There is probably some wavelength of light or sound that penetrates common clothing materials and reflects from or is emited from skin. Infrared comes to mind. Does it give you the right to post naked pictures of everyone who doesn't walk around in aluminum foil wraps?
An overwhelming majority of people don't volunteer referer information. It just leaks around without their knowledge. Be a gentleman/lady and ask in a form where they heard about your website.
That would be counterproductive. How do you play pirated games under Linux or write them to your NTFS Windows partition? DivX is better, but some videos are WMV or Quicktime.
Wow, that's even worse than I remembered. Ctrl-C doesn't do much good in a terminal window, so are you saying you can actually highlight a command in xterm, try to paste it with Ctrl-V into your kde-based irc window and instead share your juicy love letter with the whole Internet? Did you ever actually try to rationalize it to non-Linux users?
As for sendmail.cf, various cron jobs/crashed editors/other programs send you e-mail that you need to access with "mail" command or some other spool-based reader. Why shouldn't you see all your e-mail at the same time?
Well, you can explain away one case, but Linux is just littered with inconsistencies that can only be ironed out by commercial distributions with very undemocratic contribution policy. One scrollbar slides down one step if clicked at the bottom. Another one scrolls all the way to the bottom in the same situation. There are endless configuration files in/etc that control very essential facilities like getting online with PPP or syncing calendar on a Palm. There are various python thingies to edit some of them, but if user A edits in with a gnome control panel and then another one opens it in KDE, it gets mangled and must be fixed by hand. In RH8, if you just put a space in PPP password, you get a syntax error with a script line number the next time you open the config tool.
I don't know how far along are Lindows/Linspire and Java desktop at overcoming these problems for new users. But definitely windows and its typical applications are not as inconsistent for simple things and in this case the complexity is annoying rather than stimulating for people with decent IQ.
If someone has a normal/high intelligence, it doesn't mean he/she enjoys puzzling out sendmail.cf or remembering if a given program uses Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Ins/Shift-Ins or select/middle mouse button for copy and paste. Personally, I would rather write a new program or play a good puzzle game.
I am fairly convinced that the problem which most people have with cell phone users is that they cannot hear both sides of the converstation, hence my comment. Personally, I don't care about people carrying on conversations in resturants, but I know that many people do, including some that own them.
Well, say I am a neighbor of that restaurant and don't like fish smell coming from their kitchen. Should I have right to block their seafood delivery trucks? If not, they have no business using jammers or metalic paint to block my cell phone signal.
Maybe the existing system was working just fine? Upgrades too expensive?
That's fine to say when you are running a restaurant. If your system goes down, just take orders with a pencil and calculator until you get a new one. If you are running a critical infrastructure like an airline, its not enough that your computers work so far. You have to maintain a system based on modern software design, retain enough programmers who understand current code and do preventive maintanance on both software and hardware.
Oh, modern systems will still crash, but they are far less likely to run into unrecoverable errors and hard limits. There will be a log of all the submitted requests stored in redundant locations. If the database is totally corrupted, it can be still restored from a backup and the work since then re-done without losing any data.
US government should consider covering part of the expense of re-writting software in infrastructure companies, because the impact on the society - people not being able to get home for Christmas, businesses losing customers in whatever places they were going to - exceeds financial damage to the airline.
...to achieve freedom from hearing only one side of someone's conversation.
Do you also want to prevent others from talking in a foreign language while in the restaurant? If not, some places can ask people to keep silent or talk quietly, but otherwise a phone call is no different from talking to someone in person.
Well, you can continue to buy CDs or hold your breath for a long time. Most people are not bothered by mp3 quality and besides don't have enough disk space to store their whole collections uncompressed.
Besides, you can take a 5 channel, 100Khz, 32 bit sound, apply the best available compression algorithm and make a 480Kbps file which in many aspects (like having surround sound!) sounds better than your uncompressed CD.
It's more accurate to say that he/she doesn't make it a religious issue and instead looks weather use conditions are acceptable. Very few people used music services prior to iTunes, because of draconian use restrictions. Now most people are willing to accept perfect copies on several computers/portable and a slight quality loss elsewhere by burning to CD allowed by iTMS and presumably various WMA-based services.
