manslaughter and murder? Semantics.
If you ever hit someone with your car, I'll bet you hope that your lawyer doesn't feel the same way.
For instance, if you had a summer home and left a car there so that you could just fly in and go with it, and some fuck wad took it over the winter and then put it back -- ensuring that nothing was damaged, the engine was serviced and the oil was changed and had someone on the inside so that if you were anywhere near a thousand mile fucking radius, they could put it back as good as new (or better) -- would this be theft?
Yes. You were still deprived of it.
In the virtual world, you are deprived of the benefits of being its sole owner and all the perks that come with it.
You don't own the right to get money from someone. You haven't been deprived of anything legally defined to be your property.
I'd like to ask the counter-question. Those people who argue for the use of the term "copyright infringement" are asking people to be objective and legally correct. The only reason that I can see to argue for use of "theft" is because you want to attach overly negative connotations to the infringing of someone's copyright. And someone that attempts to get me to make irrational decisions and judgements is not acting in my best interest. If "copyright infringement" is bad to degree N, it can damn well stand on its own merits as being bad to degree N. There's no reason to try to manipulate someone's emotions.
You know what? People *don't* generally get as upset when faced with the word "copyright infringement" as "theft". You know why? Because they *don't* happen to feel that "copyright infringement" is as bad as theft. That's the judgement that they've made. You attempting to associate "theft" with "copyright infringement" is simply attempting to get people to be irrational.
* Open source projects have trouble innovating, because they don't pay. That means the people who work on them have to make money somewhere else, which means they can't devote 100% of their energy to innovating the open source.
Take a look at how much research software in academia is open source -- it's significant. There are probably an order of magnitude significant new ideas being coded up for the first time in open source than in closed source software.
It *is* possible to push for vote reform (like preferential voting, for instance) without having to vote for a third party.
If someone made the "Microsoft Technology Lobbying Watch Website" that just kept a list of where Microsoft lobbyists have been seen poking about and what they're doing, maybe set up an RSS feed, and open source folks would have a lot more meat to sink their teeth into. Probably generate lots of Slashdot articles as well -- look what happened with the USPTO having a searchable database and Microsoft having publically visible new patents. Plenty of criticism and prior art showing up. If Microsoft's lobbying efforts were exposed, bullshit could be shot down before it starts to take off.
Incidently, this would be a worthwhile task for even a company to pay someone to do -- it'd be similar politically to what PJ is doing legally with SCO. Just providing useful, distilled information (though Groklaw has gotten less objective since the beginning, sadly enough).
Note that public domain would *also* prevent GPLed code from being used, which would hopefully keep Microsoft happy as well. Microsoft has been happy with BSD-licensed code in the past, as it can toss it into its own products wholesale without having to use an open source license.
Even your joke "innovations" from Microsoft aren't Microsoft innovations:
Microsoft "Bob".. YES!
That's not an innovation. That's a product.
The virus..YES!
The worm.. YES!
Ideas that had been around for a long time. The Morris Internet Worm ran on UNIX, for instance.
NetBEUI (fixed spelling from NetBUI)
Nope, developed by IBM, warts and all.
The BSOD.. YES!
A name, not an innovation.
Obscurity.. YES!
I'm guessing that this is some kind of reference to security through obscurity, which *certainly* didn't originate at Microsoft and has real-world predecessors going back who knows how long.
Thank you, Waldo.
Sharing an office/cubicle (well, assuming the thing is large enough) with someone working on the same project is great. It lets you bounce ideas off the other person and visa versa.
Google is mostly a research lab, not a software development house. This is what you'd expect.
Actually, this isn't the case, for a number of reasons. Your parent post is incorrect as well.
The binary encoding of "B" in ASCII is 1000010. The binary encoding of "D" is 1000100. So just to start, there are two differing bits.
Second, the character set is not specified. If it were offset by one character from ASCII, the difference could be one bit. If it were non-alphabetic, the differing bits could come in any order.
Third, the size of the character set is not specified. If wide characters are used, more than eight bits might be involved.
You mean Yahoo?
Yahoo has a totally, completely different approach to their systems. I mean totally different.
Google is about churning out new ideas that are good enough that they can produce value that nobody else can produce. A lot of things that Google produces aren't immediately useful to users (take Google Sets for example -- cool, but nobody has an application for it yet).
Google, unlike Yahoo, demands that all of their data be buildable by computer, that it absolutely scale up with computer hardware.
Yahoo takes a "what does the customer want" approach, and often sticks a lot of people on things. Yahoo's directory was *possible* at the time Yahoo built it because they were willing to commit a lot of humans to it. A bunch of things, like Yahoo Quotes, are nothing particularly new or interesting, something that nobody but Yahoo can do -- but they are *useful*.
Put a bit more positively -- the grandparent poster might dick around with interesting problems less at work. But dicking around with ideas (well, as long as they're in the field you're researching) *is* relevant and valid as an activity in research. It's incredibly annoying if you're doing software development to have an employee doing this. If you want a FTP server written, you really don't want your employees trying to see whether they can optimize file copies in a database. At a CS research lab like Google Labs, that might be fantastic if it turns out that that ends up being something that they can use.
I'd say that a majority of good/interesting ideas get built up and fleshed out when grad students and researchers at labs/universities just start bouncing ideas around, even if they aren't part of their current project.
If you like CS research, you're likely to go to a conference and come back with a bunch of problems to bouncing around in your head, problems that you didn't immediately drop because they aren't directly applicable to what you're working on.
If you don't like stubbornly working on a problem that doesn't have any immediate application (and a hell of a lot of research doesn't have immediate application), you just might not like research, you know? I mean, I doubt that most research in mathematics could be considered applied. But research in math has given us a lot of tools -- but these tools are often built years after researchers went through solving problems.