Allegedly, the replacement format for JPEG is JNG, which is a subspec of MNG. MNG has a truckload of features including: animation (with sprites!), color correction, and (almost tangentially) lossy JPEG-like compression. The latter is available in a separate format called JNG too.
Of course, on the one hand we need support for MNG in applications (consider for example how it was removed from Mozilla; there are high hopes for it to be reintroduced in SeaMonkey, though). And of course, there is my very personal perplexity... by looking at the JNG spec, it looks like it's very similar to JPEG... is it really outside of the bounds of that stupid patent?
(Of course, everybody should be using JPEG2000 by now, which compresses much better with much less artefacts... of course that's patented too...)
In other words, when given a chance to vote for a communal model or for a more traditional capitalist one, people vote for the latter. While "incompatible" might be too strong a term, it does seem that free people making free choices do not choose the communist economic model.
Yes and no. When given a choice, people usually choose what they think is better for them (and for their descendants, hopefully), and this may not always be the same thing at all times in all places.
When saying "free people making free choices" you should also consider that "free choices" often have constraints anyway.
Some people are short-term thinkers and will value the momentary benefit more than any long-term benefit, other are long-term thinkers and would rather go for the latter rather than the former. However, some (esp. long-term) choices only really work out if there is a 'critical mass' of people thinking alike and being able to get together to make it work (in this regard, Internet is a strong part of the open source success --physically displacing yourself to another country is much more difficult), and if such critical mass cannot be reached in a certain place at a certain time, people will choose an option even when their preference would be the one needing the critical mass.
Also, often you cannot really choose what you really want, because of the vast degree of possible choices only a small discrete subset is actually offered (e.g. in politics you'll have to choose one party even though you'd rather get 60% from one, 30% from another and 10% of still another one).
It is relevant, because you can't have a large-scale communal society without some sort of government framework enforcing the rules of the commune.
Well, you can't have communal societies of any scale without some kind of government framework enforcing the rules of the commune. Actually, I'd go as far as saying you can't have any kind of society without rules and ways to enforce them. So the problem is not so much that some kind of rule-enforcing is needed, but how it is implemented.
We're wired to desire property.
Not all communism goes to Proudhon's extreme of equating any form of private property with theft. Even in the kibbutzim (to keep on topic with the specific example) some degree of private property was allowed. So it's more a matter of where to draw the line.
The Soviets didn't set out to be despotic; most party members in the early days were true believers in the communism and desperately wanted it to work. But the ambituous see communal living as an opportunity to gain political power and the lazy see an opportunity to goof off.
True for the last part, but even if not initially set out to be despotic coomunism in the USSR was still not really a voluntary option. It was imposed, when something like this can really only work when it 'grows from below'. The political power seizure is an extremely serious problem, and needs continuous thorough changes in the 'government framework' to prevent it. However this can lead to a lack of general bearings in the direction the State moves. If you take it to Mao's extreme of the "continuous revolution" (to prevent the re-formation of classes with bureaucrats on top) you obtain a State that cannot sustain itself.
But small tight-knit communal structures work and work well. You see it today in cities with large asian communities -- immigrant socities provide capital for members to start businesses.
Again, we're dealing with an essentially voluntary-based community.
Briefly, the kibbutzim fall is an effect of people not volunteering for it anymore. It had nothing to do with it being incompatible with the democratic political model. Rather, it's related to a widespread feeling, as mentioned by the previous poster, that while they were the correct way to overcome the difficulties of fighting off the desert (and please the Isarel vs Palestine discussion out of this, since it's not relevant) from an agricultural point of view, it wasn't adequate past that.
In particular, the kibbutz fall was tied to its inability to appeal in an industrial context: although there were a few industrial kibbutzim, they didn't have much success, and weren't well seen by the rest.
BTW, in other democratic countries there are other examples of communal groups, but they never reached an 'echo' or 'call' as strong as the one of the Israelian kibbutz. Also interesting, once again they are mostly agricultural coopoeratives, although there are a fw (very limited number) industrial ones. These are even less socially comunist, but very close to what Marx describe as communism, i.e. the workers owning the means of production.