People will use non-MS video recording solutions - like VCRs and MythTV - so long as DRM stops them from making a copy of an education TV show for their favourite niece. They will also refuse to subscribe to digital services that don't allow at least a moderate quality recording.
Only a monopoly would try to include DRM anyway, when even all commercial software that comes with TV tuner cards records in unrestricted formats. I look forward to them taking an enourmous beating ala Sony and ATRAC.
The truth is that there probably isn't any large program out there that doesn't suffer from this.
Umm.. Java programs don't get buffer overflows. C++ programs that use bound-checked containers and no pointer arithmetics are reasonably safe. Perl and Python are all right. So are we only talking about old-style C code then?
You can just map the same physical memory to two different addresses - one place for writting and another for executing. This way there is no overhead involved, although it weakens the protection to some degree.
Well, why aren't you contributing to iPod-Linux? Perhaps people like you want a different device - like a portable video player, a PDA or a cellphone - rather than just a different firmware.
Did I sign some kind of contract before they let me walk out with my iPod from the store? If not, I can do anything I want with my own device, and consult/pay other people for help. Even Apple realized that and released new firmware rather than sueing Real.
Although it's a plausable goal, it doesn't seam to be in high demand. If even 20% of iPod users wanted different firmware, the project would take off quickly once the initial reverse-engineering was done, and by now we would have mplayer and an mp3/ogg/acc/wma player with color visualizations and sync with music libraries of WMP, winamp and xmms.
As it is, the project's contributors page only lists 3 developers. Seams an overwhelming majority of people are satisfied with Apple's firmware.
Besides, you can recompress oggs into high bit rate AACs. Sure, there will be a quality loss, but are your headphones that good?
You sure picked a weird target. I have never been harassed by Safeway with whatever information they are gathering from my club card. They just mention some items on sale at the bottom of the receipt. If you trade cards, you just get diaper advertisements instead of ones for your favourite beer until they catch up with "your" new buying habits.
Not that they are angels or anything - probably sucks to work there - but they are trying to make more money selling groceries, not selling your personal information to nigerian spammers. Niether they want their competitors to buy their hard-collected statistics from a third party, so they would rather not sell it in the first place.
There is a lot of value of having purchase information matched to a particular buyer beyond spam and junk paper mail. If people who buy X are likely to also buy Y, it makes sense to put them close on the shelf, preferably highest-profit-margin version of Y closest to X. If majority of frequnt shoppers in a particular Safeway are senior, it makes sense to have a bigger pharmacy and smaller fast food section.
It would be nice to swap e-mail addresses that you use to fill in web forms - except that spammers care far more about volume than targetting. It seams like lots of people are not satisfied with their bodies and are willing to buy dubious creams and pills to rectify the problem. Beyond that, it would be nice to have a list of credit cards that don't harass you with "pay $70 every year of a service you will seldom remember to use" programs. And a list of online stores that don't subscribe you to any newsletters by default and don't sell information to anyone else if you choose to subscribe.
Welcome to OSX technology jumble. Application programs can use a lot of Mach facilities like ports directly instead of Unix calls and a lot of them (like NetInfo server) do just that. This occasionally causes permission problems that can not be explained by looking at uids and gids of processes.
There are also Carbon APIs that can do some things that don't have a Unix equivalent or at least not a documented one - like accessing resource forks.
If what you heard is true, JavaVM probably just uses some low-level calls that have the least overhead.
Re:Hopefully patent provision is not overbroad
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 1
The article mentions the possibility that if you sue authors/users of any piece of GPL software, you would lose right to use any GPL software, including presumable your own.
Hopefully patent provision is not overbroad
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Otherwise it can be used to write a piece of GPLed software whose main purpose is to infringe patents of some company and then get a free license from them because they are using another, unrelated piece of GPLed software - that they wrote themselves!
Also, consider a corporate merger. Company B might have used a piece of GPLed software that infringes on patents of company A and it would take some time to discover and replace it if the combined company doesn't intend to make the patent public.
Oh, I would very much like software patents to go away. But at this point, companies would rather avoid using - and contributing to - GPLed software completely than risk loss of their patents in an unpredictable fashion.
