The BSD licence is chosen to allow as much freedom as possible. Of course this comes with the risk that people will just plunder the code and never give anything back, or release additions under a more restrictive licence. Strange. I just read the BSD licence at the following link at it does not seem to tally with this.
It says you cannot remove the licence from the code or any binaries you compile the code into. The main difference I can see between the GPL and BSD licences is that the GPL forces redistribution of the source code, but the BSD licence allows you to only distribute the original code or any derived works in binary (compiled) form with no access to the source.
Both licences however seem to very thorough about not letting you take the code but leave the licence. So if something is released under a dual GPL/BSD licence, it would surely have to stay dual licensed as they both prohibit changing the licence.
So once I release my code under the BSD licence, and a few people modify it and re-release it (also under the BSD licence) I have to go round and get everyone's permission if I want to change the licence but include the amendments they have contributed. Without that permission I would have to revert to my original copy of the code and could only re-licence that as their contributions would enjoy the same protection the BSD licence, ie - no re-distribution without the licence.
That's the problem, how many consumers are sophisticated enough to even ask the right questions. On a similar note I just went to the Site Advisor page for bank of india. (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/bankofindia.com)
Especially amusing is the comment some moron has posted complaining about when Bank of India was getting a red rating. Basically he is saying how he used the site for three years and it must be a site advisor problem not a problem with the Bank of India website.
How on earth do you come up with a technological solution that copes with people who even when they get a warning saying that the site they about to visit is dangerous carry on and visit the site anyway. I know that he should now have learnt his lesson (assuming he visited the site and got all that crap installed on his PC) but there must be alot more morons out there just like him.
I reckon the only reason Microsoft have published the fact that one of their management sent this email is because he was stupid enough to send it via email. If he had done what he was told and done the same thing without leaving a paper trail he would have been promoted and given a huge pay rise.
Explaining 'beyond the scope of this paper' _IS_ saying they do not know why. Sort of yes.
Anyone who has done Physics (or any other cutting edge science) to a high enough level will know that this is always true. The maxim I remember was that every answer asks a thousand questions. This is certainly true in terms of the astrophysics of spiral galaxies.
Nobody even fully understands gravity even though the current understanding was presented by Newton and is known to break down as soon as you apply it to more than one body of approximately equal mass.
They could have waited until the paper they published didn't leave some nagging great question answered, but they would have been waiting an eternity to publish an infinitely long paper that nobody would have ever been able to finish reading anyway. Since this is impractical, they published what they knew and left it to their successors (or themselves in a few years) to answer why. Even if they had have answered this why they would have found more why's just around the corner the someone could have posted to slashdot anyway.
Ubuntu are not a company moron, Ubuntu is a product.
The company is called Canonical Ltd. Also please note that Canonical are a very small company who don't make any money. They will probably go broke soon when nobody buys their support offering.
Yeah, and it only took them to version ELEVEN to figure out that people hated having their computers being commandeered. What's your apology for the other 10 versions of crap they put out until now? The first couple versions weren't bad, but then they got obnoxious real fast and I've also avoided them since. Actually they have been fine since atleast version 8 from memory. What version / timeframe are you whining about anyway? What was the last version you installed and on what platform?
Only because their licensing agreement (or whatever they had) finished, and now they've jumped on the Windows Media Player bandwaggon. Unfortunately you are right, the BBC are now moving towards DRM'd WMV files.
But half the reason is fuckwitts like you. You bitch and moan about things Real did years ago despite the fact that they are now a much better choice than a lot of the alternatives. Although actually you do not realise that there is only one alternative to Real, and that is MS WMV. And before you counter this by spouting 8 million open source formats let me explain my answer.
Large corporations like the BBC who make money from producing content want to protect that content from unauthorised distribution. At present the two commercially established methods of doing this for both video and audio are WMV and RM. The key points in that sentence being:
Commercially established - This is important as no manager wants to bet on a product with no track record unless the ROI is far higher than if they went with established solution.
Both Audio and Video - If you have another solution that only does half of what you want it stands no chance. So the same streaming solution must deal with both in order to convince someone who produce both audio and video.
