I mean the Microsoft Office document format is almost undocumentable
You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.
what hope do we have reverse engineering it from 1000 years from now, especially if there was a civilisation collapse, and the one doing the recovering doesn't have much continuity to ours.
If they get back to anything like our level, I'm sure they'll figure it out. Possibly with a bit of work, but they'll probably do it.
Not the obscure weird-ass formats, perhaps, but the dead common ones like those based around MPEG-2, JPEG, etc. Yeah, I think they'll manage.
Human beings are incredibly ingenious. Did you know that they recently retrieved the colour from a black-and-white copy of UK TV series Dad's Army?
It was originally shot on colour, but the BBC (as they used to do a lot) wiped it, and only a black and white telecine copy remained.
The engineers noted that "chroma dots" (v. minor interference caused by the colour signal not having been filtered out of the signal before the mono copy was made) remained on many such films. (The engineers at the time "should" have turned this off, but it wasn't a big deal).
They managed to use this pattern of tiny dots to figure out what the original colour information had been. Now, that's clever.
Anyone as clever as us with the desire to retrieve metric assloads of information from rotting media will be able to manage it, I'm sure.
If they remain very primitive for a long time, I'm worried about more than some hard drives; I'm sure that there will still be a number of human-viewable hard copies anyway. Probably way more than there were of the middle ages as well.
I can buy tapes made by Maxell, Fuji, Emtec, Sony and Acme (at least I can buy all of them locally, did not try eBay...). Which manufacturer has stopped making tapes?
Probably most if not all of them; I'm willing to bet that those are all made by a third-party contractor, probably one of very few remaining. VHS is the bottom of the market and likely too small to make it worth keeping their own facilities. Most "big name" video recorders are now made by other companies anyway for similar reasons.
Most of them don't even make their "own" DVDs and CDs...
If that material was considered out of copyright, I could take my library and digitize it, throw up a torrent, and *poof* it's around for forever.. but because I can't, it will sit around until I'm an old man before there's even a glimmer of hope that it might be made available to the public.
No, you *can* do that. You just can't do it legally, but it hasn't stopped countless people doing it anyway.
I wonder if this has pushed the sale of what would have previously been considered obscure material in (e.g.) "complete series" form, whereas on VHS you'd have been lucky to get "best of" compilations or at best the series on 1001 bulky tapes with no extras.
In a not unrelated vein... The panic-mongers have an obsession with "OMG!!!!! Digital media is fragile, our digital age is going to disappear without trace!"
Well, quite honestly, it's true that digital media is pretty fragile and that (despite being perfectly suited to copying) much of it will be lost because it wasn't copied. But I'm damn willing to bet that there's so much digital media out there in various forms, being copied and recopied that our digital age will on balance leave behind *way* more than previous ones.
I guarantee that the digital age will no more disappear from history than previous ones; as a percentage of media produced, more may be lost, but do we really need to keep every damn bit anyway? In the absence of personal interest, there's going to be more than enough to give future generations a good picture of our society.
Matter of fact, I wonder if we're getting to the stage of retaining too much. (That's aside from the privacy issues involved in monitoring and recording our everyday lives). Do I really care if security camera footage of me eating my lunch is lost?
Additional; the fact that the margin on the OS is greater than that on the hardware doesn't automatically mean that your argument is valid. Just that (e.g.) they might have to sell 90 OSs to make up for not selling 100 computers instead of the numbers being equal.
Although the real situation is probably more complicated than *that*!
From their financials, their margins on most computers are less than a boxed copy of OS X, which means that letting people install bought copies of OS X on other hardware would be in their interests.
Flawed reasoning. It's possible that the people buying Macs at present are doing so because they want to run OS X properly and/or legally (since it's theoretically possible to run it on generic non-Apple x86 hardware). If they weren't required to buy a Mac, how many wouldn't? And would increased sales of the OS compensate?
