"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government."
What's interesting to me about this tidbit is that it the numerous laws are both a cause and effect of corruption. Whenever a straightforward, simple law is passed, someone will find a way to scam around it. If they are devious enough, they can't be charged under current law, so a new law has to be written to cover it. This is what happens with campaign finance reform every few years.
Conversely, people always want to get loopholes, exceptions, special funding or other benefits from the government. A lot of these actually end up as laws, especially if you contribute liberally to party leaders...
I disagree. When you speak of clicking on an "object icon" you are speaking of a user interface to an OO program Object. When you speak of a user interface object, that would be clicking on an "icon object".
Some clarification. Many of the questions you selected apply to programs a potential GPL product's author is creating, rather than programs being modified by a GPL licensee. Based on some of the other FAQs, they're in trouble 1) for releasing binaries without an offer of the source code and 2) for distributing derivative binaries with a non-GPL license.
Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization. But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.
Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.
What does this "written offer valid for any third party" mean? Does that mean everyone in the world can get the source to any GPL'ed program no matter what?
"Valid for any third party" means that anyone who has the offer is entitled to take you up on it. If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code later. When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.
The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you.
The GPL says that modified versions, if released, must be "licensed... to all third parties." Who are these third parties?,p>
Section 2 says that modified versions you distribute must be licensed to all third parties under the GPL. "All third parties" means absolutely everyone--but this does not require you to *do* anything physically for them. It only means they have a license from you, under the GPL, for your version.
She's not only partisan against SCO, she's also believes that any OpenSource license without a GPL-like "contagion" clause is simply a license to steal the code for commercial use. So she has big problems with a lot of proposed and new open source licenses from Sun, CA and the like.
Being partisan doesn't disqualify her or Groklaw as a valuable resource for information about SCO vs. the world. Groklaw is a blog/community, so the writing is editorial as well journalistic. As anyone can see from spending time on the site, PJ's take on events is definitely anti-SCO, but she always has facts to back up her statements. Maybe not all the facts (there have been a couple times when she seems to take her conclusions a step too far), but the resources are always conveniently available to read the original source documents (Open Source Law! ) and form your own opinion. The site overall, is certainly no more partisan than say.../., and is certainly more informative than anything I've read from Maureen, Laura or the other SCO/MS minions.
Or conversely, for every road built with tax dollars, there is a toll-road operator that is losing business, forced to compete with state sponsored infrastructure. Where the line between public and private responsibility is drawn is a political and social decision, not a moral imperative.
Besides the state isn't sponsoring software, the state is sponsoring a back to work program. The group that is applying the back to work program to software is a private organization.
TANSTAAFM (There ain't no such thing as a free market.) There's always some level of government involvement, whether it's to level the playing field and make the market behave more freely or to help avoid the tragedy of the commons.
I can see that there are some frame encoding/decoding options that I hadn't considered. But it also sounds like you would incur the degradation resulting from two resolution changes (1080i(540p)->1080p->720p) vs one change (1080i (540p)->720p), without incorporating any additional "real" information from the original frame into the final image.
If we're going to throw CPU and memory at the problem in order to create an intelligent scaling/de-interlacing algorithm, there's nothing lost by applying that intelligence to go from "540p" to 720p.
Now we're talking about the real reason this is considered a "cheap" solution: because they didn't add the electronics to perform buffering and intelligent scaling based on the image characteristics. It isn't so much which resolutions you go through to get from 1080i to 720p as it is how you encode the image at each step of the way.
Right up until Warp was released, IBM and Microsoft were still obligated to share source code with each other, and this code was used in many cases to ensure compatibility. Much of NT came from DEC, but lots of it came from Windows 3.1, and plenty of Windows code made it into OS/2. So I'm not saying NT is a fork of OS/2, I'm saying they have a common ancestor and were exchanging material for some time during their development cycles.
As far as DOS emulation goes, I should probably have referenced the command line utilities rather than the emulation layer. Many of the utilities were just straight recompiles of the original assembler code to OS/2 obj files, with kludges patched in for things like "format c:". The emulation layer copied a lot of INT 21 code, but you're right that there was a lot more re-writing done in that layer, since it was virtualizing the HW environment. Basically the front end to the virtual DOS session was based on the old DOS code and the backend was where the rewrites had to take place.