I know we would all like to see nothing but open formats like MP3 as far as the eye can see, but it is not going to happen. It's like wishing you lived in utopia and never going outside until you do. Until MS die a horrible death Real are the best alternative so we need to start encouraging companies to use it more often. Either that or we can give up on accessing streaming content from anything other than Windows.
I use Linux far more than I do windows nowadays and the Linux version of realplayer is one of the best video players available for linux. And more to the point it is available for Linux, unlike Quicktime or DRM'd WMV files. If anyone out there hasn't tried using the Linux version of realplayer I would recommend it as it doesn't suffer the same problems that effect the windows version.
If I take your bike, I am denying you the use of your bike for however long I have it. That isnt the case with wireless access. How do you know? Many ISP's over here still have usage caps on the amount you can upload and download.
If the network is completely unsecured, it should be assumed that it's public access. So if I leave my front door unlocked then my house must be public access too? No chance, try coming in and you are still liable to be shot at (under US law anyway, I am a brit unfortunately so have to stick to "reasonable force").
I understand where you are coming from as I used to think like that as well, but nowadays I have a little bit more legal understanding.
The fact is that access is always illegal without explicit consent of the owner. Just not locking something is not consent. It could be absent mindedness, laziness, technical inability or any number of other reasons.
I love your water fountain analogy, but it is a bit limited as it assumes the intent was to build the fountain in public. The fact is that most people who have an unsecured network access point probably had no such intent.
Generally speaking, I think people on here pay off their cards and don't get their payments in late. Errm, I wish.
I could go and add up all the charge I have paid on mine over the past year, but it would probably really piss me off and I would rather spend the time down the pub with my credit card behind the bar. Or I could buy some new high tech gadget.
On a more serious note there is something you have overlooked. Credit card companies also make money as a percentage of every transaction. This is charge levelled to the retailer for allowing you to buy something that you might not actually have had the money for. I believe the charge is round about 1-2 percent so you have actually made them more than you thought on that $50K.
They probably wanted to take back your parents card as they cleared the balance every month AND did not spend enough.
First off, if MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (mp3) was state-of-the-art 16 years ago, that means it's 16 years old already. That is exactly what I said in my original post:
Lets remember it is now 16 years old. Maybe you should learn to read english, although no doubt you already do better than I read french.
Second, "mp3 is a non-proprietary codec". Well, guess what, so are Vorbis (which also happens to be FREE), and MPEG-2/4 AAC (which, unlike mp3, does not have a license fee to be able to play). Both of the formats you mention are lossy compression even though they are probably better than MP3 as they have been developed far more recently. I mentioned FLAC as it is lossless so is the direction to go in if you want the best sound quality.
Seeing as these give better quality than mp3, there's no reason that people wouldn't have switched other than the fact that *Joe Sixpack can't tell the difference between 32 kbit/s mp3 and the original*. Here is where I disagree with you. There is a reason which I mentioned but you seem to have completely missed. It is that MP3 has had longer to establish itself in the market and also that there are more portable devices that play MP3. I have lots of music I could rip from CD again and put in whatever format I choose, but why bother if I am unable to buy a portable device that will let me lesson to said music on my way to work?
Third, the FLAC *programming API* changed, FLAC 1.0 files can still be decoded using FLAC 1.2. But can new files be played with the old API? My point was about creating hardware based portable music players as these are the main driver of the MP3 format at present. What would be the good of a portable player if it was only able to play files created with old versions of the encoding software.
When the API is STABLE it may be adpoted by hardware manufacturers who will start making portable music players that support the format. But it takes a long time to bring a new device to market, much longer than a new piece of software.
I was not saying the MP3 was great, I was saying that when the other audio compression technolgies become as mature as MP3 is, they will start to become more widely used in portable players. Portable players are currently the biggest thing holding back the adpotion of a better format than MP3. This was my main point which you seem to have completely overlooked.
The Joe Sixpacks of the world apparently don't care about quality (hence the ubiquity of MP3s) Has it suddenly become fashionable on slashdot to slag off MP3?
When MP3 was first released it was head and shoulders above the other audio formats available (apart from Real Audio) in terms of quality per MB of filesize. Lets remember it is now 16 years old. In 1991 your choice was uncompressed (approx 60 meg per track) or MP3 (approx 6MB per track).