Not saying that this is definitely the case, just that it might be.
Everytime I go see a free paper on one of typical newspaper vending machines, most of them are still there. People don't value them because they see it's free and figure it translates to cheap or not worthwhile.
I'm not too bothered about free newspapers because they're normally designed for most of the content to be read within 5-10 minutes. If I'm on the bus I'll pick one up, read everything of interest and leave it for someone else, but I wouldn't take it home because I'd just end up throwing it out. I'd rather just buy something like The Independent, which has gone from 60-70p to £1 within a relatively short space of time, but is still worth it because it contains a lot to read and in-depth stuff which isn't as common on the net.
802.11N is not finished yet. Stop buying draft N hardware. You're ruining the standard.
I might have agreed with this (or rather, with criticism of manufacturers releasing "Draft N" hardware) 18 months back. However, 802.11n has been awaiting final release for ages, and it supposedly *still* isn't due until the end of next year. That's a ridiculous length of time.
According to the date on this article, the first "draft N" routers were already out more than 2.5 years ago. Slap another year on that and you're talking up to 3.5 years wait for someone who wanted an official 802.11n device instead of enjoying the benefits of Pre-N/Draft-N in the meantime.
I couldn't in good conscience criticise someone for not waiting another bloody year, even if it's not 100% clear if all the current routers will definitely support the final 802.11n standard.
Sorry, but I'm not buying that justification. Are you saying that no cut and paste is better than a flawed implementation, even if it's clear that Apple had- and have- nothing better in the pipeline?
The iPhone has been out for 18 months now. In that time, there's been no official cut and paste facility, let alone an improved version! The simple truth is that Apple likely launched the cut-and-pasteless iPhone with nothing better planned for the forseeable future. (If they'd anything that was well-developed enough at that time to be a sure bet- as opposed to some interesting but untested HCI UI research- they could have implemented it by now).
This is just a guess, but I'm guessing Steve Jobs was involved in this decision. The guy is very clever, and probably the reason Apple are much better at design, UI and consumer electronics than MS. However, he's not infallible, and this did make me think of his insistence on the original implementation of the Mac being a 128KB model against the advice of his engineers.
I have a hunch that Steve is looking for something a lot better than text copy-paste.
So? I'm sure that he- along with lots of other companies- is, but that's no excuse for leaving the facility out altogether until something better comes along!
It's true Hard Drives cost a little bit more than an optical disc, but putting a few platters inside a box with a read/write head is still simpler than etching the Integrated Circuits inside flash ROM drives.
Of course, this is clearly true- at present, anyway (*).
However, it doesn't change the fact that the analogy you used to back this up was flawed and therefore irrelevant to the argument. (Because you were relying on the two cases being the same when they weren't for the reasons I gave). It also doesn't say anything about the future.
(*) And if we accept your use of "simpler" and "more complex" to refer to cost-effectiveness, but I'm nitpicking here.
Still doesn't correct the fundamental flaw in your reasoning or your inability to recognise the difference between the current position (HDD still way cheaper per buck) from the current *trend* (flash memory is growing way faster).
Disclaimer; I'm not an SSD fanboy- I still prefer the bytes-for-your-buck that traditional HDDs give at present. However, I dislike misleading statements like this:-
Well the SSD proponents ignore the trend of hard drives.
On the contrary, you're the one that's selectively ignoring trends. Hard drives certainly continue to grow; I recently noted that there was 18 months between the first 1TB HDD and the first 1.5TB model.
A 1.5x increase every 18 months sounds good until you consider that flash memory is currently increasing at a rate of at least 2.5x if not faster. (*) THAT is the trend and enough in itself; but its real significance is that this difference would be magnified exponentially over longer periods.
I see I can buy a 1 terabyte USB HDD can be bought for $115.
We're not talking about the present, we're talking about the not-so-distant future. It's possible that SSD memory's increases may slow down like hard drives' did. However, that's speculation, and doesn't change the fact that present trends prove exactly the opposite of what you implied they did.