(Of course, I'm not mentioning the open source project, which is an essentially anarcho-communist environment, in the strictest sense)
Didn't I mention I didn't want to discuss the reasons of their rise and fall?:) I only wanted to point out that communism and democracy are not intrinsically in contrast, regardless of the anticommunist obsession Americans grow in.
So why didn't this happen with Israel's kibbutzim? Note that regardless of the ideology behind them (i.e. not all of them where ideologically communist or even socialist), the kibbutz is in practice a communist cell of a democratic organism (the State of Israel). (Of course we could go on and on at length on if and why they failed, and if and why they were a success, and why there weren't many industrial ones and blah blah blah, but that's totally off topic.)
You got it all right until the end. Being a republic is orthogonal to being democratic. Republic is the opposite of monarchy, and it refers to nation that have a res publica, something which is not owned by anybody (in particular the King) and is therefor property of everybody/nobody. A republic does not have to be democratic in any way.
Re:NTFS already does it since Win2K !
on
Vista To Get Symlinks?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Junction points on NTFS are neither symlinks nor hardlinks: they are mountpoints for system volumes (partitions). Basically, they are the way NT deals with the Unix way of doing things (instead of the DOS way of assigning letters to volumes).
NTFS does support hardlinks and, as the developers of the NTFS driver for Linux recently discovered (see details in this thread), it also supports symlinks, provided Microsoft Services For Unix are installed.
The important part of all this, is, I think, that open source tools ranging from the linux fs drivers (ntfs and cifs/smb) to the cygwin stuff should get updated and start managing the thing the way MS does it (on MS filesystems, of course).
Cycling in motorways/highways ("autostrade") is outlawed in Italy too. Actually, no mean of transportation that can't go faster than 60 km/h is banned. And not because they are dangerous, but because they slow traffic down.
the bridge was planned a lot of time ago, and projects and deployment began right after the last elections results. So it is not an electoral move.
Actually yes, it was an electoral move. But it was an electoral move two elections ago.
The messina striat is quite efficient, and the status of high-traffic roads in south italy is not as bad as you are trying to present. I personally saw the Salerno-Reggio Calabria and it's completely new. Also in sicily from messina to palermo the road is perfect.
Is that a joke or something? I live in Catania, my father has worked near Siracusa for tens of years, my girlfriend is from Matera, I have relatives all over Sicily, and some others that have moved (some temporarily, some permanently) to cities northern of Rome. I think this entitles me to a more thorough knowledge about the conditions of "high-traffic roads" in the South in general and in Sicily in particular.
And for sure "high-traffic roads" are scarcer and in much worse conditions than they are in the rest of Italy. As I mentioned, most (surely not all) the major cities are reached by these "high-traffic" roads, but this is scarcely significant for most of the population. Some of the most important high-traffic roads (e.g. SS 114) are still in abysmal conditions, and the ones that exist can in no way hold a comparison with what they have up north; or did you happen to pass by in one of the lucky days in which the one-lane-per-direction in the SA-RC and ME-PA is less than 50%, and you had no truck or caravan in front of you?
And let's not even get started on the railroads systems.
The main problem in south and central italy are the inhabitants.
eveything in Italy is cheaper than in the USA (about half, although the gap is diminishing)
in the South, this is especially more true
local labour
cheating: with this I mean that the prospected cost will grow much higher as time goes by; since Berlusconi is likely to lose the next elections and who knows, probably the ones after those too, it'll be the left-wing parties that'll have to dig for that money, or stop the works; all the best for Mr. B
contrary to the use in most civilized nations (Italy included) the private company that builds it will not be held responsible for defects; this means that if the bridge collapses (wanna bet?) the State will be held liable, not the company that's building it
Well, Berlusconi is very likely to get the votes from Sicily anyway, due to his well-known connections. But yes, it's also an electoral move.
It's also a totally useless bridge, considering the state of road and railway communications across souther Italy. Believe me: the Messina striat is scarely the bottleneck, except perhaps for reaching the major cities in Sicily (or conversely when traving from the major cities in Sicily).
.tar.gz? What is the "parent parent" using, slackware? Installing GAIM under Debian is as easy as feta install gaim, for example. And there are graphical interfaces for that, too.