Nowadays MP3's are ubiquitous not because none of us care about the lss in quality, but because it is the easiest format to find portable devices that play them. To make a device that plays back MP3 is also cheaper since the actual chips that do the work can be mass produced on a huge scale.
The other reason MP3 is everywhere is because it is a non-proprietary codec which anyone can produce a player / encoder for without falling foul of too many patent issues.
I know that in recent years there have been alot of other technologies that can produce a file of similar size without using lossy compression but thse formats are by no means established in the consumer market yet. If Flac had been around in 1991 then by now everyone would be using that instead, but it has only been here for a few years. Also note that flac has just changed the format, thus breaking backwards compatibility.
This meant even if there were embedded devices that played back flac streams they would now be out of date and need to be updated. Another nice thing about MP3 from hardware producers point of view is that the format is stable and not likely to change.
In 15 years time I predict these same arguments on slashdot regarding whatever format does replace MP3 and how out of date that format will be by then. Hopefully that format will be FLAC or something open source rather than WMA.
It is therefore bizarre to expect entertainment to be factually accurate. I actually agree with this, to expect movies or television to be accurate beyond the level needed to suspend the majority of the populations disbelief is asking a bit much.
However I can also see the point of the original article and paper. I studied Physics and Space Technology to degree level and I can remember numerous discussions I have had with non-phsycists regarding interesting areas of physics where they actually mentioned popular entertainment as an example of why what I was saying must be incorrect.
The real problem here is that when you get down to the nitty gritty alot of Phsycics is counter-intuitive to the layman. In order to cope with this movies and entertainment can either "dumb down" the ideas to make them sound right to the layman (also known as the majority) or can be true to the real world and make physicists happy (the few). Confronted with this choice anyone will go with angling the product to appeal to the largest market, unless you are already 100% sure the product will have no mass appeal regardless of which path you choose.
It is true that a solution to this problem could be to make movies factually accurate, but where is the fun in that? I am more than capable of watching speed when the bus does a super jump and not be instantly objecting at how inaccurate it is (I do object to the rest of that shit film though). Most of us are able to watch entertainment and suspend our disbelief to a certain level even when we know what we are watching is inaccurate.
I think a better solution is to force people to study Physics to a sufficient level that you gain a basic understanding of the underlying principles. I do not mean a true understanding of every concept, but enough so that you learn that the level of understanding you do have is not the complete picture and is a simplification (or scientific model) of reality.
The thing that frustrated me about studying physics was that every year I would be told that what I learnt the year before was not really what was happening and that you could no longer rely on it to hold true in all situations that would come up over the coming year. With hindsight however this was a very valuable to learn as it teaches you that your understanding of a subject may be a far to simple to apply to the real world. This understanding extends to all things.
Gerald Ratner is the head of Ratners, a jewelers here in GB.
Gerald made some comment to the press about not understanding why anyone would buy the crap his shops sold as it was all second rate, tasteless junk (It is, he was being honest). Aparrently there was some outcry over this when the great unwashed who actually bought crap from his shops realised they were being ripped off.
(Disclaimer - I have not been into a Ratners in at least 20 years and have no intention of doing so, ever)
I want to carry a spare battery for when the first one runs out of charge as well. Sometimes I do not get a chance to plug it in for several days in a row.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.ph
It says you cannot remove the licence from the code or any binaries you compile the code into. The main difference I can see between the GPL and BSD licences is that the GPL forces redistribution of the source code, but the BSD licence allows you to only distribute the original code or any derived works in binary (compiled) form with no access to the source.
Both licences however seem to very thorough about not letting you take the code but leave the licence. So if something is released under a dual GPL/BSD licence, it would surely have to stay dual licensed as they both prohibit changing the licence.
So once I release my code under the BSD licence, and a few people modify it and re-release it (also under the BSD licence) I have to go round and get everyone's permission if I want to change the licence but include the amendments they have contributed. Without that permission I would have to revert to my original copy of the code and could only re-licence that as their contributions would enjoy the same protection the BSD licence, ie - no re-distribution without the licence.
Especially amusing is the comment some moron has posted complaining about when Bank of India was getting a red rating. Basically he is saying how he used the site for three years and it must be a site advisor problem not a problem with the Bank of India website.