(*) It's notable that HDD size increases have slowed in recent years. I estimated that they were roughly matching flash's current 2.5x to 3x every 18 months during most of the 1990s and early-2000s.
I don't understand the relevance of your statement to Solid State Drives v. Hard Disk Drives.
He's arguing that your comparison of read-only pressed optical discs vs. the read-only ROM technology of ten plus years ago to read/write electro-mechanical (*) units (i.e. hard drives) vs. modern solid-state read/write flash memory is neither as similar nor as relevant as you'd like to make out.
(*) The biggest and most obvious difference beyond the ten-year progression of technology. From your earlier message:-
ROM, Flash, Solid State..... it's all still integrated circuitry and more-complicated to build than pressing a disc.
Yeah, and I'd like to hear how one manufactures an HDD by merely "pressing" it....
Complication drives up manufacturing cost which is why discs will always be cheaper than ICs.
...or without using any ICs. (Yeah, I know that removable hard-disc-only carts like the Iomega Jaz existed. But if that approach was so successful and cost-effective, why isn't it popular today?)
Or alternately, whether you're seriously proposing using optical media in place of a mechanical or SSD hard drive?
A £15 no-name player does not have comparable storage space to a £200, 120 GB iPod Classic. [etc, snip]
I never said that it did! Way to go at missing the point *and* reading things into my post that I clearly neither said nor meant.
The OP stated that "the iPod brand still had about 85 percent market share (*1)". My point was simply that if this was by value rather than units sold, then it was misleading in the context of the discussion.
Put simply; Apple could get the above 85% share by market value if (say) one £170 expensive iPod was sold for every three £10 cheapass no-name MP3 players. But it wouldn't mean that 85% of MP3 player owners had iPods; quite the opposite, three out of four wouldn't.
That's a simplified guess of course, but it's true that iPods are priced in the middle-to-top end of the market and avoid the dirt cheap segment altogether. Therefore a given iPod "counts" more by market value than a cheap player. See?
(*1) Assuming he meant "the whole MP3 player market", which is almost certain given what he was replying to
Cisco / Linksys set themselves up for a fall here. If they wanted code they could just rip off and use whilst largely ignoring the license, why on earth didn't they just use BSD code?
Maybe because there wasn't suitable equivalent code available under the BSD license? Or to put it another way, no-one who had written such code felt like releasing it under a BSD license. You can read into that what you will.
In fact, the UK is the only European country to do it differently (why doesn't that surprise me, the bloody bastards still drive on the wrong side of the road too).
Yeah, well that's why you were occupied by the Germans during WWII and we weren't. It's damn hard to steer a left-hand-drive tank on the wrong side of the road.
Although perhaps the 22 miles of water helped as well;)
*sigh* Cueing the millionth identical replay of the exact same longwinded "BSD is freer because...." "No, GPL is freer because...." discussion subthread, in which the contributors get to restate the established position using the same old arguments to make the same old points, and neither side changes the other's mind.
Nothing wrong with that, but we don't need to hear it over and over and over again. Can't we just find an old subthread on the subject and link to that instead?:)
This is why free licenses such as BSD should be adopted for any commercial project.
Cisco didn't "adopt" the GPL; quite the opposite, they're trying to avoid it. However, they put *themselves* in a position where they'll either be forced to or be guilty of breaking the license terms.
Avoid viral licenses such as *GPL.
Who should? The people who wrote the original code? Maybe they don't want companies like Cisco using it if it means closing the code off and not returning anything. That's their choice.
Cisco? They knew- or should have known- the implications of the GPL and had- as you imply- the choice of using BSD-licensed software instead.
Perhaps there wasn't a BSD-licensed version of what they were looking for? If so, tough shit! No-one's under any obligation to provide them with that for free. Cisco could of course pay someone to write it (and release it under the BSD license if they so wish). Or they're free to use the GPLed code and adhere to the terms it was released under.