Yes, you have to be root, but that has nothing to do with open source. It has to do with network- and multi-user- aware operating systems. In Windows XP (or any other NT-based Windows version) you have to be an administrator, or a user with administrator rights (i.e. someone in the "root" group or with passwordless sudo, if you want it in Linux terms) too.
This page makes a very nice description of what science "is", or more precisely how it behaves, making the difference between science and faith very clear: science does not claim to have "the definitive answer" to anything. Just an answer "as good as it gets for what we know". This is why scientific theories are scientific theories and not dogmas.
CorelWordPerfect has had it for even longer time: since version 9 at least (and that was 5 or 6 years ago).
Of course, just like for OOo, it didn't support all the nifty advanced PDF features right from the start (e.g. version 9 didn't even support hyperlinks, IIRC).
KOffice too has had PDF support for quite some time, IIRC, and both ways, even, which is something exceptional in the wordprocessing field.
MSO does look like "the late runner" here.
Indeed, someone should collect all the chapters together and put them on the various p2p networks: BitTorrent, ed2k, whatever else.
I'm actually surprised it hasn't been done by the authors/editors/publishers themselves, though. It would have been a brilliant example.
Actually, the potential applications of such mechanical organs and other simil-organic stuff is very important for transplants on (living) human beings. The more these robots are made similar to the "real thing" (so that training doctors know *exactly* what happens when they "miss") the more their parts will be near to be useful to supplant defective parts of humans.
Of course, if there's a risk in there it's that the "mechanical organs" could be as bad as the real ones:)
#1 56 mbits would be heaven ? nah, i dont really think so:) at first, if 3 users with 56Mbit lines would start to download from a server that sits in a rack behind a 100Mbit ethernet... they would want to pull 56*3=168 Mbits out from the 100Mbit ethernet... so they will just not be able to really use their bandwidth and the server will be jammed.... and for most of users, even 8Mbit is a huge overkill, cause people that dont download movies/cd-images/adult-movies/music each day, mostly have latency issues (they click and the browser doesnt react within a second, waaah) and the larger the bandwidth distributed over several users, the larger the latency (routers & co have their limits). ofcourse a big maximal downloadspeed is great but i dont think that the rest of the network isnt quite ready for it, it might not be such a good idea (most of our country's server hosting providers have 100Mbit ethernet/internet lines for the servers, so 4 british haxors can now jamm my server)
I was having thoughts along the same lines. While the backbones of the internet might still be safely many orders of magnitude wider channels that such theoritecial limits reachable by end-users (and even if it's not 24 but 12 to 20)), and thus be safe from clogging the way you describe for servers, it's sensible to remark that some servers may find themselves at a pretty bad shortage of upload bandwidth.
A possible solution is of course provider-side proxies, but this runs the risk of making the Internet "out-datish", "stale-ish", especially when the proxies are hidden and the user won't even know he's not getting fresh contents. Ok, this could be solved with intelligent proxies, but still it wouldn't solve the problem for very dynamic, yet bandwidth-intensive, applications.
So we need some new form of distributed content providing. While specific forms like BitTorrent are a nice step in that direction, I don't see them as the mean for common use (web pages, moderate multimedia content).
I was directing my thoughts towards something more low-level, maybe even at a TCP/IP level. For example, universal multicasting.
Multicasting is currently implemented in a way that is pretty much a remainder of the way radio and TV broadcasting work: the emitter is somewhat agnostic of who is going to receive, and the receivers can freely attach/detach from the 'channel', without any knowledge of who else is listening.
While that's probably the safest way to implement TCP/IP transmission to multiple destination addresses, it has several shortcomings. Some are provider dependent (it's not widespread, and some providers only have provider-local multicasting), some are structural (the number of multicasting addresses is quite small).
So a cross-provider, generally available multicasting capability (would it be possible to allow any IP to be a multicasting IP, for example?) might be the solution.
This would have enormous benefits for lots of applications, and enormously reduce bandwidth waste from lots of Internet usage. Actually, I was surprised when I found out it wasn't like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, now I can lose all of my data by just misplacing a single disk. Ain't that grand?
