I think that Dvorak is confused about the uses for the CC licenses. If all a person wants to do is retain all rights for creative work, then by all means, that person should indicate copyright status on their work. If all a person wants is to allow their work into the public domain, no problems, that's easy to accomplish. If a person doesn't know that all they need to do is indicate on their copyright status on their work, then Creative Commons, at the very least, offers a place for them to find that information freely and easily.
However, in the case of collaborative works, or artforms that involve the use of other artists' works, something with more specificity is very useful. In the case of improvised music, I can think of one fairly well known controversy from the 1960's in which La Monte Young's status as composer is -- or at least was -- disputed by some of the performers of these works. (There is some discussion on this by Young in a PDF linked to from this page.) This has made publication difficult or impossible, and it is possible that something like a CC license could have smoothed or resolved the tensions of the situation.
Perhaps Dvorak is onto something, though. It seems like the CC licenses are being used a lot; they seem to be fairly trendy, so it may be that they are being overused. Unfortunately, traditional copyrights fall short for many of today's forms of creation -- web journalism, hip hop, improvised music. Dvorak doesn't need a CC license to publish safely and protect his rights. I do, because in protecting my rights, I want to be able to limit or protect the rights of other people who want to be able to use my work.
I won't go to the lengths of comparing MS Office and OpenOffice (since I don't have a copy of MS Office to compare with), but on my Debian box, an installation of OOo is upwards of 100M to download, and when it's finally installed (nearly two hours later, due to my relatively slow DSL connection), it takes about a minute to load even *with* prelinking. After trying a few other distros, I have concluded that OOo is just plain slow on linux. Granted, in my previous life as a windozer, I don't recall OOo being particularly slow.
OOo is bloated, slow, unresponsive. It is cumbersome. On screen font display (with X11) is embarrassingly ugly, no matter what antialiasing autohinting is being used. It is the sole reason I started using LaTeX: I was tired of documents looking ugly on screen, and printing differently than I expected. Since migrating, I have learned how much I dislike Windows, but I've also learned to respect some of their software for its quality--namely their office suite.
Now that I'm using Macintoshes more frequently, and am stuck with G3's, OOo is even more irrelevant. AbiWord finally doesn't suck royally on a Mac, but it still doesn't do smart quotes properly--or at all. Perhaps MS Office is still the most viable solution specifically because it doesn't suck as badly as the competition, bloat or not.
From what I can gather, they're basically giving things coming out of MS Research to companies.
And if you read the article carefully, you'll notice that MS isn't giving away anything. They're selling exclusive licenses in exchange for part ownership. In a sense, this could easily be seen as "startup farming." Instead of waiting for a startup to come along and develop on ideas and buy them out, MS has done the initial research and development, is essentially renting the ideas out to the new company. As part owners, if the company goes under, MS hasn't lost anything and doesn't have to buy the company out.
I'd object to being called a zealot, but I don't generally find myself trusting big corporations to act in the general best intrest of their consumer base or their competitors. I do trust them to do everything in their power to maintain monopoly status in as many areas of the software world as possible. This is not to say that I think they should necessarily open the sources and let free software types have a field day, but I don't see this as being a benefit to anyone other than Microsoft.
Although I'm not religious, religion can be a pretty good guide here. Obviously there have been multiple religioius practices regarding marriage over the years. I don't think that it is unreasonable to assume that the current general belief system in the USA is the best evolved of the bunch, vis-a-vis maintaining a stable society.
Religious or not, it is not logically reasonable to assume the evolutionary benefits of American religious systems. There are a lot of factors other than religious ones that have influenced American prosperity. The first European settlers to stay in this part of the Americas were lucky as could be that the soil was fertile and natural resources were plentiful, and their technology would soon make it possible to expand westward. This has more to do with our current success than the religions that were practiced by them.
The fact that we are still a country two hundred years later is not really all that special, considering the longevities of other governments. Your argument could be used to describe the ancient Romans: I would not be unreasonable to assume that animal sacrifice was the best evolved of the bunch, vis-a-vis maintaining a stable society.
I don't support redefining marriage _any more_ from the where it is now. Understand?
I, for one, don't. In order for me to understand, I need for you to justify your lack of support. Why don't you support further changes to the definition of marriage?
This may indeed be the last straw. This may the one legal inanity out of hundreds of legal inanities that causes me to wilfully and deliberately violate the GPL with glee.
First off, if you do deliberately violate the GPL, I would hope that you do so publicly so that we can finally test its validity in a public arena. If you don't, then your chickenshit cowardice would hopefully find a way to catch up to you.