Then why do you think Clinton took all the heat? Fifth Amendment is for criminal charges. In civil lawsuits you can be compelled to testify against yourself and jailed for lying or refusing to answer, even if the original case is trivial. In fact plainstiffs can exact vengence by destroying your family or public image with juicy bits of your life that have at best a tenious bearing on the case. Or in case of politicians, a civil lawsuit can be launched at election time, in order to tarnish candidate's reputation rather than collect any judgement.
In the other words, it's time for a major cleanup of the system.
Hmmm.. So you can hire me to write some false but plausable looking accusations against CEO of your competitor, publish them as coming from an "anonymous insider" and there is not a thing the CEO or company's shareholders can do against me if they find out?
All right, sorry for premature conclusions. Version 1.3 for MacOS has a much more useful help file and demo and can do pretty impressive things like animated 3D graphs.
It still has "New Math expression" in the menu just to tell you it only works in Version 3 later, but I guess that's minor. Hopefully the final 1.x version for OSX will be equally usable:-)
PacificT.com offers a free download of "the original Graphing Calculator, beloved by students and teachers, which Apple has bundled on all machines since the introduction of the Power Macintosh in 1994". But when you actually run it, you can not edit any provided examples - even y = x^2 - because "they have been created with commercial version". Documentation makes no mention of what is actually supported by free software and equation editor lets you enter full syntax supported by version 3. You just get messages asking you to order their $100 stuff when you try something like x+y=1.
Now, how would the original program created by unpayed volunteers in '94 know to nag users about their future $$$ product? The answer is easy, because Graphing Calculator saves documents in simple text format. For example:
Simply changing the first line to "GraphingCalculator 3.0;" and opening it again magically causes all the missing features to be supported! Of course now it doesn't let you edit the document until you change the version back. I bet both programs are compiled from the same source with a few #ifdef NAG blocks.
Nothing is really wrong with that, except for misleading claims and that nagware rather destroys the original sentiment of authors who wanted to release a useful program without even getting payed. This is not "Version 1.4", it's "Version 3.0 demo". Otherwise it would come with original documentation and examples that actually show you how to use the free program.
Really? Know any other law where you can make money helping the criminal with full knowledge of the crime to be committed and not be charged with anything?
Slashdot Mirror
There is probably some wavelength of light or sound that penetrates common clothing materials and reflects from or is emited from skin. Infrared comes to mind. Does it give you the right to post naked pictures of everyone who doesn't walk around in aluminum foil wraps?
An overwhelming majority of people don't volunteer referer information. It just leaks around without their knowledge. Be a gentleman/lady and ask in a form where they heard about your website.
That would be counterproductive. How do you play pirated games under Linux or write them to your NTFS Windows partition? DivX is better, but some videos are WMV or Quicktime.
Wow, that's even worse than I remembered. Ctrl-C doesn't do much good in a terminal window, so are you saying you can actually highlight a command in xterm, try to paste it with Ctrl-V into your kde-based irc window and instead share your juicy love letter with the whole Internet? Did you ever actually try to rationalize it to non-Linux users?
/etc that control very essential facilities like getting online with PPP or syncing calendar on a Palm. There are various python thingies to edit some of them, but if user A edits in with a gnome control panel and then another one opens it in KDE, it gets mangled and must be fixed by hand. In RH8, if you just put a space in PPP password, you get a syntax error with a script line number the next time you open the config tool.
As for sendmail.cf, various cron jobs/crashed editors/other programs send you e-mail that you need to access with "mail" command or some other spool-based reader. Why shouldn't you see all your e-mail at the same time?
Well, you can explain away one case, but Linux is just littered with inconsistencies that can only be ironed out by commercial distributions with very undemocratic contribution policy. One scrollbar slides down one step if clicked at the bottom. Another one scrolls all the way to the bottom in the same situation. There are endless configuration files in
I don't know how far along are Lindows/Linspire and Java desktop at overcoming these problems for new users. But definitely windows and its typical applications are not as inconsistent for simple things and in this case the complexity is annoying rather than stimulating for people with decent IQ.
If someone has a normal/high intelligence, it doesn't mean he/she enjoys puzzling out sendmail.cf or remembering if a given program uses Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Ins/Shift-Ins or select/middle mouse button for copy and paste. Personally, I would rather write a new program or play a good puzzle game.