But they thought they could get away with using the no-cost GPL code without honouring the obligations. They knew what they were doing.
Though there is an element of truth to it. I'd argue that BSD and the like are more "free" then GPL.
Oh no, not another bloody massive "BSD is more free than the GPL" "Oh not it isn't" "Oh yes it is" subthread where people restate the same established arguments for their respective sides.
No, you're not the first person to make this observation. We've heard it all before- again and again and again and...:/
The PC version of GTA 4 sold very well the first few days.
No, I read some of the reactions to it and waited for the 1911 release to test it.
Is the 1911 version the one where almost all the cars are Ford Model Ts? I was looking forward to hearing some ragtime music on my car's radio, but it didn't even include one. Abysmal!
I hear there's a "Hot Coffee" mod where you get to be alone with some woman and she flashes a bit of her ankle. Phwoar!
One individual trying to improve itself isn't evolution, it's simulated annealing.
Although this doesn't negate your entire post, I should point out that the Mona Lisa isn't the "lifeform" being evolved and nor is the program generating the polygons. Those are merely an abstract reproductive fitness test- the similarity to the Mona Lisa replacing effective use of food and sexual behaviour- and in a sense they represent the environment and the concept of evolution itself.
The actual lifeform- if you can call it that- is the evolving data set of polygons being used to generate the image.
No, the Mona Lisa isn't the lifeform as such. The Mona Lisa is the intended result (cf. gathering and using food as efficiently as possible) which determines reproductive fitness. The "lifeform" is really the program- or rather the set of polygons that the program uses to generate the image- and we don't know *that* in advance.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean the Microsoft Office document format is almost undocumentable
You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.
what hope do we have reverse engineering it from 1000 years from now, especially if there was a civilisation collapse, and the one doing the recovering doesn't have much continuity to ours.
If they get back to anything like our level, I'm sure they'll figure it out. Possibly with a bit of work, but they'll probably do it.
Not the obscure weird-ass formats, perhaps, but the dead common ones like those based around MPEG-2, JPEG, etc. Yeah, I think they'll manage.
Human beings are incredibly ingenious. Did you know that they recently retrieved the colour from a black-and-white copy of UK TV series Dad's Army?
It was originally shot on colour, but the BBC (as they used to do a lot) wiped it, and only a black and white telecine copy remained.
The engineers noted that "chroma dots" (v. minor interference caused by the colour signal not having been filtered out of the signal before the mono copy was made) remained on many such films. (The engineers at the time "should" have turned this off, but it wasn't a big deal).
They managed to use this pattern of tiny dots to figure out what the original colour information had been. Now, that's clever.
Anyone as clever as us with the desire to retrieve metric assloads of information from rotting media will be able to manage it, I'm sure.
If they remain very primitive for a long time, I'm worried about more than some hard drives; I'm sure that there will still be a number of human-viewable hard copies anyway. Probably way more than there were of the middle ages as well.
I can buy tapes made by Maxell, Fuji, Emtec, Sony and Acme (at least I can buy all of them locally, did not try eBay...). Which manufacturer has stopped making tapes?
Probably most if not all of them; I'm willing to bet that those are all made by a third-party contractor, probably one of very few remaining. VHS is the bottom of the market and likely too small to make it worth keeping their own facilities. Most "big name" video recorders are now made by other companies anyway for similar reasons.
Most of them don't even make their "own" DVDs and CDs...
If that material was considered out of copyright, I could take my library and digitize it, throw up a torrent, and *poof* it's around for forever.. but because I can't, it will sit around until I'm an old man before there's even a glimmer of hope that it might be made available to the public.
No, you *can* do that. You just can't do it legally, but it hasn't stopped countless people doing it anyway.