Perhaps because 1) Smith was writing in the 1930's not the 1960's and 2) Smith's writing is a counter-example to the point Card was trying to make. The only character evolution Smith's characters get is they get bigger, more destructive weapons going from episode to episode. Kind of like going from Wolfenstein to Doom to Doom 3.
Card's examples are all authors who wrote during the 1960's and spent a great deal of time on character development (and on setting/societal development as well) in their work. Just because your favorite author was left out doesn't mean he's being dissed. It just may not be the style of writing Card needed to contrast with Trek.
If you try to de-interlace the two 540p frames to generate a 1080p frame before scaling down, you end up with 720p at 30 fps, because you have to wait for two cycles to get the next 1080p frame. This would introduce intolerable flicker for most videophiles.
The other option to generate 1080p frames would be to have rolling frames where a new 1080p frame would be generated each 1/60th of a second using the two most recent frames. This technique would result in its own set of video artifacts. Two examples would be when something is moving quickly across the screen, or when there is a fast cut-scene. In the first situation, the object would be blurred (probably even more than by the current technique), and in the second the scenes would be blended. These types of artifacts are ones that reviewers can test for and downgrade for, so it's not surprising manufacturers opt away from this solution.
There's a good chance that this "cheap" solution is just the best choice from a bad lot. While it may slightly degrade the image overall in a way that's visible to videophiles, it lowers any risk of really bad artifacts that the average consumer can see.
And if you think Posix would cause problems, what about all the cross-pollination between OS/2 and Windows NT? Before their falling out, IBM and Microsoft were heavily sharing code between them, and who knows where Microsoft's fingers reach into. The fact that Windows up to Win XP could support OS/2 HPFS disk drives is one indicator. The DOS emulation code is also likely to contain Microsoft product in it.
Why did you let yourself be blindsided by this? Even if you weren't notified that a "security consultant" would be working the network, you should be running your own scans and classifying the risks. And if you were notified, that's even more reason to do your own independent scan/analysis.
There are some situations where even if you're overworked, you have to make the time to be pro-active in self-defense. Any work done by outside consultants to evaluate your performance falls into this category.
if you want the most efficient solution then take a look at your hourly wage and make the hard decision.
If you spend so much time gaming online that this product is attractive, a more appropriate measurement would probably be the number of kills per hour you lose while hacking a normal router. The hacking time would come out of your gaming time, not your work time.
Some of the worst dialog in the Dune movie was the dialog that came from the book. "We would have joined each other in death." at the end of Paul's training fight with Gurney still sticks out in my mind.
didn't RTFA. SCO copied pdf scans that Groklaw and TuxRocks member had made of public domain court documents. The court documents are not copyrightable. They didn't copy any of Groklaw's own material, so any copyright infringement would be almost as convoluted as SCO's claim of infringement against IBM.
why Dick and Jane can't do math or physics or even balance their checkbooks.
One of the great values the Pilgrims brought over with them was the idea of public education for all and the value of natural philosophy (now science) in that education. And their successors want us to establish a fundamentalist church, when that is exactly what the colonists had to flee (the Anglican church) in England.
If Daimaou signed the IP agreement after he started modifying and distributing his modifications, he doesn't have to enforce the verbal agreement. His written agreement assigns all of HIS rights to the code and the ideas there-in. However his rights are limited by the GPL because he accepted the GPL by making his changes to the initial product.
The IP agreement can't transfer rights that Daimaou had already relinquished by agreeing to the GPL.
The one scenario where he could be in trouble is if he signed the IP agreement before he first distributed or modified the initial GPL code. In this case he violated the GPL because he had previously agreed to relinquish his rights to his employer, and wasn't in a position to release his changes under the GPL, as required.
Neither of these scenarios exempts the employer from complying with the GPL for the original code, so they have to re-write the original code or comply with the GPL.
As an earlier poster stated: Daimaou should call IBM, and settle any GPL violations he may have committed by cooperating in any actions against his former employer.
Also, since XML is a subset of SGML, wouldn't all of the old SGML document processors constitute prior art? Especially ones that allowed storing macros and subprograms in SGML?
That's OK, we make it up when it comes to violence. We're all in favor of torture, war and gun ownership over here in the US, as long as we're doing the torturing, warring and gun owning, while Europe sees violence as a sin.
So see, Europeans can be just as repressed as Americans. Just in different areas.
Oh! I'm sorry, but I seem to have emptied this whole barrel of sarcasm already. So I'll have to get serious.
