The alogrithms underneeth all of the glizt and glamour of the internet apply to many different searching tasks. The engine may not be the same as "Page-rank" but they've got some really smart people over there at google. If KDE can develop (kdevelop?:)) search technology that far surpasses existing capability and approaches that of a Google solution it would be a killer app that could set KDE above the other DE's. But that's a big if.
hmm? Two megs for a kitchen-sink editor? That seems pretty small to me. Perhaps you meant memory wise. Or you could be a troll. This got insightful? You could easily put together a mail agent in like a 100K jar.
and I haven't seen any real notion of software engineering except for ONE small company I had occasion to work at.
I can second that, but I disagree that software engineering is real engineering, (and I get that alot as a computer engineering major who doesn't solder). The sofware development lifecycle may be one consideration, but there are many others.
Just as many considerations, IMHO, as a civil engineer takes into account when building a road. As for corporations actually using software engineering and not something much more nieve, you've got a point. Except for the large corporations, just moving to the level of software development that IBM had in the 70's would vastly improve software. Remember that a lot of software is developed even without version control!
I'm not sure that 99.9% of companies is a good number, but to say that software eng != eng is a hard statment to make.
Yeah, I hate replying to offtopic post (especally when I hate mod points). But I will complain in every thread that the color scheme is god-damn awful. I've not heard anybody that likes it, only people that don't mind it.
And I hate having to remove the 'it' in it.slashdot.org to get normal green back. I can't figging read it like it is. Yeah, bitch, bitch offtopic whatever, but come on. Props to parent for complaining again.
Can you honestly tell me that the government is going to hire a panel of people to check in in-depth source changes on OSS projects?
Even if they didn't you still have to ask yourself how would linux be used in the military. What is the single hardest attack vector to defend against? Internet access. Therefore, don't hook anything up to the web. Even devices hooked up to the military network are much more secure. To get to any system remotely you're still going to have to break the military network security. That's not easy.
Also, the military doesn't broadcast where it uses what. Sensitive hardware is classified, as it should be. You're not going to know some missle or guidance system uses embedded linux.
So let's go over how Linux could be compromised. First, you have to construct a stealth feature into a GNU/Linux component, and have it get past the "many-eyes". Then you have to find out where and how it's being used in the military. Then you have to either gain local access or defeat the military network. Then you might have some effect on whatever system is using Linux. But to get to that point you already have 3 non-linux related security breaches (1.knowing linux is used, 2.physically getting to/defeating remote security, 3.doing so without detection).
Even then, you are only gaining access/sabotaging to only a small subset of military capability. You think the military will allow anything to become ubiqitous?
I'm glad we got a good discussion going here. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree again.
You wouldn't need anywhere near that many people.
Ask John Carmack how many man-months Doom3 took per year of development. I'd wager its comparable to the effort put into Linux for the same time. True, it's not as complex, but it required a lot of man power.
Even more, assuming there is a open framework out there that removes a lot of the effort where is the advantages of open sourcing your end product? One could use a GPL'ed engine but have all the sounds, graphics and design propreitary. And you could charge for it and have your stuff be non-distributable. Where is the advantage? Until there is a clear motive to move, it just won't happen.
"The only thing really holding back OSS game development is graphics and sound."
...and this is the biggest investment in a game anyway. Level design, character models, gameplay balancing, UI tweeking, sound, and playtesting invariably take more time and resources than coding the engine anyway.
And you're right, artists and musicians haven't jumped aboard yet. Artists and musicians require professional hardware and software that often doesn't yet have a OSS equivalent. And there are exceptions to the rule. Check out the total conversion mod RedOrchestra for UT2k4. It's professional quality, but still buggy (to be fair it's beta), and far from complete.
So you would be ok with 3 maybe 4 new releases a year instead of the dozens today? The OSS model has told us that's all there's going to be. Take a look at the biggest, most active OSS projects out there:
linux, mozilla, gnome, kde, gnu. In order to put together a game in a couple years, you'd need at least as much manpower as any of those four, and the talent pool is much more varied (just just programmers, but artists, etc).