I wonder if this has pushed the sale of what would have previously been considered obscure material in (e.g.) "complete series" form, whereas on VHS you'd have been lucky to get "best of" compilations or at best the series on 1001 bulky tapes with no extras.
In a not unrelated vein... The panic-mongers have an obsession with "OMG!!!!! Digital media is fragile, our digital age is going to disappear without trace!"
Well, quite honestly, it's true that digital media is pretty fragile and that (despite being perfectly suited to copying) much of it will be lost because it wasn't copied. But I'm damn willing to bet that there's so much digital media out there in various forms, being copied and recopied that our digital age will on balance leave behind *way* more than previous ones.
I guarantee that the digital age will no more disappear from history than previous ones; as a percentage of media produced, more may be lost, but do we really need to keep every damn bit anyway? In the absence of personal interest, there's going to be more than enough to give future generations a good picture of our society.
Matter of fact, I wonder if we're getting to the stage of retaining too much. (That's aside from the privacy issues involved in monitoring and recording our everyday lives). Do I really care if security camera footage of me eating my lunch is lost?
Additional; the fact that the margin on the OS is greater than that on the hardware doesn't automatically mean that your argument is valid. Just that (e.g.) they might have to sell 90 OSs to make up for not selling 100 computers instead of the numbers being equal.
Although the real situation is probably more complicated than *that*!
From their financials, their margins on most computers are less than a boxed copy of OS X, which means that letting people install bought copies of OS X on other hardware would be in their interests.
Flawed reasoning. It's possible that the people buying Macs at present are doing so because they want to run OS X properly and/or legally (since it's theoretically possible to run it on generic non-Apple x86 hardware). If they weren't required to buy a Mac, how many wouldn't? And would increased sales of the OS compensate?
Not saying that this is definitely the case, just that it might be.
Everytime I go see a free paper on one of typical newspaper vending machines, most of them are still there. People don't value them because they see it's free and figure it translates to cheap or not worthwhile.
I'm not too bothered about free newspapers because they're normally designed for most of the content to be read within 5-10 minutes. If I'm on the bus I'll pick one up, read everything of interest and leave it for someone else, but I wouldn't take it home because I'd just end up throwing it out. I'd rather just buy something like The Independent, which has gone from 60-70p to £1 within a relatively short space of time, but is still worth it because it contains a lot to read and in-depth stuff which isn't as common on the net.
802.11N is not finished yet. Stop buying draft N hardware. You're ruining the standard.
I might have agreed with this (or rather, with criticism of manufacturers releasing "Draft N" hardware) 18 months back. However, 802.11n has been awaiting final release for ages, and it supposedly *still* isn't due until the end of next year. That's a ridiculous length of time.
According to the date on this article, the first "draft N" routers were already out more than 2.5 years ago. Slap another year on that and you're talking up to 3.5 years wait for someone who wanted an official 802.11n device instead of enjoying the benefits of Pre-N/Draft-N in the meantime.
I couldn't in good conscience criticise someone for not waiting another bloody year, even if it's not 100% clear if all the current routers will definitely support the final 802.11n standard.
What was the average number of tentacles used to penetrate Rui?
That brings a whole new meaning to the term "standard deviation" Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week, try the calamari!
Judging by poor Rui's experience, it'd probably be more accurate to say that in Sovie.. er, Anime Japan, the calamari tries *you*!
Sorry...
Sorry, but I'm not buying that justification. Are you saying that no cut and paste is better than a flawed implementation, even if it's clear that Apple had- and have- nothing better in the pipeline?
The iPhone has been out for 18 months now. In that time, there's been no official cut and paste facility, let alone an improved version! The simple truth is that Apple likely launched the cut-and-pasteless iPhone with nothing better planned for the forseeable future. (If they'd anything that was well-developed enough at that time to be a sure bet- as opposed to some interesting but untested HCI UI research- they could have implemented it by now).