Yeah, that confirms my suspiction. So we need to come out with something new ... let's just make it as good as JPEG2000 while we're at it :)
Allegedly, the replacement format for JPEG is JNG, which is a subspec of MNG. MNG has a truckload of features including: animation (with sprites!), color correction, and (almost tangentially) lossy JPEG-like compression. The latter is available in a separate format called JNG too. Of course, on the one hand we need support for MNG in applications (consider for example how it was removed from Mozilla; there are high hopes for it to be reintroduced in SeaMonkey, though). And of course, there is my very personal perplexity ... by looking at the JNG spec, it looks like it's very similar to JPEG ... is it really outside of the bounds of that stupid patent?
(Of course, everybody should be using JPEG2000 by now, which compresses much better with much less artefacts ... of course that's patented too ...)
When saying "free people making free choices" you should also consider that "free choices" often have constraints anyway.
Some people are short-term thinkers and will value the momentary benefit more than any long-term benefit, other are long-term thinkers and would rather go for the latter rather than the former. However, some (esp. long-term) choices only really work out if there is a 'critical mass' of people thinking alike and being able to get together to make it work (in this regard, Internet is a strong part of the open source success --physically displacing yourself to another country is much more difficult), and if such critical mass cannot be reached in a certain place at a certain time, people will choose an option even when their preference would be the one needing the critical mass.
Also, often you cannot really choose what you really want, because of the vast degree of possible choices only a small discrete subset is actually offered (e.g. in politics you'll have to choose one party even though you'd rather get 60% from one, 30% from another and 10% of still another one).
Briefly, the kibbutzim fall is an effect of people not volunteering for it anymore. It had nothing to do with it being incompatible with the democratic political model. Rather, it's related to a widespread feeling, as mentioned by the previous poster, that while they were the correct way to overcome the difficulties of fighting off the desert (and please the Isarel vs Palestine discussion out of this, since it's not relevant) from an agricultural point of view, it wasn't adequate past that. In particular, the kibbutz fall was tied to its inability to appeal in an industrial context: although there were a few industrial kibbutzim, they didn't have much success, and weren't well seen by the rest. BTW, in other democratic countries there are other examples of communal groups, but they never reached an 'echo' or 'call' as strong as the one of the Israelian kibbutz. Also interesting, once again they are mostly agricultural coopoeratives, although there are a fw (very limited number) industrial ones. These are even less socially comunist, but very close to what Marx describe as communism, i.e. the workers owning the means of production. (Of course, I'm not mentioning the open source project, which is an essentially anarcho-communist environment, in the strictest sense)
Didn't I mention I didn't want to discuss the reasons of their rise and fall? :) I only wanted to point out that communism and democracy are not intrinsically in contrast, regardless of the anticommunist obsession Americans grow in.
Ok, Ajax is a bathroom cleaner and Vim is a detergent (in Europe). Can you beat that, Emacs? ;)
So why didn't this happen with Israel's kibbutzim? Note that regardless of the ideology behind them (i.e. not all of them where ideologically communist or even socialist), the kibbutz is in practice a communist cell of a democratic organism (the State of Israel). (Of course we could go on and on at length on if and why they failed, and if and why they were a success, and why there weren't many industrial ones and blah blah blah, but that's totally off topic.)
In this ocean of ignorance, someone that knows what he's talking about.
You got it all right until the end. Being a republic is orthogonal to being democratic. Republic is the opposite of monarchy, and it refers to nation that have a res publica, something which is not owned by anybody (in particular the King) and is therefor property of everybody/nobody. A republic does not have to be democratic in any way.
Parent is Informative.
NTFS does support hardlinks and, as the developers of the NTFS driver for Linux recently discovered (see details in this thread), it also supports symlinks, provided Microsoft Services For Unix are installed.
The important part of all this, is, I think, that open source tools ranging from the linux fs drivers (ntfs and cifs/smb) to the cygwin stuff should get updated and start managing the thing the way MS does it (on MS filesystems, of course).
Sony? Openness? I'll believe that when they'll release the specs for the various ATRAC formats.
Cycling in motorways/highways ("autostrade") is outlawed in Italy too. Actually, no mean of transportation that can't go faster than 60 km/h is banned. And not because they are dangerous, but because they slow traffic down.
the bridge was planned a lot of time ago, and projects and deployment began right after the last elections results. So it is not an electoral move.