How on earth do you come up with a technological solution that copes with people who even when they get a warning saying that the site they about to visit is dangerous carry on and visit the site anyway. I know that he should now have learnt his lesson (assuming he visited the site and got all that crap installed on his PC) but there must be alot more morons out there just like him.
Not sure what you point is, but did you know that some theories suggest that global warming could trigger the next ice age. Here are some links:
2 374,1083419,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,1
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8398.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm
Very Offtopic but what the hell.
Have you clicked on the link in your sig lately? SCO are back on the up. Share price is back to 0.72.
Wow, I wish I had some mod points for your post.
I reckon the only reason Microsoft have published the fact that one of their management sent this email is because he was stupid enough to send it via email. If he had done what he was told and done the same thing without leaving a paper trail he would have been promoted and given a huge pay rise.
Anyone who has done Physics (or any other cutting edge science) to a high enough level will know that this is always true. The maxim I remember was that every answer asks a thousand questions. This is certainly true in terms of the astrophysics of spiral galaxies.
Nobody even fully understands gravity even though the current understanding was presented by Newton and is known to break down as soon as you apply it to more than one body of approximately equal mass.
They could have waited until the paper they published didn't leave some nagging great question answered, but they would have been waiting an eternity to publish an infinitely long paper that nobody would have ever been able to finish reading anyway. Since this is impractical, they published what they knew and left it to their successors (or themselves in a few years) to answer why. Even if they had have answered this why they would have found more why's just around the corner the someone could have posted to slashdot anyway.
Ubuntu are not a company moron, Ubuntu is a product.
The company is called Canonical Ltd. Also please note that Canonical are a very small company who don't make any money. They will probably go broke soon when nobody buys their support offering.
But half the reason is fuckwitts like you. You bitch and moan about things Real did years ago despite the fact that they are now a much better choice than a lot of the alternatives. Although actually you do not realise that there is only one alternative to Real, and that is MS WMV. And before you counter this by spouting 8 million open source formats let me explain my answer.
Large corporations like the BBC who make money from producing content want to protect that content from unauthorised distribution. At present the two commercially established methods of doing this for both video and audio are WMV and RM. The key points in that sentence being:
Commercially established - This is important as no manager wants to bet on a product with no track record unless the ROI is far higher than if they went with established solution.
Both Audio and Video - If you have another solution that only does half of what you want it stands no chance. So the same streaming solution must deal with both in order to convince someone who produce both audio and video.
I know we would all like to see nothing but open formats like MP3 as far as the eye can see, but it is not going to happen. It's like wishing you lived in utopia and never going outside until you do. Until MS die a horrible death Real are the best alternative so we need to start encouraging companies to use it more often. Either that or we can give up on accessing streaming content from anything other than Windows.
I use Linux far more than I do windows nowadays and the Linux version of realplayer is one of the best video players available for linux. And more to the point it is available for Linux, unlike Quicktime or DRM'd WMV files. If anyone out there hasn't tried using the Linux version of realplayer I would recommend it as it doesn't suffer the same problems that effect the windows version.
That isnt the case with wireless access. How do you know? Many ISP's over here still have usage caps on the amount you can upload and download.
I understand where you are coming from as I used to think like that as well, but nowadays I have a little bit more legal understanding.
The fact is that access is always illegal without explicit consent of the owner. Just not locking something is not consent. It could be absent mindedness, laziness, technical inability or any number of other reasons.
I love your water fountain analogy, but it is a bit limited as it assumes the intent was to build the fountain in public. The fact is that most people who have an unsecured network access point probably had no such intent.
Some bunch of fuckwit mods out there really don't understand sarcasm do they?
Did anyone really think this was a serious comment?
I could go and add up all the charge I have paid on mine over the past year, but it would probably really piss me off and I would rather spend the time down the pub with my credit card behind the bar. Or I could buy some new high tech gadget.
On a more serious note there is something you have overlooked. Credit card companies also make money as a percentage of every transaction. This is charge levelled to the retailer for allowing you to buy something that you might not actually have had the money for. I believe the charge is round about 1-2 percent so you have actually made them more than you thought on that $50K.
They probably wanted to take back your parents card as they cleared the balance every month AND did not spend enough.
If you want to get modded as a troll less often, try describing the problems you had in more detail.