Just to clarify: faith != religion != god or even God. The evil in religion is what you have left over after you take out the faith and Godliness, and are left with Dogma, exclusion and self-righteousness.
As discussed earlier, this would work for the developers if all copyright holders of the GPLed work agreed to the new license terms.
But anyone who actually used your GPLed code would still be liable for patent infringement.
The trade would have to be:
"We won't sue you or any of your users or any users or developers of products derived from your product (ad infinitum) for infringing our patents, if you don't sue us for infringing on the GPL."
Otherwise the copyright holders of the GPLed product would have to withdraw the GPLed version of the product, since they don't have the authority to license the patent that was violated by their product. And the GPL requires that if you release a product, you release it free of patent encumbrances.
Maybe it's not hydrogen fusion occurring. Red dwarfs are fusing carbon. 95x jupieter's mass in 1.15x the volume would give it a density in the range of liquids, so maybe it's fusing (something) into Sodium, or something else that emits yellow-white light.
I personally think that the degree of uncertainty in our measurements of distant masses are so high that many of the conclusions we draw about distant planets and planet-like stars are similar to early observations of Venus and Mars, where we thought Venus was earthlike and Mars "canals" could come from plant life. How good are the statistical models used to process the data from these stars at filtering out gravitational effects from our local planets, comets and any dark matter that might lie between us and the star system being observed?
The corporate conglomerates control the publishing industry too. The variety of new books being published is just as limited as the TV networks.
Don't talk to me about Philip K. Dick. He's DEAD. Reading his stuff is rewarding, but it's like watching Babylon 5 re-runs from DVD: it doesn't represent any new creative output being released by the media conglomerates. How many SF writers active today would you compare with Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein or even John Varley? 5? 10?
The only thing that makes it easier to find good books than good TV is that book publisher's backlists are much bigger than DVD producers. But that is changing as more shows are re-released on DVD.
20 years from now (well maybe more) we could be watching someone rant that holovision is full of commercial drivel and we should all be watching ST:TNG on DVD for real quality entertainment.
I think I got the circle vs. line. But if a line in your space has to go through two rotations to close the curve (a Mobius strip), is that still homeomorphic to a closed curve drawn in a normal strip that only takes a single rotation?
Slashdot Mirror
"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government."
What's interesting to me about this tidbit is that it the numerous laws are both a cause and effect of corruption. Whenever a straightforward, simple law is passed, someone will find a way to scam around it. If they are devious enough, they can't be charged under current law, so a new law has to be written to cover it. This is what happens with campaign finance reform every few years.
Conversely, people always want to get loopholes, exceptions, special funding or other benefits from the government. A lot of these actually end up as laws, especially if you contribute liberally to party leaders...
I disagree. When you speak of clicking on an "object icon" you are speaking of a user interface to an OO program Object. When you speak of a user interface object, that would be clicking on an "icon object".
Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization. But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL. Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.
What does this "written offer valid for any third party" mean? Does that mean everyone in the world can get the source to any GPL'ed program no matter what?
"Valid for any third party" means that anyone who has the offer is entitled to take you up on it. If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code later. When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer. The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you.
The GPL says that modified versions, if released, must be "licensed ... to all third parties." Who are these third parties? ,p>
Section 2 says that modified versions you distribute must be licensed to all third parties under the GPL. "All third parties" means absolutely everyone--but this does not require you to *do* anything physically for them. It only means they have a license from you, under the GPL, for your version.
She's not only partisan against SCO, she's also believes that any OpenSource license without a GPL-like "contagion" clause is simply a license to steal the code for commercial use. So she has big problems with a lot of proposed and new open source licenses from Sun, CA and the like.
/., and is certainly more informative than anything I've read from Maureen, Laura or the other SCO/MS minions.
Being partisan doesn't disqualify her or Groklaw as a valuable resource for information about SCO vs. the world. Groklaw is a blog/community, so the writing is editorial as well journalistic. As anyone can see from spending time on the site, PJ's take on events is definitely anti-SCO, but she always has facts to back up her statements. Maybe not all the facts (there have been a couple times when she seems to take her conclusions a step too far), but the resources are always conveniently available to read the original source documents (Open Source Law! ) and form your own opinion. The site overall, is certainly no more partisan than say...
Or conversely, for every road built with tax dollars, there is a toll-road operator that is losing business, forced to compete with state sponsored infrastructure. Where the line between public and private responsibility is drawn is a political and social decision, not a moral imperative.