More on topic, though, you are right when you say that a document is not a derivative work of its fonts. The poor sap who wrote the post to the scribus mailing list has obviously not read the GPL. The "GPL advocates" you refer to bring up these controversies in order to protect *their* freedoms and the benefits granted by those freedoms. The controversies are turned into Slashdot flamewars, are a big deal for a little while, and mellow out.
Not all of us who are GPL advocates are also zealots, and you make yourself look like an idiot for confusing them.
Debian works quite nicely on a desktop. If a major upgrade every three or four years is all you need, (which seems to be about what users brought up in the Windows world would expect, anyway) Debian stable is fine.
For the last year or so, Debian testing has been generally stable enough for desktop use; and since Ubuntu came out, I've still found that in general, Debian testing is more stable than Ubuntu. In a couple weeks, I'll try installing Hoary, but my expectations are low.
The biggest difference between KDE and Gnome on Debian versus Ubuntu is the branding. Debian doesn't seem to spend much time making their desktop environments look very different from the defaults set in place by the people who make them (unlike Red Hat and their derivatives, for instance), and the biggest change going to Ubuntu was that there are themes installed which are not standard Gnome themes.
The computer I'm on right now is running Debian Sarge with Ubuntu's XOrg (with its requisite dependencies).
If Pages can make documents look at least as good as (La)TeX, I'll go buy a Mac Mini next week. All I want is great text processing under the slick interface... which means "fi" and "ff" and "fl" are ligatures; kerning, justification, and hyphenation are automated beautifully with the whole paragraph in mind.
I don't have a need for advanced typographical tools (such as InDesign), but I do want my research papers to look good on paper (which is why I use (La)TeX instead of OOo or any of the other alternatives). If Pages can pull this off, Apple will have snagged a new customer away from the FS/OSS world.
Most schools will teach you about the same things, more or less, and often with a similar standard for excellence. The big difference between schools is prestige, which can potentially be useful on your resume. Prestigious schools will often do more to develop your contacts than the good (but less prestigious) schools. Who you know is always important, but usually less important than what you know, how much experience you have, and how well you can get along with other people.
Perhaps things are different between CS and music (my field) in this respect, but I doubt that things are so drastically different as for these rules to apply differently: good work ethic, honesty, good references, and a strong experience base are what will get you jobs. A better school can definitely aid any or all of those, but it's not necessary.
It is well-established that ancient Greek (as well as many other classical languages) was written with no spaces between words.
SOATYPICALSENTENCEWOULDREADLIKETHIS!
This works quite well in languages that have specific patterns (such as endings) based on the grammatical roles of the words used. Japanese, ancient Greek, and Latin are all examples of this. Spaces might help, but they aren't necessary to separate the verbs from the nouns. English, on the other hand, makes very few distinctions between kinds of words, so text without spaces appears tangled and obscures meaning.
Similarly, this is made easier to deal with when the sounds represented by the text are greater in number, so syllabaries and ideogrammatic systems work much better than alphabets without spaces. Alphabetic systems (Latin- and Greek- based, for instance) are much more legible with spaces as a result.
If I wanted the iMac, part of what I would want is the simplicity factor. Instead, I would get the fangldanglies and colorful doodads along with a whole lot of crap that I don't need. Please, Santa Clause, if you value your cookies and milk and not having razor blades lining my chimney, refrain from giving my the hip-e.
Re:But DeMuDi is stuck on 2.4.25
on
RT Linux Patches
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· Score: 1
I understand the political reasons, I just wonder if the connection was made between the software to be used and the environment in which it would be used. Perhaps, as I'm really only interested in a small number of the apps that Demudi and the people at Stanford have to offer, I haven't noticed much of the gtk2/gnome software.
I only open up KDE to run Qt/KDE apps such as rosegarden, LyX, and K3B (though in the last day or two I've been a little irked at how buggy it is) -- I don't like waiting for kdelibs to load... takes forever on my box -- and I generally run UDE/UWM instead.
If you're an admin or a user, you're concerned with whether it works, and the RT-Linux folks certainly know what they're doing.
So what if I'm I'm a user who wants to use RT-Linux for audio work, but don't have the time and/or energy to roll my own kernel (which I still haven't figured out how to do without panics)? I don't want this to sound confrontational, as I'm interested in overcoming this problem.
Because DeMuDi is stuck on 2.4, certain pleasantries of the desktop environments (like udev) are missing. On the other hand, the 2.6 alsa integration fails to set up my sound cards properly. More specifically, it doesn't allow me to set them up the way I want, although it is fairly likely that I just haven't figured it out.