I am fairly convinced that the problem which most people have with cell phone users is that they cannot hear both sides of the converstation, hence my comment. Personally, I don't care about people carrying on conversations in resturants, but I know that many people do, including some that own them.
Well, say I am a neighbor of that restaurant and don't like fish smell coming from their kitchen. Should I have right to block their seafood delivery trucks? If not, they have no business using jammers or metalic paint to block my cell phone signal.
Maybe the existing system was working just fine? Upgrades too expensive?
That's fine to say when you are running a restaurant. If your system goes down, just take orders with a pencil and calculator until you get a new one. If you are running a critical infrastructure like an airline, its not enough that your computers work so far. You have to maintain a system based on modern software design, retain enough programmers who understand current code and do preventive maintanance on both software and hardware.
Oh, modern systems will still crash, but they are far less likely to run into unrecoverable errors and hard limits. There will be a log of all the submitted requests stored in redundant locations. If the database is totally corrupted, it can be still restored from a backup and the work since then re-done without losing any data.
US government should consider covering part of the expense of re-writting software in infrastructure companies, because the impact on the society - people not being able to get home for Christmas, businesses losing customers in whatever places they were going to - exceeds financial damage to the airline.
...to achieve freedom from hearing only one side of someone's conversation.
Do you also want to prevent others from talking in a foreign language while in the restaurant? If not, some places can ask people to keep silent or talk quietly, but otherwise a phone call is no different from talking to someone in person.
Well, you can continue to buy CDs or hold your breath for a long time. Most people are not bothered by mp3 quality and besides don't have enough disk space to store their whole collections uncompressed.
Besides, you can take a 5 channel, 100Khz, 32 bit sound, apply the best available compression algorithm and make a 480Kbps file which in many aspects (like having surround sound!) sounds better than your uncompressed CD.
True enough.
The question is, does it have a warp drive and are the vulcans watching?
The average consumer does not care about DRM.
It's more accurate to say that he/she doesn't make it a religious issue and instead looks weather use conditions are acceptable. Very few people used music services prior to iTunes, because of draconian use restrictions. Now most people are willing to accept perfect copies on several computers/portable and a slight quality loss elsewhere by burning to CD allowed by iTMS and presumably various WMA-based services.
People will use non-MS video recording solutions - like VCRs and MythTV - so long as DRM stops them from making a copy of an education TV show for their favourite niece. They will also refuse to subscribe to digital services that don't allow at least a moderate quality recording.
Only a monopoly would try to include DRM anyway, when even all commercial software that comes with TV tuner cards records in unrestricted formats. I look forward to them taking an enourmous beating ala Sony and ATRAC.
The truth is that there probably isn't any large program out there that doesn't suffer from this.
Umm.. Java programs don't get buffer overflows. C++ programs that use bound-checked containers and no pointer arithmetics are reasonably safe. Perl and Python are all right. So are we only talking about old-style C code then?
You can just map the same physical memory to two different addresses - one place for writting and another for executing. This way there is no overhead involved, although it weakens the protection to some degree.
Well, why aren't you contributing to iPod-Linux? Perhaps people like you want a different device - like a portable video player, a PDA or a cellphone - rather than just a different firmware.
Did I sign some kind of contract before they let me walk out with my iPod from the store? If not, I can do anything I want with my own device, and consult/pay other people for help. Even Apple realized that and released new firmware rather than sueing Real.
Uh, apparently these people don't like Referer: slashdot.org. Just copy and paste the URL: http://www.ipodlinux.org/index.php/Contributors
Although it's a plausable goal, it doesn't seam to be in high demand. If even 20% of iPod users wanted different firmware, the project would take off quickly once the initial reverse-engineering was done, and by now we would have mplayer and an mp3/ogg/acc/wma player with color visualizations and sync with music libraries of WMP, winamp and xmms.
As it is, the project's contributors page only lists 3 developers. Seams an overwhelming majority of people are satisfied with Apple's firmware.
Besides, you can recompress oggs into high bit rate AACs. Sure, there will be a quality loss, but are your headphones that good?
