that the call was real but wrong. Kid was WAY more likely to have just been arranging to meet one of his same-age friends and the mother freaked and jumped to the worst possible conclusion.
that Outlook has a MUCH better interface than Notes, despite Notes' longevity and arguably more maturity.
While you do have something of a point
on
Embracing Insanity
·
· Score: 2
it's already survived more than a decade quite nicely, thank you. The GNU project was founded in 1984; open source development is even older than that. The kind of people who produced open source software BEFORE the hype will still do it AFTER the hype, it seems to me.
Besides, many open source developers DO get paid for what they do.
Lots of innovations are obvious IN RETROSPECT. However, sometimes nobody has done something before just because nobody thought it was a good idea, not because they didn't think of it. It depends on the circumstances.
It is, indeed, fundamentally illogical to suggest that one should be able to patent hardware but not software that does the same thing.
The problem in the US is not so much software patents *per se*, but how badly the US Patent Office has gone about issuing and regulating them.
I have no problem with people being able to patent something truly innovative, whether the product of lots of hard work or a sudden flash of inspiration.
One should not be able just add '... on the Internet' to existing ideas and patent them, for example.
One thing I will take issue with: your bringing up the millions of dollars companies spend. An idea is not and should not be patentable simply because you've spent millions on it. In fact, patents are MORE defensible for the little guy, the backyard inventor, the small startup with a good idea.
If you spent a million dollars and came up with a poor, lame-ass idea that's not all that original, you don't deserve a patent for it.
The most positive way one can put a spin on it would be to say that Rambus and other companies simultaneously invented some of the same ideas -- but Rambus was smart/cunning enough to get a patent in.
Remember, under patent law, that it doesn't matter if you didn't even know of the patented technology. It doesn't matter if you thought of it completely on your own. If someone else thought of it before you, you're toast.
As the second referenced article shows, flaws in the US patent system allow unscrupulous companies to patent things and completely lie about the dates. Firstly, you can claim you invented the thing up to a year before the filing date, and secondly, you can amend your application with stuff you only thought of AFTER the filing date.
The article asserts that Rambus have done this -- I have no idea whether the allegations are true, but they're certainly possible.
then why does Solaris scale to 128-way SMP, while Linux craps out above 8?
Solaris doesn't scale that high on PC hardware.
Solaris does on SPARC since Sun build their own hardware -- a HUGE advantage.
it's just another thing the kernel developers have been wasting time on instead of catching up where they need to catch up. This project needs some direction.
Linux isn't a commercial development house. If someone wants to add a feature that is useful to a certain subset of Linux users, why not, so long as it's stable and well designed?
Maybe has more features, but last time I checked, BSD was FAR faster and scaled better.
Now your true troll colours come out.
BSD is better at certain things than Linux, and worse at others.
I wouldn't say that Solaris is yet QUITE so stable as VMS, however. In terms of hardware, though, I'd reckon about the same. The legendary VAX/VMS uptimes were as much to do with a stable OS as anything else.
IBM? I really don't see an RS/6000 as being any better than a Sun, reliability wise.
However, make sure you're comparing like for like. It's easy to say 'Well, I can buy a 450 MHz processor, 18GB of disk and 256MB of RAM as a PC for ~$1000, and as a Sun for ~3000, so Suns are overpriced' but that's not the full story.
Sun systems are made to a much higher quality than any PC I've ever found, even the high end servers from Compaq et al. [this doesn't mean that a few products of theirs haven't been total dogs, but in general...] Also, Sun systems generally have better memory bandwidth, IO bandwidth, etc. than PCs of seemingly equivalent spec. And they last *forever*.
I'm involved in running the web site for a public radio station, running on hand-me-down Sun equipment obtained from the affiliated university.
We're serving a web site, doing audio streaming in both GTS's Java technology and Shoutcast, DNS service, plus email and interactive logons for about 50 staff members...
On what hardware?
One SPARCstation 5. Single SPARC processor, I think 50 (50!) MHz, 128Mb memory, old scsi disk. The system must be six years old at least.
Now that's lasting value. Not a cutting edge system any more by any means, but it's quite something to still be using a system that old for a production server...
jwz, like most truly talented people, is not a team player. The reason rms and he disagreed so violently, I think, is because they're similar kinds. It wasn't his personality alone that caused the emacs split -- it was BOTH their personalities, and furthermore there was clearly a split in the user base too -- if there hadn't been, then lemacs/xemacs would not have been very popular. Yet everyone didn't go that route either.