One thing I don't understand about DeMuDi and Planet CCRMA is the default of Gnome. I'm personally pretty ambivalent about DE choice, but it seems to me that it would be a good idea to use the environment most fitting for the tools offered in the distro. All of the nice GUI sequencer/notation programs are qt/kde programs.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that Dvorak is confused about the uses for the CC licenses. If all a person wants to do is retain all rights for creative work, then by all means, that person should indicate copyright status on their work. If all a person wants is to allow their work into the public domain, no problems, that's easy to accomplish. If a person doesn't know that all they need to do is indicate on their copyright status on their work, then Creative Commons, at the very least, offers a place for them to find that information freely and easily.
However, in the case of collaborative works, or artforms that involve the use of other artists' works, something with more specificity is very useful. In the case of improvised music, I can think of one fairly well known controversy from the 1960's in which La Monte Young's status as composer is -- or at least was -- disputed by some of the performers of these works. (There is some discussion on this by Young in a PDF linked to from this page.) This has made publication difficult or impossible, and it is possible that something like a CC license could have smoothed or resolved the tensions of the situation.
Perhaps Dvorak is onto something, though. It seems like the CC licenses are being used a lot; they seem to be fairly trendy, so it may be that they are being overused. Unfortunately, traditional copyrights fall short for many of today's forms of creation -- web journalism, hip hop, improvised music. Dvorak doesn't need a CC license to publish safely and protect his rights. I do, because in protecting my rights, I want to be able to limit or protect the rights of other people who want to be able to use my work.
in that case, they'd be wanting to run OOoOffice apps.
"Where do you want to go today?"
This could bring a lot of business to companies like Toys in Babeland...
I won't go to the lengths of comparing MS Office and OpenOffice (since I don't have a copy of MS Office to compare with), but on my Debian box, an installation of OOo is upwards of 100M to download, and when it's finally installed (nearly two hours later, due to my relatively slow DSL connection), it takes about a minute to load even *with* prelinking. After trying a few other distros, I have concluded that OOo is just plain slow on linux. Granted, in my previous life as a windozer, I don't recall OOo being particularly slow.
OOo is bloated, slow, unresponsive. It is cumbersome. On screen font display (with X11) is embarrassingly ugly, no matter what antialiasing autohinting is being used. It is the sole reason I started using LaTeX: I was tired of documents looking ugly on screen, and printing differently than I expected. Since migrating, I have learned how much I dislike Windows, but I've also learned to respect some of their software for its quality--namely their office suite.
Now that I'm using Macintoshes more frequently, and am stuck with G3's, OOo is even more irrelevant. AbiWord finally doesn't suck royally on a Mac, but it still doesn't do smart quotes properly--or at all. Perhaps MS Office is still the most viable solution specifically because it doesn't suck as badly as the competition, bloat or not.
But then they'd be competing with Inferno for names. Toy Story and Dante's Divine Comedy make for a nice distinction between the two, though...
From what I can gather, they're basically giving things coming out of MS Research to companies.
And if you read the article carefully, you'll notice that MS isn't giving away anything. They're selling exclusive licenses in exchange for part ownership. In a sense, this could easily be seen as "startup farming." Instead of waiting for a startup to come along and develop on ideas and buy them out, MS has done the initial research and development, is essentially renting the ideas out to the new company. As part owners, if the company goes under, MS hasn't lost anything and doesn't have to buy the company out.
I'd object to being called a zealot, but I don't generally find myself trusting big corporations to act in the general best intrest of their consumer base or their competitors. I do trust them to do everything in their power to maintain monopoly status in as many areas of the software world as possible. This is not to say that I think they should necessarily open the sources and let free software types have a field day, but I don't see this as being a benefit to anyone other than Microsoft.
Although I'm not religious, religion can be a pretty good guide here. Obviously there have been multiple religioius practices regarding marriage over the years. I don't think that it is unreasonable to assume that the current general belief system in the USA is the best evolved of the bunch, vis-a-vis maintaining a stable society. Religious or not, it is not logically reasonable to assume the evolutionary benefits of American religious systems. There are a lot of factors other than religious ones that have influenced American prosperity. The first European settlers to stay in this part of the Americas were lucky as could be that the soil was fertile and natural resources were plentiful, and their technology would soon make it possible to expand westward. This has more to do with our current success than the religions that were practiced by them. The fact that we are still a country two hundred years later is not really all that special, considering the longevities of other governments. Your argument could be used to describe the ancient Romans: I would not be unreasonable to assume that animal sacrifice was the best evolved of the bunch, vis-a-vis maintaining a stable society.