You sure picked a weird target. I have never been harassed by Safeway with whatever information they are gathering from my club card. They just mention some items on sale at the bottom of the receipt. If you trade cards, you just get diaper advertisements instead of ones for your favourite beer until they catch up with "your" new buying habits.
Not that they are angels or anything - probably sucks to work there - but they are trying to make more money selling groceries, not selling your personal information to nigerian spammers. Niether they want their competitors to buy their hard-collected statistics from a third party, so they would rather not sell it in the first place.
There is a lot of value of having purchase information matched to a particular buyer beyond spam and junk paper mail. If people who buy X are likely to also buy Y, it makes sense to put them close on the shelf, preferably highest-profit-margin version of Y closest to X. If majority of frequnt shoppers in a particular Safeway are senior, it makes sense to have a bigger pharmacy and smaller fast food section.
It would be nice to swap e-mail addresses that you use to fill in web forms - except that spammers care far more about volume than targetting. It seams like lots of people are not satisfied with their bodies and are willing to buy dubious creams and pills to rectify the problem. Beyond that, it would be nice to have a list of credit cards that don't harass you with "pay $70 every year of a service you will seldom remember to use" programs. And a list of online stores that don't subscribe you to any newsletters by default and don't sell information to anyone else if you choose to subscribe.
Welcome to OSX technology jumble. Application programs can use a lot of Mach facilities like ports directly instead of Unix calls and a lot of them (like NetInfo server) do just that. This occasionally causes permission problems that can not be explained by looking at uids and gids of processes.
There are also Carbon APIs that can do some things that don't have a Unix equivalent or at least not a documented one - like accessing resource forks.
If what you heard is true, JavaVM probably just uses some low-level calls that have the least overhead.
The article mentions the possibility that if you sue authors/users of any piece of GPL software, you would lose right to use any GPL software, including presumable your own.
Otherwise it can be used to write a piece of GPLed software whose main purpose is to infringe patents of some company and then get a free license from them because they are using another, unrelated piece of GPLed software - that they wrote themselves!
Also, consider a corporate merger. Company B might have used a piece of GPLed software that infringes on patents of company A and it would take some time to discover and replace it if the combined company doesn't intend to make the patent public.
Oh, I would very much like software patents to go away. But at this point, companies would rather avoid using - and contributing to - GPLed software completely than risk loss of their patents in an unpredictable fashion.
Then why do you think Clinton took all the heat? Fifth Amendment is for criminal charges. In civil lawsuits you can be compelled to testify against yourself and jailed for lying or refusing to answer, even if the original case is trivial. In fact plainstiffs can exact vengence by destroying your family or public image with juicy bits of your life that have at best a tenious bearing on the case. Or in case of politicians, a civil lawsuit can be launched at election time, in order to tarnish candidate's reputation rather than collect any judgement.
In the other words, it's time for a major cleanup of the system.
Hmmm.. So you can hire me to write some false but plausable looking accusations against CEO of your competitor, publish them as coming from an "anonymous insider" and there is not a thing the CEO or company's shareholders can do against me if they find out?
If so, some laws sure need fixing.
All right, sorry for premature conclusions. Version 1.3 for MacOS has a much more useful help file and demo and can do pretty impressive things like animated 3D graphs.
:-)
It still has "New Math expression" in the menu just to tell you it only works in Version 3 later, but I guess that's minor. Hopefully the final 1.x version for OSX will be equally usable
Now, how would the original program created by unpayed volunteers in '94 know to nag users about their future $$$ product? The answer is easy, because Graphing Calculator saves documents in simple text format. For example:Simply changing the first line to "GraphingCalculator 3.0;" and opening it again magically causes all the missing features to be supported! Of course now it doesn't let you edit the document until you change the version back. I bet both programs are compiled from the same source with a few #ifdef NAG blocks.
Nothing is really wrong with that, except for misleading claims and that nagware rather destroys the original sentiment of authors who wanted to release a useful program without even getting payed. This is not "Version 1.4", it's "Version 3.0 demo". Otherwise it would come with original documentation and examples that actually show you how to use the free program.
Really? Know any other law where you can make money helping the criminal with full knowledge of the crime to be committed and not be charged with anything?