Plus there's no incentive to switch to OSS. Only the most popular games develop a large community, so it's not like you'd get alot of help. Face it, there are some software models where OSS doesn't make sense at all.
Yes, you would have KPatience and whatever else comes in the gnome-games and kde-games packages. But you would not have games the scale of Doom 3, HalfLife 2 etc. Yes they conceivably could be tackeled by open source people, but at not nearly the same pace. I like open source as much as the next guys but some software is better non-free. If they didn't charge $40 a game it simple wouldn't get made.
Sure operating systems and office software will become such a commodity that they will have no monetary value, but we have to realize that the "all software should be free" model is serverely flawed.
Open source development simply can not match the short term model that is game development.
I was refering specifically to the White House and other high value Governments target who have people on the roof that can shoot down stuff. Also this new license doesn't apply to Helicopters and thus much of the argument of terrorists using this new license do not make sence.
Furthermore it makes sence that the Secret Service will be there (the DNC, that is) and have adaquate anti-aircraft protection. No, you won't be able to scramble jets, but a shoulder mounted SAM should be able to take down small aircraft even when they are less than a mile away.
Now for regular sports events, then yes, a helicopter attack, especially a highjacked med copter, is a high risk. But that is out of the scope of a discussion of a license that doesn't allow helicopter usage in the first place.
since as it manages to speed up it will start to forcibly stay "sideways" not like O but |
Um... why? Turbulence would skew it out out the verticle position constantly. Since a penny has little mass, as soon as it corrected itself, (and probably before) it would get blown off verticle again. I'd guess on average that the penny would fall at a 30 degree angle to it's verticle, but as it's just a guess (though a little google confirms pennys wobble in experience) this assertion is just as baseless as yours.
Poor logic. It would be trivial to use such a plane carrying explosives, or spraying gas/nerve agent over the White House,
You'd get shot down way before you even got far into town. Even if you don't get shot down by the air force, it's widely reported that the Secret Service carries and maintains a variety of SAMs. After 9/11? I doubt you'd get very far.
Also such planes don't allow room for very much explosives. What kind of bomb you going to use, Ammonium Nitrate? You'd need more then a couple hundred pound to do any damage. Besides, anything more sophisticated will do more damage on the ground.
Gas/Nerve agent? Even if you accumulated enough to do some damage, it would be more effective to detonate on the ground, in an enclosed or crowded area. You'd have to get your hands on some power stuff to not have it just disperse in the air.
And like another poster asked, what the terminal velocity of coins? As has been widely reported, rarely enough to kill someone.
It will cost me and other developers way too much time to learn it.
From my experience, it does take a couple days to get up and running with Maven. Say ~10 man hours. This time is insignificant compared with the benefits that it bestows.
Remember, a good programer knows when not to program, and plan, improve processes instead. Also, Maven really only needs to be touches by one person, the project lead. The rest only need to know a couple commands and spend a couple hours to learn how to document stuff in Maven.
Let me end by saying that it's no magic bullet (nothing really is), but it fills a niche (automated project management) nicely that many people don't even consider. The only things that it doesn't do is task and bug management (AFAIK). I'd urge you to give it a try.
Erm... so you didn't really read the page huh? Maven is a project automation tool, not a build automation tool. You configure it to do (continuous) builds, but also to do documention, collaboration etc.
I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, I wasn't on the bandwagon either until I actually used it for a project.
Sorry but I'm still convinced that Transgaming has been a bad wine citizen (the fact that the licence permitted it doesn't change my opinion),
Transgaming is a commerical venture. They need to secure a line of income. They do this by restricting access to precompiled binaries, amoungst other things. To get it easily you have to pay a nominal subscription: $60 a year. Now that's not alot. Without this subscription they wouldn't have a profit model and would probably desinagrate.
Would you rather have them not do this venture at all? Or do you have another profit model that would alleviate what you criticize? For me the community benefits from their work: I can run Windows games under Linux. The OSS'ers may complain that they don't have full/libre access to the code, but if they had that, there wouldn't be a transgaming anyway. What do you want them to do?
and that they were deceiving the community when they said they'd give back everything to wine after they reach a certain number of subscribers. I guess they have reached that number since they have not yet filed for bankruptcy.