This is just a guess, but I'm guessing Steve Jobs was involved in this decision. The guy is very clever, and probably the reason Apple are much better at design, UI and consumer electronics than MS. However, he's not infallible, and this did make me think of his insistence on the original implementation of the Mac being a 128KB model against the advice of his engineers.
I have a hunch that Steve is looking for something a lot better than text copy-paste.
So? I'm sure that he- along with lots of other companies- is, but that's no excuse for leaving the facility out altogether until something better comes along!
It's true Hard Drives cost a little bit more than an optical disc, but putting a few platters inside a box with a read/write head is still simpler than etching the Integrated Circuits inside flash ROM drives.
Of course, this is clearly true- at present, anyway (*).
However, it doesn't change the fact that the analogy you used to back this up was flawed and therefore irrelevant to the argument. (Because you were relying on the two cases being the same when they weren't for the reasons I gave). It also doesn't say anything about the future.
(*) And if we accept your use of "simpler" and "more complex" to refer to cost-effectiveness, but I'm nitpicking here.
[corrected version]
Still doesn't correct the fundamental flaw in your reasoning or your inability to recognise the difference between the current position (HDD still way cheaper per buck) from the current *trend* (flash memory is growing way faster).
Well the SSD proponents ignore the trend of hard drives.
On the contrary, you're the one that's selectively ignoring trends. Hard drives certainly continue to grow; I recently noted that there was 18 months between the first 1TB HDD and the first 1.5TB model.
A 1.5x increase every 18 months sounds good until you consider that flash memory is currently increasing at a rate of at least 2.5x if not faster. (*) THAT is the trend and enough in itself; but its real significance is that this difference would be magnified exponentially over longer periods.
I see I can buy a 1 terabyte USB HDD can be bought for $115.
We're not talking about the present, we're talking about the not-so-distant future. It's possible that SSD memory's increases may slow down like hard drives' did. However, that's speculation, and doesn't change the fact that present trends prove exactly the opposite of what you implied they did.
(*) It's notable that HDD size increases have slowed in recent years. I estimated that they were roughly matching flash's current 2.5x to 3x every 18 months during most of the 1990s and early-2000s.
I don't understand the relevance of your statement to Solid State Drives v. Hard Disk Drives.
He's arguing that your comparison of read-only pressed optical discs vs. the read-only ROM technology of ten plus years ago to read/write electro-mechanical (*) units (i.e. hard drives) vs. modern solid-state read/write flash memory is neither as similar nor as relevant as you'd like to make out.
(*) The biggest and most obvious difference beyond the ten-year progression of technology. From your earlier message:-
ROM, Flash, Solid State..... it's all still integrated circuitry and more-complicated to build than pressing a disc.
Yeah, and I'd like to hear how one manufactures an HDD by merely "pressing" it....
Complication drives up manufacturing cost which is why discs will always be cheaper than ICs.
...or without using any ICs. (Yeah, I know that removable hard-disc-only carts like the Iomega Jaz existed. But if that approach was so successful and cost-effective, why isn't it popular today?)
Or alternately, whether you're seriously proposing using optical media in place of a mechanical or SSD hard drive?
And please don't argue that you were talking about console media and not integrated read/write storage. That's precisely what we were discussing until you yourself brought up the misleading comparisons to the console situation of the late 1990s.
A £15 no-name player does not have comparable storage space to a £200, 120 GB iPod Classic. [etc, snip]
I never said that it did! Way to go at missing the point *and* reading things into my post that I clearly neither said nor meant.
The OP stated that "the iPod brand still had about 85 percent market share (*1)". My point was simply that if this was by value rather than units sold, then it was misleading in the context of the discussion.
Put simply; Apple could get the above 85% share by market value if (say) one £170 expensive iPod was sold for every three £10 cheapass no-name MP3 players. But it wouldn't mean that 85% of MP3 player owners had iPods; quite the opposite, three out of four wouldn't.