As far as Mozilla goes, I think he got a bit too personally involved there -- personally involved in its success, not just its technical success but its worldly success.
Reading between the lines, I think Jamie was way past the time he should have left Netscape when the Mozilla thing came along. It was enough to keep him, but when Mozilla turned out to be, in many ways, still business as usual, it drove him nuts.
Whether he was right or wrong in what he said, he said what he truly thought and felt, IMHO.
There are some problems naturally suited to a threading model, and some naturally suited to an event-driven model, and a language or OS that forces you to use one or the other for all problems is broken.
Ousterhout is right, however, that threading is hard in the case that there is a lot of shared state between threads -- lots of locking issues to worry about.
On the other hand, anyone who's tried to work on a network server based around an event-driven select() model knows what a pain in the ass that can be, too.
that you're only added to the RBL if any of those things happen AND YOU DO NOTHING.
If you're a spammer yourself, if you stop spamming, you won't be on the RBL.
If spammers use your services, then if you change your policies to prohibit spammers and take some steps to enforce that policy, you're not on the RBL.
You get on the RBL if the mail abuse people tell you your service aids or abets spam and you tell them 'why is this my problem?'
The RBL isn't forced on anyone -- individuals and companies adopt it by choice. They have the legal right to choose to refuse to do business with anyone who refuses to do anything about spammers.
If you're affected by this, you chose to do business with someone who doesn't do anything about spammers. That's your choice.
Spam Support Services - this is the trickier one. You can get on this one if you:
host spammers' web pages
host spammers' email
provide credit-card processing for spammers
provide adult verification services for spammers
hosting services that provide any of the above
And more.
The point is not to just try and shut off spammers from sending mail; except for some certifiable net.kooks, they're mostly trying to get you to buy something, and therefore eventually they have to have a fixed presence somewhere. The RBL tries to cut off those fixed presences.
What they're trying to do is to make every Internet service have a policy against any of their customers being involved in spam.
It's one thing to digitally add advertizing to blank billboards, or to non-blank billboards with the knowledge of the real advertizer -- nothing underhanded going on there, really.
But if they ever start to change the image of anything WITHOUT asking the permission of the people involved, I bet a lawsuit will happen VERY rapidly.
I would imagine it would be legal to do something like fuzz out somebody's ad, but to put someone else's ad on top would be misrepresentation.
Very treacherous legal ground, so I don't think it will happen. TV networks employ very paranoid lawyers.
I'm SURE this is not going to be OSHA's last word on the subject.
My personal take on it is that if the employer provides you with a perfectly acceptable place to work at their workplace, and does not explicitly nor implicitly encourage working from home, but merely PERMITS it under certain circumstances, then they should not be liable for much.
On the other hand, if there is any kind of requirement or pressure for you to work at home, then they SHOULD be liable. Telecommuting shouldn't be an out for companies who don't want to pay for safe working environments.
As many people pointed out, the true lawsuit looming is not by home-based telecommuters, but workers who spend all their time on the road. Working in cramped spaces on planes, on miniscule hotel desks, in any corner that can be found at client sites, on some crappy laptop computer that is seriously un-ergonomic.
The IRS doesn't like it, and won't let you. There are rulings about this all the time.
Basically: if you treat them as if they are an employee, then they ARE an employee.
Some of the indications they look for:
* The 'contractors' actually only work for one company. * They don't have limited term contracts, or they are constantly, automatically renewed. * They're subject to the same employee-handbook type rules and restrictions as employees. * No more flexibility in working hours than an employee
Perl is NOT suited to embedded programming. Perl is huge. A Forth interpreter is tiny, and Forth bytecode is tiny. Forth was written for embedded systems.
Perl is best suited to larger systems, as a good method of tying together the extensive resources available on such a machine. It's just not suited to a tiny system.
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that the call was real but wrong. Kid was WAY more likely to have just been arranging to meet one of his same-age friends and the mother freaked and jumped to the worst possible conclusion.
that Outlook has a MUCH better interface than Notes, despite Notes' longevity and arguably more maturity.
it's already survived more than a decade quite nicely, thank you. The GNU project was founded in 1984; open source development is even older than that. The kind of people who produced open source software BEFORE the hype will still do it AFTER the hype, it seems to me.