So just because they haven't yet, they're not going to? And they lied about it? Face it a pure software company just doesn't have a OSS profit model. Name one. Red Hat? Services, not software. Mozilla? Not a commerical entity, but backed by them. Come on, what would you have them do?
Should you demonstrate to our satisfaction the number of seats you have been using and presently need licensed and if you enter into a pre-paid, one year commercial license agreement with Valve for that usage, Valve will consider this matter resolved and will not pursue any claims it may have for past infringement of its software products in regard to their use at your establishment.
The point that they do not simply have the option to stop offering Counter Strike. They have to buy a license if they don't want to get sued. Maybe the guy made a mistake and thought they just by buying 40 copies of half-life and putting them on his computers was enough.
This was a reasonable position given that:
...with companies such as Microsoft offering licenses through cybercafé organizations like iGames such that as long as each copy of a title is legitimately purchased, cybercafés may use them.
Yes he profited from using Half-life and the free CS mod, and yes he should have made sure that all of the licensing was correct. But as a company with large community of followers, why would you want to seed mistrust as a money-grubbing corporation to some shmuck who didn't know he needed a different license?
If he wants to keep using CS, then he should get the license, but he should have the opportunity just to stop offering it (if he had accuired the copies legally), as it could have been just an honest mistake.
Of course there could be more details to this case that shine less favorable on the cafe, but forcing someone to buy a license or risk law-suits doesn't exactly ring as a nice thing to do.
I don't know about Walmart, (there aren't many in the largish city where I live), but when the discount bins in many software stores I have seen are classics. Sure there are noname crap, but I've paid $10 (or less) this year for Black and White, Sam and Max Hit the Road, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Day of the Tentacle, X-COM Ufo Denfense.
Case in point: my Girlfriend loves adventure games, but those aren't in style much anymore. When I pointed out that she could have all of the SCUMM-type games for like $50, she all of a sudden didn't mind going into the software store with me anymore. I admit, that some are a rare find, but cost, as a previous poster said, doesn't denote quality.
I find it wierd that people will wontonly spend money on lavishly priced items when cheap items are often better. Or that people spend 50K on a car they spend an hour in a day, yet still sleep on a crappy mattress or have a crappy chair at work. Sorry about the rant, but people need to think more about actual worth than price.
It could also be that is has a small rfid tag, and that it's base station, on a wiki network, keeps track of what it last touched. If another device notices the rfid tag in it's space, it could say, "Hey a pen that I don't recongize is here, who wants to give me something?".
The base device would hear the broadcast and transmit the file to the remote device. Some combination of bluetooth and wifi could easily be embedded into the devices, while keeping the pen "dumb" and only having a tag in it. As more and more devices come with wifi or bluetooth, I think this is a more reasonable implementation.
Given such an implementation, it shouldn't increase hardware costs significantly.
It is more likely that your deadspot is the result of those towers not being Verizon or of multipath scattering, in which the surrounding environment causes the cell signal to interfere with itself. Modern cell placement is very careful, and the hw/sw used there is almost positively able to overcome "fighting" over a given phone.
Adjacet base towers use different frequencies to resolve exactly this kind of problem. The cell phone should be able to pick which one is best.
As misguided as Ken Brown is he hardly seems rabbid. His thoughts are clear and consise, even though they are founded on shaky groud. It seems like he wants Linus to say, "Yeah, I took what I knew about minix and applied it to create Linux."
Except that he said that before 0.1 came out. I just don't know what he wants. Andrew T. wrote minix and doesn't seems to have a problem with it. Much of the organization of Unix had become public domain.
You can't resonably expect IP protection when you write a text book. The main purpose of a text book is to distribute knowledge. Ok, so stealing source code is mmm... bad ok? But show me where 1 year old linux source code came from? 22K loc in one year? Hell yeah he was working hard but in a non-corporate environment (like he was comparing Denise Richtie) one can write a LOT of code. That's 60 loc a day. Deal.
In conclusion, is this guy rabbid? I don't think so, but I think he's barking up the wrong tree.