Besides the state isn't sponsoring software, the state is sponsoring a back to work program. The group that is applying the back to work program to software is a private organization.
TANSTAAFM (There ain't no such thing as a free market.) There's always some level of government involvement, whether it's to level the playing field and make the market behave more freely or to help avoid the tragedy of the commons.
I can see that there are some frame encoding/decoding options that I hadn't considered. But it also sounds like you would incur the degradation resulting from two resolution changes (1080i(540p)->1080p->720p) vs one change (1080i (540p)->720p), without incorporating any additional "real" information from the original frame into the final image.
If we're going to throw CPU and memory at the problem in order to create an intelligent scaling/de-interlacing algorithm, there's nothing lost by applying that intelligence to go from "540p" to 720p.
Now we're talking about the real reason this is considered a "cheap" solution: because they didn't add the electronics to perform buffering and intelligent scaling based on the image characteristics. It isn't so much which resolutions you go through to get from 1080i to 720p as it is how you encode the image at each step of the way.
Right up until Warp was released, IBM and Microsoft were still obligated to share source code with each other, and this code was used in many cases to ensure compatibility. Much of NT came from DEC, but lots of it came from Windows 3.1, and plenty of Windows code made it into OS/2. So I'm not saying NT is a fork of OS/2, I'm saying they have a common ancestor and were exchanging material for some time during their development cycles.
As far as DOS emulation goes, I should probably have referenced the command line utilities rather than the emulation layer. Many of the utilities were just straight recompiles of the original assembler code to OS/2 obj files, with kludges patched in for things like "format c:". The emulation layer copied a lot of INT 21 code, but you're right that there was a lot more re-writing done in that layer, since it was virtualizing the HW environment. Basically the front end to the virtual DOS session was based on the old DOS code and the backend was where the rewrites had to take place.
Perhaps because 1) Smith was writing in the 1930's not the 1960's and 2) Smith's writing is a counter-example to the point Card was trying to make. The only character evolution Smith's characters get is they get bigger, more destructive weapons going from episode to episode. Kind of like going from Wolfenstein to Doom to Doom 3.
Card's examples are all authors who wrote during the 1960's and spent a great deal of time on character development (and on setting/societal development as well) in their work. Just because your favorite author was left out doesn't mean he's being dissed. It just may not be the style of writing Card needed to contrast with Trek.
If you try to de-interlace the two 540p frames to generate a 1080p frame before scaling down, you end up with 720p at 30 fps, because you have to wait for two cycles to get the next 1080p frame.
This would introduce intolerable flicker for most videophiles.
The other option to generate 1080p frames would be to have rolling frames where a new 1080p frame would be generated each 1/60th of a second using the two most recent frames. This technique would result in its own set of video artifacts. Two examples would be when something is moving quickly across the screen, or when there is a fast cut-scene. In the first situation, the object would be blurred (probably even more than by the current technique), and in the second the scenes would be blended. These types of artifacts are ones that reviewers can test for and downgrade for, so it's not surprising manufacturers opt away from this solution.
There's a good chance that this "cheap" solution is just the best choice from a bad lot. While it may slightly degrade the image overall in a way that's visible to videophiles, it lowers any risk of really bad artifacts that the average consumer can see.
...has so many bugs in their code that they still work on it on a daily basis years after they originally wrote it.
Regardless of your philosophy about HOW to comment, I don't think anyone rationally can argue that code should exist without any comments.
And if you think Posix would cause problems, what about all the cross-pollination between OS/2 and Windows NT? Before their falling out, IBM and Microsoft were heavily sharing code between them, and who knows where Microsoft's fingers reach into. The fact that Windows up to Win XP could support OS/2 HPFS disk drives is one indicator. The DOS emulation code is also likely to contain Microsoft product in it.
Why did you let yourself be blindsided by this? Even if you weren't notified that a "security consultant" would be working the network, you should be running your own scans and classifying the risks. And if you were notified, that's even more reason to do your own independent scan/analysis.
There are some situations where even if you're overworked, you have to make the time to be pro-active in self-defense. Any work done by outside consultants to evaluate your performance falls into this category.
If you spend so much time gaming online that this product is attractive, a more appropriate measurement would probably be the number of kills per hour you lose while hacking a normal router. The hacking time would come out of your gaming time, not your work time.