Besides, many open source developers DO get paid for what they do.
Lots of innovations are obvious IN RETROSPECT. However, sometimes nobody has done something before just because nobody thought it was a good idea, not because they didn't think of it. It depends on the circumstances.
It is, indeed, fundamentally illogical to suggest that one should be able to patent hardware but not software that does the same thing.
The problem in the US is not so much software patents *per se*, but how badly the US Patent Office has gone about issuing and regulating them.
I have no problem with people being able to patent something truly innovative, whether the product of lots of hard work or a sudden flash of inspiration.
One should not be able just add '... on the Internet' to existing ideas and patent them, for example.
One thing I will take issue with: your bringing up the millions of dollars companies spend. An idea is not and should not be patentable simply because you've spent millions on it. In fact, patents are MORE defensible for the little guy, the backyard inventor, the small startup with a good idea.
If you spent a million dollars and came up with a poor, lame-ass idea that's not all that original, you don't deserve a patent for it.
Rambus don't produce anything. They just license technology.
The most positive way one can put a spin on it would be to say that Rambus and other companies simultaneously invented some of the same ideas -- but Rambus was smart/cunning enough to get a patent in.
Remember, under patent law, that it doesn't matter if you didn't even know of the patented technology. It doesn't matter if you thought of it completely on your own. If someone else thought of it before you, you're toast.
As the second referenced article shows, flaws in the US patent system allow unscrupulous companies to patent things and completely lie about the dates. Firstly, you can claim you invented the thing up to a year before the filing date, and secondly, you can amend your application with stuff you only thought of AFTER the filing date.
The article asserts that Rambus have done this -- I have no idea whether the allegations are true, but they're certainly possible.
as opposed to vaporware you can't actually buy yet, just 'here within the next year'?
was, I was told by a SF author of my acquaintance, known to blast the living crap out of things in her back yard with an AK-47, also.
;)
Apocryphal, but probably true
the e10k in question is acting as www.ebay.com -- it's more likely a back-end Oracle server.
then why does Solaris scale to 128-way SMP, while Linux craps out above 8?
Solaris doesn't scale that high on PC hardware.
Solaris does on SPARC since Sun build their own hardware -- a HUGE advantage.
it's just another thing the kernel developers have been wasting time on instead of catching up where they need to catch up. This project needs some direction.
Linux isn't a commercial development house. If someone wants to add a feature that is useful to a certain subset of Linux users, why not, so long as it's stable and well designed?
Maybe has more features, but last time I checked, BSD was FAR faster and scaled better.
Now your true troll colours come out.
BSD is better at certain things than Linux, and worse at others.
Scales better? BSD barely does SMP at all.
I wouldn't say that Solaris is yet QUITE so stable as VMS, however. In terms of hardware, though, I'd reckon about the same. The legendary VAX/VMS uptimes were as much to do with a stable OS as anything else.
IBM? I really don't see an RS/6000 as being any better than a Sun, reliability wise.
However, make sure you're comparing like for like. It's easy to say 'Well, I can buy a 450 MHz processor, 18GB of disk and 256MB of RAM as a PC for ~$1000, and as a Sun for ~3000, so Suns are overpriced' but that's not the full story.
...] Also, Sun systems generally have better memory bandwidth, IO bandwidth, etc. than PCs of seemingly equivalent spec. And they last *forever*.
...
...
Sun systems are made to a much higher quality than any PC I've ever found, even the high end servers from Compaq et al. [this doesn't mean that a few products of theirs haven't been total dogs, but in general
I'm involved in running the web site for a public radio station, running on hand-me-down Sun equipment obtained from the affiliated university.
We're serving a web site, doing audio streaming in both GTS's Java technology and Shoutcast, DNS service, plus email and interactive logons for about 50 staff members
On what hardware?
One SPARCstation 5. Single SPARC processor, I think 50 (50!) MHz, 128Mb memory, old scsi disk. The system must be six years old at least.