Yeah, he is using straw man arugment. While challening the validity of linux with quotes like
he reality is that, noone, including Linus Torvalds, can ever guarantee that code in the Linux kernel is free of counter ownership, or attribution claims.
When in reality noone can ever be absolutely sure, OSS or proprietary, the validity of source code who has more than one writer. This is a common theme of anti-Linux writers: Desribe a weakness that Linux has (as the defacto-OSS model) that really isn't a weakness, or that it effects all software.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised they haven't thought of another avenue of attack. And then there is inflamatory sentences like this:
Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property?
Um... the GPL is ALL about IP. It has protections and safegaurds. It doesn't even have to be free! Contemp for IP? Not Linus, RMS maybe, but it's still a longshot.
Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?
As I said before trust applies to everybody who writes code. You have to trust your employees not to steal GLP'ed code too. Given that most software written is proprietary I'd say that that is a MUCH more likely propositition than masive amounts of unowned IP getting into Linux.
It sounded pretty honest to me, except for the accusation of Codeweaver's code leaking back into the wine project. I wouldn't call it spin, because there's nothing really to spin. They didn't do anything wrong.
The people that they hired to do marketing should have done a better job and they probably have little knowledge of the oss community. Frankly I'm surprised that people got all up in arms.
So in this new letter, they're admitting that there's WINE in there, though not saying how much
Which is good because David isn't finished yet and even they don't know how much they are going to use.
In conclusion it sounds like a case of a PR flop, but the quality of the letter suggests they hired somebody to help them. I personally expect them to produce something useful. They don't have any of the tell tale signs of misinformation ala SCO.
Until we actually see convictions for actual spamming, ie forged headers, etc, then I have no faith in the justice system to fix spamming. Even then I have little faith. Technological problems require technological solutions.
But in this case, couldn't of happened to a better guy.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that's why Google doesn't provide enterprise solutions for searching documents.
:)) search technology that far surpasses existing capability and approaches that of a Google solution it would be a killer app that could set KDE above the other DE's. But that's a big if.
The alogrithms underneeth all of the glizt and glamour of the internet apply to many different searching tasks. The engine may not be the same as "Page-rank" but they've got some really smart people over there at google. If KDE can develop (kdevelop?
>ll jedit* ... jedit42pre14install.jar
2076042
hmm? Two megs for a kitchen-sink editor? That seems pretty small to me. Perhaps you meant memory wise. Or you could be a troll. This got insightful? You could easily put together a mail agent in like a 100K jar.
and I haven't seen any real notion of software engineering except for ONE small company I had occasion to work at.
I can second that, but I disagree that software engineering is real engineering, (and I get that alot as a computer engineering major who doesn't solder). The sofware development lifecycle may be one consideration, but there are many others.
Just as many considerations, IMHO, as a civil engineer takes into account when building a road. As for corporations actually using software engineering and not something much more nieve, you've got a point. Except for the large corporations, just moving to the level of software development that IBM had in the 70's would vastly improve software. Remember that a lot of software is developed even without version control!
I'm not sure that 99.9% of companies is a good number, but to say that software eng != eng is a hard statment to make.
Yeah, I hate replying to offtopic post (especally when I hate mod points). But I will complain in every thread that the color scheme is god-damn awful. I've not heard anybody that likes it, only people that don't mind it.
And I hate having to remove the 'it' in it.slashdot.org to get normal green back. I can't figging read it like it is. Yeah, bitch, bitch offtopic whatever, but come on. Props to parent for complaining again.
What we need is a MISINFORMED or IGNORANT moderation option.
We do, it's called Reply to this. Most people deserve to know why their post is misinformed or ignorant.
Can you honestly tell me that the government is going to hire a panel of people to check in in-depth source changes on OSS projects?
Even if they didn't you still have to ask yourself how would linux be used in the military. What is the single hardest attack vector to defend against? Internet access. Therefore, don't hook anything up to the web. Even devices hooked up to the military network are much more secure. To get to any system remotely you're still going to have to break the military network security. That's not easy.
Also, the military doesn't broadcast where it uses what. Sensitive hardware is classified, as it should be. You're not going to know some missle or guidance system uses embedded linux.