Some of the worst dialog in the Dune movie was the dialog that came from the book. "We would have joined each other in death." at the end of Paul's training fight with Gurney still sticks out in my mind.
didn't RTFA. SCO copied pdf scans that Groklaw and TuxRocks member had made of public domain court documents. The court documents are not copyrightable. They didn't copy any of Groklaw's own material, so any copyright infringement would be almost as convoluted as SCO's claim of infringement against IBM.
why Dick and Jane can't do math or physics or even balance their checkbooks.
One of the great values the Pilgrims brought over with them was the idea of public education for all and the value of natural philosophy (now science) in that education. And their successors want us to establish a fundamentalist church, when that is exactly what the colonists had to flee (the Anglican church) in England.
God bless us all, no one else will.
If Daimaou signed the IP agreement after he started modifying and distributing his modifications, he doesn't have to enforce the verbal agreement. His written agreement assigns all of HIS rights to the code and the ideas there-in. However his rights are limited by the GPL because he accepted the GPL by making his changes to the initial product.
The IP agreement can't transfer rights that Daimaou had already relinquished by agreeing to the GPL.
The one scenario where he could be in trouble is if he signed the IP agreement before he first distributed or modified the initial GPL code. In this case he violated the GPL because he had previously agreed to relinquish his rights to his employer, and wasn't in a position to release his changes under the GPL, as required.
Neither of these scenarios exempts the employer from complying with the GPL for the original code, so they have to re-write the original code or comply with the GPL.
As an earlier poster stated: Daimaou should call IBM, and settle any GPL violations he may have committed by cooperating in any actions against his former employer.
Also, since XML is a subset of SGML, wouldn't all of the old SGML document processors constitute prior art? Especially ones that allowed storing macros and subprograms in SGML?
That's OK, we make it up when it comes to violence. We're all in favor of torture, war and gun ownership over here in the US, as long as we're doing the torturing, warring and gun owning, while Europe sees violence as a sin.
So see, Europeans can be just as repressed as Americans. Just in different areas.
Oh! I'm sorry, but I seem to have emptied this whole barrel of sarcasm already. So I'll have to get serious.
Just to clarify: faith != religion != god or even God. The evil in religion is what you have left over after you take out the faith and Godliness, and are left with Dogma, exclusion and self-righteousness.
Doesn't the stereotypical engineer/geek spend hours dreaming of being a sick pervert?
As discussed earlier, this would work for the developers if all copyright holders of the GPLed work agreed to the new license terms.
But anyone who actually used your GPLed code would still be liable for patent infringement.
The trade would have to be:
"We won't sue you or any of your users or any users or developers of products derived from your product (ad infinitum) for infringing our patents, if you don't sue us for infringing on the GPL."
Otherwise the copyright holders of the GPLed product would have to withdraw the GPLed version of the product, since they don't have the authority to license the patent that was violated by their product. And the GPL requires that if you release a product, you release it free of patent encumbrances.
Maybe it's not hydrogen fusion occurring. Red dwarfs are fusing carbon. 95x jupieter's mass in 1.15x the volume would give it a density in the range of liquids, so maybe it's fusing (something) into Sodium, or something else that emits yellow-white light.
I personally think that the degree of uncertainty in our measurements of distant masses are so high that many of the conclusions we draw about distant planets and planet-like stars are similar to early observations of Venus and Mars, where we thought Venus was earthlike and Mars "canals" could come from plant life. How good are the statistical models used to process the data from these stars at filtering out gravitational effects from our local planets, comets and any dark matter that might lie between us and the star system being observed?
The corporate conglomerates control the publishing industry too. The variety of new books being published is just as limited as the TV networks.
Don't talk to me about Philip K. Dick. He's DEAD. Reading his stuff is rewarding, but it's like watching Babylon 5 re-runs from DVD: it doesn't represent any new creative output being released by the media conglomerates. How many SF writers active today would you compare with Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein or even John Varley? 5? 10?
The only thing that makes it easier to find good books than good TV is that book publisher's backlists are much bigger than DVD producers. But that is changing as more shows are re-released on DVD.
20 years from now (well maybe more) we could be watching someone rant that holovision is full of commercial drivel and we should all be watching ST:TNG on DVD for real quality entertainment.
Microsoft and Digital Research already settled out of court. Actually, it ended up being Novell, after they bought DR out.
I think I got the circle vs. line. But if a line in your space has to go through two rotations to close the curve (a Mobius strip), is that still homeomorphic to a closed curve drawn in a normal strip that only takes a single rotation?