Also try swearing less as that always helps too.
Why not just let the thing overheat and blow up?
Who needs Alabama anyway?
I notice you didn't feel like responding to the rest of my points?
Are these things high street items in the states yet?
When the API is STABLE it may be adpoted by hardware manufacturers who will start making portable music players that support the format. But it takes a long time to bring a new device to market, much longer than a new piece of software.
I was not saying the MP3 was great, I was saying that when the other audio compression technolgies become as mature as MP3 is, they will start to become more widely used in portable players. Portable players are currently the biggest thing holding back the adpotion of a better format than MP3. This was my main point which you seem to have completely overlooked.
When MP3 was first released it was head and shoulders above the other audio formats available (apart from Real Audio) in terms of quality per MB of filesize. Lets remember it is now 16 years old. In 1991 your choice was uncompressed (approx 60 meg per track) or MP3 (approx 6MB per track).
Nowadays MP3's are ubiquitous not because none of us care about the lss in quality, but because it is the easiest format to find portable devices that play them. To make a device that plays back MP3 is also cheaper since the actual chips that do the work can be mass produced on a huge scale.
The other reason MP3 is everywhere is because it is a non-proprietary codec which anyone can produce a player / encoder for without falling foul of too many patent issues.
I know that in recent years there have been alot of other technologies that can produce a file of similar size without using lossy compression but thse formats are by no means established in the consumer market yet. If Flac had been around in 1991 then by now everyone would be using that instead, but it has only been here for a few years. Also note that flac has just changed the format, thus breaking backwards compatibility.
This meant even if there were embedded devices that played back flac streams they would now be out of date and need to be updated. Another nice thing about MP3 from hardware producers point of view is that the format is stable and not likely to change.
In 15 years time I predict these same arguments on slashdot regarding whatever format does replace MP3 and how out of date that format will be by then. Hopefully that format will be FLAC or something open source rather than WMA.
The mains sources for this info were the following two articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Lossless_Audio_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
However I can also see the point of the original article and paper. I studied Physics and Space Technology to degree level and I can remember numerous discussions I have had with non-phsycists regarding interesting areas of physics where they actually mentioned popular entertainment as an example of why what I was saying must be incorrect.
The real problem here is that when you get down to the nitty gritty alot of Phsycics is counter-intuitive to the layman. In order to cope with this movies and entertainment can either "dumb down" the ideas to make them sound right to the layman (also known as the majority) or can be true to the real world and make physicists happy (the few). Confronted with this choice anyone will go with angling the product to appeal to the largest market, unless you are already 100% sure the product will have no mass appeal regardless of which path you choose.
It is true that a solution to this problem could be to make movies factually accurate, but where is the fun in that? I am more than capable of watching speed when the bus does a super jump and not be instantly objecting at how inaccurate it is (I do object to the rest of that shit film though). Most of us are able to watch entertainment and suspend our disbelief to a certain level even when we know what we are watching is inaccurate.
I think a better solution is to force people to study Physics to a sufficient level that you gain a basic understanding of the underlying principles. I do not mean a true understanding of every concept, but enough so that you learn that the level of understanding you do have is not the complete picture and is a simplification (or scientific model) of reality.
The thing that frustrated me about studying physics was that every year I would be told that what I learnt the year before was not really what was happening and that you could no longer rely on it to hold true in all situations that would come up over the coming year. With hindsight however this was a very valuable to learn as it teaches you that your understanding of a subject may be a far to simple to apply to the real world. This understanding extends to all things.
Does leftwing just mean anyone who is not a card carrying republican?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
http://www.criminal-information-agency.com/firear
It would have worked if you were British.
Gerald Ratner is the head of Ratners, a jewelers here in GB.
Gerald made some comment to the press about not understanding why anyone would buy the crap his shops sold as it was all second rate, tasteless junk (It is, he was being honest). Aparrently there was some outcry over this when the great unwashed who actually bought crap from his shops realised they were being ripped off.
(Disclaimer - I have not been into a Ratners in at least 20 years and have no intention of doing so, ever)
I want to carry a spare battery for when the first one runs out of charge as well. Sometimes I do not get a chance to plug it in for several days in a row.
Con has already said he will no longer develop it or any other kernel development because his scheduler was not chosen.