So let's go over how Linux could be compromised. First, you have to construct a stealth feature into a GNU/Linux component, and have it get past the "many-eyes". Then you have to find out where and how it's being used in the military. Then you have to either gain local access or defeat the military network. Then you might have some effect on whatever system is using Linux. But to get to that point you already have 3 non-linux related security breaches (1.knowing linux is used, 2.physically getting to/defeating remote security, 3.doing so without detection).
Even then, you are only gaining access/sabotaging to only a small subset of military capability. You think the military will allow anything to become ubiqitous?
I'm glad we got a good discussion going here. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree again.
You wouldn't need anywhere near that many people.
Ask John Carmack how many man-months Doom3 took per year of development. I'd wager its comparable to the effort put into Linux for the same time. True, it's not as complex, but it required a lot of man power.
Even more, assuming there is a open framework out there that removes a lot of the effort where is the advantages of open sourcing your end product? One could use a GPL'ed engine but have all the sounds, graphics and design propreitary. And you could charge for it and have your stuff be non-distributable. Where is the advantage? Until there is a clear motive to move, it just won't happen.
"The only thing really holding back OSS game development is graphics and sound."
...and this is the biggest investment in a game anyway. Level design, character models, gameplay balancing, UI tweeking, sound, and playtesting invariably take more time and resources than coding the engine anyway.
And you're right, artists and musicians haven't jumped aboard yet. Artists and musicians require professional hardware and software that often doesn't yet have a OSS equivalent. And there are exceptions to the rule. Check out the total conversion mod RedOrchestra for UT2k4. It's professional quality, but still buggy (to be fair it's beta), and far from complete.
So you would be ok with 3 maybe 4 new releases a year instead of the dozens today? The OSS model has told us that's all there's going to be. Take a look at the biggest, most active OSS projects out there: linux, mozilla, gnome, kde, gnu. In order to put together a game in a couple years, you'd need at least as much manpower as any of those four, and the talent pool is much more varied (just just programmers, but artists, etc).
Plus there's no incentive to switch to OSS. Only the most popular games develop a large community, so it's not like you'd get alot of help. Face it, there are some software models where OSS doesn't make sense at all.
Yes, you would have KPatience and whatever else comes in the gnome-games and kde-games packages. But you would not have games the scale of Doom 3, HalfLife 2 etc. Yes they conceivably could be tackeled by open source people, but at not nearly the same pace. I like open source as much as the next guys but some software is better non-free. If they didn't charge $40 a game it simple wouldn't get made.
Sure operating systems and office software will become such a commodity that they will have no monetary value, but we have to realize that the "all software should be free" model is serverely flawed.
Open source development simply can not match the short term model that is game development.
I was refering specifically to the White House and other high value Governments target who have people on the roof that can shoot down stuff. Also this new license doesn't apply to Helicopters and thus much of the argument of terrorists using this new license do not make sence.
Furthermore it makes sence that the Secret Service will be there (the DNC, that is) and have adaquate anti-aircraft protection. No, you won't be able to scramble jets, but a shoulder mounted SAM should be able to take down small aircraft even when they are less than a mile away.
Now for regular sports events, then yes, a helicopter attack, especially a highjacked med copter, is a high risk. But that is out of the scope of a discussion of a license that doesn't allow helicopter usage in the first place.
i'd guess probably hundred meteres per second (just below mach 1 or something)
Actually around 30 mph
since as it manages to speed up it will start to forcibly stay "sideways" not like O but |
Um... why? Turbulence would skew it out out the verticle position constantly. Since a penny has little mass, as soon as it corrected itself, (and probably before) it would get blown off verticle again. I'd guess on average that the penny would fall at a 30 degree angle to it's verticle, but as it's just a guess (though a little google confirms pennys wobble in experience) this assertion is just as baseless as yours.
Poor logic. It would be trivial to use such a plane carrying explosives, or spraying gas/nerve agent over the White House,
You'd get shot down way before you even got far into town. Even if you don't get shot down by the air force, it's widely reported that the Secret Service carries and maintains a variety of SAMs. After 9/11? I doubt you'd get very far.
Also such planes don't allow room for very much explosives. What kind of bomb you going to use, Ammonium Nitrate? You'd need more then a couple hundred pound to do any damage. Besides, anything more sophisticated will do more damage on the ground.