Actually yes, it was an electoral move. But it was an electoral move two elections ago.
The messina striat is quite efficient, and the status of high-traffic roads in south italy is not as bad as you are trying to present. I personally saw the Salerno-Reggio Calabria and it's completely new. Also in sicily from messina to palermo the road is perfect. Is that a joke or something? I live in Catania, my father has worked near Siracusa for tens of years, my girlfriend is from Matera, I have relatives all over Sicily, and some others that have moved (some temporarily, some permanently) to cities northern of Rome. I think this entitles me to a more thorough knowledge about the conditions of "high-traffic roads" in the South in general and in Sicily in particular.
And for sure "high-traffic roads" are scarcer and in much worse conditions than they are in the rest of Italy. As I mentioned, most (surely not all) the major cities are reached by these "high-traffic" roads, but this is scarcely significant for most of the population. Some of the most important high-traffic roads (e.g. SS 114) are still in abysmal conditions, and the ones that exist can in no way hold a comparison with what they have up north; or did you happen to pass by in one of the lucky days in which the one-lane-per-direction in the SA-RC and ME-PA is less than 50%, and you had no truck or caravan in front of you?
And let's not even get started on the railroads systems.
The main problem in south and central italy are the inhabitants.
This, I can related to.
It's also a totally useless bridge, considering the state of road and railway communications across souther Italy. Believe me: the Messina striat is scarely the bottleneck, except perhaps for reaching the major cities in Sicily (or conversely when traving from the major cities in Sicily).
Yes, you have to be root, but that has nothing to do with open source. It has to do with network- and multi-user- aware operating systems. In Windows XP (or any other NT-based Windows version) you have to be an administrator, or a user with administrator rights (i.e. someone in the "root" group or with passwordless sudo, if you want it in Linux terms) too.
This page makes a very nice description of what science "is", or more precisely how it behaves, making the difference between science and faith very clear: science does not claim to have "the definitive answer" to anything. Just an answer "as good as it gets for what we know". This is why scientific theories are scientific theories and not dogmas.
Corel WordPerfect has had it for even longer time: since version 9 at least (and that was 5 or 6 years ago). Of course, just like for OOo, it didn't support all the nifty advanced PDF features right from the start (e.g. version 9 didn't even support hyperlinks, IIRC). KOffice too has had PDF support for quite some time, IIRC, and both ways, even, which is something exceptional in the wordprocessing field. MSO does look like "the late runner" here.
Indeed, someone should collect all the chapters together and put them on the various p2p networks: BitTorrent, ed2k, whatever else. I'm actually surprised it hasn't been done by the authors/editors/publishers themselves, though. It would have been a brilliant example.
Of course, if there's a risk in there it's that the "mechanical organs" could be as bad as the real ones :)
A possible solution is of course provider-side proxies, but this runs the risk of making the Internet "out-datish", "stale-ish", especially when the proxies are hidden and the user won't even know he's not getting fresh contents. Ok, this could be solved with intelligent proxies, but still it wouldn't solve the problem for very dynamic, yet bandwidth-intensive, applications.
So we need some new form of distributed content providing. While specific forms like BitTorrent are a nice step in that direction, I don't see them as the mean for common use (web pages, moderate multimedia content).
I was directing my thoughts towards something more low-level, maybe even at a TCP/IP level. For example, universal multicasting.
Multicasting is currently implemented in a way that is pretty much a remainder of the way radio and TV broadcasting work: the emitter is somewhat agnostic of who is going to receive, and the receivers can freely attach/detach from the 'channel', without any knowledge of who else is listening.
While that's probably the safest way to implement TCP/IP transmission to multiple destination addresses, it has several shortcomings. Some are provider dependent (it's not widespread, and some providers only have provider-local multicasting), some are structural (the number of multicasting addresses is quite small).
So a cross-provider, generally available multicasting capability (would it be possible to allow any IP to be a multicasting IP, for example?) might be the solution.
This would have enormous benefits for lots of applications, and enormously reduce bandwidth waste from lots of Internet usage. Actually, I was surprised when I found out it wasn't like this.