Now that's lasting value. Not a cutting edge system any more by any means, but it's quite something to still be using a system that old for a production server
jwz, like most truly talented people, is not a team player. The reason rms and he disagreed so violently, I think, is because they're similar kinds. It wasn't his personality alone that caused the emacs split -- it was BOTH their personalities, and furthermore there was clearly a split in the user base too -- if there hadn't been, then lemacs/xemacs would not have been very popular. Yet everyone didn't go that route either.
As far as Mozilla goes, I think he got a bit too personally involved there -- personally involved in its success, not just its technical success but its worldly success.
Reading between the lines, I think Jamie was way past the time he should have left Netscape when the Mozilla thing came along. It was enough to keep him, but when Mozilla turned out to be, in many ways, still business as usual, it drove him nuts.
Whether he was right or wrong in what he said, he said what he truly thought and felt, IMHO.
There are some problems naturally suited to a threading model, and some naturally suited to an event-driven model, and a language or OS that forces you to use one or the other for all problems is broken.
Ousterhout is right, however, that threading is hard in the case that there is a lot of shared state between threads -- lots of locking issues to worry about.
On the other hand, anyone who's tried to work on a network server based around an event-driven select() model knows what a pain in the ass that can be, too.
that you're only added to the RBL if any of those things happen AND YOU DO NOTHING.
If you're a spammer yourself, if you stop spamming, you won't be on the RBL.
If spammers use your services, then if you change your policies to prohibit spammers and take some steps to enforce that policy, you're not on the RBL.
You get on the RBL if the mail abuse people tell you your service aids or abets spam and you tell them 'why is this my problem?'
The RBL isn't forced on anyone -- individuals and companies adopt it by choice. They have the legal right to choose to refuse to do business with anyone who refuses to do anything about spammers.
If you're affected by this, you chose to do business with someone who doesn't do anything about spammers. That's your choice.
And more.
The point is not to just try and shut off spammers from sending mail; except for some certifiable net.kooks, they're mostly trying to get you to buy something, and therefore eventually they have to have a fixed presence somewhere. The RBL tries to cut off those fixed presences.
What they're trying to do is to make every Internet service have a policy against any of their customers being involved in spam.
It's one thing to digitally add advertizing to blank billboards, or to non-blank billboards with the knowledge of the real advertizer -- nothing underhanded going on there, really.
But if they ever start to change the image of anything WITHOUT asking the permission of the people involved, I bet a lawsuit will happen VERY rapidly.
I would imagine it would be legal to do something like fuzz out somebody's ad, but to put someone else's ad on top would be misrepresentation.
Very treacherous legal ground, so I don't think it will happen. TV networks employ very paranoid lawyers.
I'm SURE this is not going to be OSHA's last word on the subject.
My personal take on it is that if the employer provides you with a perfectly acceptable place to work at their workplace, and does not explicitly nor implicitly encourage working from home, but merely PERMITS it under certain circumstances, then they should not be liable for much.
On the other hand, if there is any kind of requirement or pressure for you to work at home, then they SHOULD be liable. Telecommuting shouldn't be an out for companies who don't want to pay for safe working environments.
As many people pointed out, the true lawsuit looming is not by home-based telecommuters, but workers who spend all their time on the road. Working in cramped spaces on planes, on miniscule hotel desks, in any corner that can be found at client sites, on some crappy laptop computer that is seriously un-ergonomic.
The IRS doesn't like it, and won't let you. There are rulings about this all the time.
Basically: if you treat them as if they are an employee, then they ARE an employee.
Some of the indications they look for:
* The 'contractors' actually only work for one company.
* They don't have limited term contracts, or they are constantly, automatically renewed.
* They're subject to the same employee-handbook type rules and restrictions as employees.
* No more flexibility in working hours than an employee
The entire point of the thing is that how to play a DVD is a SECRET that you can only get if you pay and sign.
This explicitly prevents an open source implementation; DVD encryption relies on a secret.
We could get a closed source DVD player program if we wished and someone stumped up the cash, yes.
Sounds rather hypocritical to me, Mr Flamebait.
Perl is NOT suited to embedded programming. Perl is huge. A Forth interpreter is tiny, and Forth bytecode is tiny. Forth was written for embedded systems.
Perl is best suited to larger systems, as a good method of tying together the extensive resources available on such a machine. It's just not suited to a tiny system.
Their clock momentarily went a minute early with each minute. Bad programming, I presume.