Gas/Nerve agent? Even if you accumulated enough to do some damage, it would be more effective to detonate on the ground, in an enclosed or crowded area. You'd have to get your hands on some power stuff to not have it just disperse in the air.
And like another poster asked, what the terminal velocity of coins? As has been widely reported, rarely enough to kill someone.
It will cost me and other developers way too much time to learn it.
From my experience, it does take a couple days to get up and running with Maven. Say ~10 man hours. This time is insignificant compared with the benefits that it bestows.
Remember, a good programer knows when not to program, and plan, improve processes instead. Also, Maven really only needs to be touches by one person, the project lead. The rest only need to know a couple commands and spend a couple hours to learn how to document stuff in Maven.
Let me end by saying that it's no magic bullet (nothing really is), but it fills a niche (automated project management) nicely that many people don't even consider. The only things that it doesn't do is task and bug management (AFAIK). I'd urge you to give it a try.
Erm... so you didn't really read the page huh? Maven is a project automation tool, not a build automation tool. You configure it to do (continuous) builds, but also to do documention, collaboration etc.
I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, I wasn't on the bandwagon either until I actually used it for a project.
There is quite a bit of software that is bug free. Unfortunately the vast majority of them contain the string "Hello World!".
Sorry but I'm still convinced that Transgaming has been a bad wine citizen (the fact that the licence permitted it doesn't change my opinion),
Transgaming is a commerical venture. They need to secure a line of income. They do this by restricting access to precompiled binaries, amoungst other things. To get it easily you have to pay a nominal subscription: $60 a year. Now that's not alot. Without this subscription they wouldn't have a profit model and would probably desinagrate.
Would you rather have them not do this venture at all? Or do you have another profit model that would alleviate what you criticize? For me the community benefits from their work: I can run Windows games under Linux. The OSS'ers may complain that they don't have full/libre access to the code, but if they had that, there wouldn't be a transgaming anyway. What do you want them to do?
and that they were deceiving the community when they said they'd give back everything to wine after they reach a certain number of subscribers. I guess they have reached that number since they have not yet filed for bankruptcy.
So just because they haven't yet, they're not going to? And they lied about it? Face it a pure software company just doesn't have a OSS profit model. Name one. Red Hat? Services, not software. Mozilla? Not a commerical entity, but backed by them. Come on, what would you have them do?
Yes it does, but do a google on "Alan Hicks" 660661. You get a whole page full of your comments. Obviously Google does cache Slashdot articls.
From the article:
...with companies such as Microsoft offering licenses through cybercafé organizations like iGames such that as long as each copy of a title is legitimately purchased, cybercafés may use them.
Should you demonstrate to our satisfaction the number of seats you have been using and presently need licensed and if you enter into a pre-paid, one year commercial license agreement with Valve for that usage, Valve will consider this matter resolved and will not pursue any claims it may have for past infringement of its software products in regard to their use at your establishment.
The point that they do not simply have the option to stop offering Counter Strike. They have to buy a license if they don't want to get sued. Maybe the guy made a mistake and thought they just by buying 40 copies of half-life and putting them on his computers was enough.
This was a reasonable position given that:
Yes he profited from using Half-life and the free CS mod, and yes he should have made sure that all of the licensing was correct. But as a company with large community of followers, why would you want to seed mistrust as a money-grubbing corporation to some shmuck who didn't know he needed a different license?
If he wants to keep using CS, then he should get the license, but he should have the opportunity just to stop offering it (if he had accuired the copies legally), as it could have been just an honest mistake.
Of course there could be more details to this case that shine less favorable on the cafe, but forcing someone to buy a license or risk law-suits doesn't exactly ring as a nice thing to do.
are games that people assume (rightly) suck
I don't know about Walmart, (there aren't many in the largish city where I live), but when the discount bins in many software stores I have seen are classics. Sure there are noname crap, but I've paid $10 (or less) this year for Black and White, Sam and Max Hit the Road, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Day of the Tentacle, X-COM Ufo Denfense.