That's a simplified guess of course, but it's true that iPods are priced in the middle-to-top end of the market and avoid the dirt cheap segment altogether. Therefore a given iPod "counts" more by market value than a cheap player. See?
(*1) Assuming he meant "the whole MP3 player market", which is almost certain given what he was replying to
Can't we just find an old subthread on the subject and link to that instead? :)
But Slashdot doesn't allow us to post anything in old discussions!
Doesn't really matter, it's all been said anyway, which was kind of the point I was making! :/
Cisco / Linksys set themselves up for a fall here. If they wanted code they could just rip off and use whilst largely ignoring the license, why on earth didn't they just use BSD code?
Maybe because there wasn't suitable equivalent code available under the BSD license? Or to put it another way, no-one who had written such code felt like releasing it under a BSD license. You can read into that what you will.
In fact, the UK is the only European country to do it differently (why doesn't that surprise me, the bloody bastards still drive on the wrong side of the road too).
Yeah, well that's why you were occupied by the Germans during WWII and we weren't. It's damn hard to steer a left-hand-drive tank on the wrong side of the road.
;)
Although perhaps the 22 miles of water helped as well
*sigh* Cueing the millionth identical replay of the exact same longwinded "BSD is freer because...." "No, GPL is freer because...." discussion subthread, in which the contributors get to restate the established position using the same old arguments to make the same old points, and neither side changes the other's mind.
:)
Nothing wrong with that, but we don't need to hear it over and over and over again. Can't we just find an old subthread on the subject and link to that instead?
This is why free licenses such as BSD should be adopted for any commercial project.
Cisco didn't "adopt" the GPL; quite the opposite, they're trying to avoid it. However, they put *themselves* in a position where they'll either be forced to or be guilty of breaking the license terms.
Avoid viral licenses such as *GPL.
Who should? The people who wrote the original code? Maybe they don't want companies like Cisco using it if it means closing the code off and not returning anything. That's their choice.
Cisco? They knew- or should have known- the implications of the GPL and had- as you imply- the choice of using BSD-licensed software instead.
Perhaps there wasn't a BSD-licensed version of what they were looking for? If so, tough shit! No-one's under any obligation to provide them with that for free. Cisco could of course pay someone to write it (and release it under the BSD license if they so wish). Or they're free to use the GPLed code and adhere to the terms it was released under.
But they thought they could get away with using the no-cost GPL code without honouring the obligations. They knew what they were doing.
Though there is an element of truth to it. I'd argue that BSD and the like are more "free" then GPL.
Oh no, not another bloody massive "BSD is more free than the GPL" "Oh not it isn't" "Oh yes it is" subthread where people restate the same established arguments for their respective sides.
:/
No, you're not the first person to make this observation. We've heard it all before- again and again and again and...
The PC version of GTA 4 sold very well the first few days.
No, I read some of the reactions to it and waited for the 1911 release to test it.
Is the 1911 version the one where almost all the cars are Ford Model Ts? I was looking forward to hearing some ragtime music on my car's radio, but it didn't even include one. Abysmal!
I hear there's a "Hot Coffee" mod where you get to be alone with some woman and she flashes a bit of her ankle. Phwoar!
One individual trying to improve itself isn't evolution, it's simulated annealing.
Although this doesn't negate your entire post, I should point out that the Mona Lisa isn't the "lifeform" being evolved and nor is the program generating the polygons. Those are merely an abstract reproductive fitness test- the similarity to the Mona Lisa replacing effective use of food and sexual behaviour- and in a sense they represent the environment and the concept of evolution itself.
The actual lifeform- if you can call it that- is the evolving data set of polygons being used to generate the image.
No, the Mona Lisa isn't the lifeform as such. The Mona Lisa is the intended result (cf. gathering and using food as efficiently as possible) which determines reproductive fitness. The "lifeform" is really the program- or rather the set of polygons that the program uses to generate the image- and we don't know *that* in advance.