Case in point: my Girlfriend loves adventure games, but those aren't in style much anymore. When I pointed out that she could have all of the SCUMM-type games for like $50, she all of a sudden didn't mind going into the software store with me anymore. I admit, that some are a rare find, but cost, as a previous poster said, doesn't denote quality.
I find it wierd that people will wontonly spend money on lavishly priced items when cheap items are often better. Or that people spend 50K on a car they spend an hour in a day, yet still sleep on a crappy mattress or have a crappy chair at work. Sorry about the rant, but people need to think more about actual worth than price.
It could also be that is has a small rfid tag, and that it's base station, on a wiki network, keeps track of what it last touched. If another device notices the rfid tag in it's space, it could say, "Hey a pen that I don't recongize is here, who wants to give me something?".
The base device would hear the broadcast and transmit the file to the remote device. Some combination of bluetooth and wifi could easily be embedded into the devices, while keeping the pen "dumb" and only having a tag in it. As more and more devices come with wifi or bluetooth, I think this is a more reasonable implementation.
Given such an implementation, it shouldn't increase hardware costs significantly.
It is more likely that your deadspot is the result of those towers not being Verizon or of multipath scattering, in which the surrounding environment causes the cell signal to interfere with itself. Modern cell placement is very careful, and the hw/sw used there is almost positively able to overcome "fighting" over a given phone.
Adjacet base towers use different frequencies to resolve exactly this kind of problem. The cell phone should be able to pick which one is best.
As misguided as Ken Brown is he hardly seems rabbid. His thoughts are clear and consise, even though they are founded on shaky groud. It seems like he wants Linus to say, "Yeah, I took what I knew about minix and applied it to create Linux."
Except that he said that before 0.1 came out. I just don't know what he wants. Andrew T. wrote minix and doesn't seems to have a problem with it. Much of the organization of Unix had become public domain.
You can't resonably expect IP protection when you write a text book. The main purpose of a text book is to distribute knowledge. Ok, so stealing source code is mmm... bad ok? But show me where 1 year old linux source code came from? 22K loc in one year? Hell yeah he was working hard but in a non-corporate environment (like he was comparing Denise Richtie) one can write a LOT of code. That's 60 loc a day. Deal.
In conclusion, is this guy rabbid? I don't think so, but I think he's barking up the wrong tree.
Yeah, he is using straw man arugment. While challening the validity of linux with quotes like
he reality is that, noone, including Linus Torvalds, can ever guarantee that code in the Linux kernel is free of counter ownership, or attribution claims.
When in reality noone can ever be absolutely sure, OSS or proprietary, the validity of source code who has more than one writer. This is a common theme of anti-Linux writers: Desribe a weakness that Linux has (as the defacto-OSS model) that really isn't a weakness, or that it effects all software.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised they haven't thought of another avenue of attack. And then there is inflamatory sentences like this:
Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property?
Um... the GPL is ALL about IP. It has protections and safegaurds. It doesn't even have to be free! Contemp for IP? Not Linus, RMS maybe, but it's still a longshot.
Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?
As I said before trust applies to everybody who writes code. You have to trust your employees not to steal GLP'ed code too. Given that most software written is proprietary I'd say that that is a MUCH more likely propositition than masive amounts of unowned IP getting into Linux.
Now they're spinning.
It sounded pretty honest to me, except for the accusation of Codeweaver's code leaking back into the wine project. I wouldn't call it spin, because there's nothing really to spin. They didn't do anything wrong.
The people that they hired to do marketing should have done a better job and they probably have little knowledge of the oss community. Frankly I'm surprised that people got all up in arms.
So in this new letter, they're admitting that there's WINE in there, though not saying how much
Which is good because David isn't finished yet and even they don't know how much they are going to use.
In conclusion it sounds like a case of a PR flop, but the quality of the letter suggests they hired somebody to help them. I personally expect them to produce something useful. They don't have any of the tell tale signs of misinformation ala SCO.
the conviction was not for spamming per se
Until we actually see convictions for actual spamming, ie forged headers, etc, then I have no faith in the justice system to fix spamming. Even then I have little faith. Technological problems require technological solutions.
But in this case, couldn't of happened to a better guy.