I don't support redefining marriage _any more_ from the where it is now. Understand?
I, for one, don't. In order for me to understand, I need for you to justify your lack of support. Why don't you support further changes to the definition of marriage?
This may indeed be the last straw. This may the one legal inanity out of hundreds of legal inanities that causes me to wilfully and deliberately violate the GPL with glee.
First off, if you do deliberately violate the GPL, I would hope that you do so publicly so that we can finally test its validity in a public arena. If you don't, then your chickenshit cowardice would hopefully find a way to catch up to you.
More on topic, though, you are right when you say that a document is not a derivative work of its fonts. The poor sap who wrote the post to the scribus mailing list has obviously not read the GPL. The "GPL advocates" you refer to bring up these controversies in order to protect *their* freedoms and the benefits granted by those freedoms. The controversies are turned into Slashdot flamewars, are a big deal for a little while, and mellow out.
Not all of us who are GPL advocates are also zealots, and you make yourself look like an idiot for confusing them.
Debian works quite nicely on a desktop. If a major upgrade every three or four years is all you need, (which seems to be about what users brought up in the Windows world would expect, anyway) Debian stable is fine.
For the last year or so, Debian testing has been generally stable enough for desktop use; and since Ubuntu came out, I've still found that in general, Debian testing is more stable than Ubuntu. In a couple weeks, I'll try installing Hoary, but my expectations are low.
The biggest difference between KDE and Gnome on Debian versus Ubuntu is the branding. Debian doesn't seem to spend much time making their desktop environments look very different from the defaults set in place by the people who make them (unlike Red Hat and their derivatives, for instance), and the biggest change going to Ubuntu was that there are themes installed which are not standard Gnome themes.
The computer I'm on right now is running Debian Sarge with Ubuntu's XOrg (with its requisite dependencies).
this is just another example of microsoft innovating! it's a new way to bring smart people together, and to foster a richer environment for msn users.
it doesn't matter that google did something like it first, what matters is that microsoft is innovating!
Yes, but does the spell checker work?
Only at the command line, but the hyphenation and justification is spectacular...
If Pages can make documents look at least as good as (La)TeX, I'll go buy a Mac Mini next week. All I want is great text processing under the slick interface... which means "fi" and "ff" and "fl" are ligatures; kerning, justification, and hyphenation are automated beautifully with the whole paragraph in mind.
I don't have a need for advanced typographical tools (such as InDesign), but I do want my research papers to look good on paper (which is why I use (La)TeX instead of OOo or any of the other alternatives). If Pages can pull this off, Apple will have snagged a new customer away from the FS/OSS world.
Does the FSF know about this? Should I worry that my Debian box is being threatened by the Gator?
Perhaps things are different between CS and music (my field) in this respect, but I doubt that things are so drastically different as for these rules to apply differently: good work ethic, honesty, good references, and a strong experience base are what will get you jobs. A better school can definitely aid any or all of those, but it's not necessary.
This works quite well in languages that have specific patterns (such as endings) based on the grammatical roles of the words used. Japanese, ancient Greek, and Latin are all examples of this. Spaces might help, but they aren't necessary to separate the verbs from the nouns. English, on the other hand, makes very few distinctions between kinds of words, so text without spaces appears tangled and obscures meaning.
Similarly, this is made easier to deal with when the sounds represented by the text are greater in number, so syllabaries and ideogrammatic systems work much better than alphabets without spaces. Alphabetic systems (Latin- and Greek- based, for instance) are much more legible with spaces as a result.
Why read the article when you get to read phrases such as "Sorry, this site is temporary unavailable. [ Daily Bandwidth Limit Exceeded ]" instead?
You want to use a distro without a GUI, but refuse to use an installer that is a little archaic? Have you even tried the debian installer?
If I wanted the iMac, part of what I would want is the simplicity factor. Instead, I would get the fangldanglies and colorful doodads along with a whole lot of crap that I don't need. Please, Santa Clause, if you value your cookies and milk and not having razor blades lining my chimney, refrain from giving my the hip-e.
I understand the political reasons, I just wonder if the connection was made between the software to be used and the environment in which it would be used. Perhaps, as I'm really only interested in a small number of the apps that Demudi and the people at Stanford have to offer, I haven't noticed much of the gtk2/gnome software.
I only open up KDE to run Qt/KDE apps such as rosegarden, LyX, and K3B (though in the last day or two I've been a little irked at how buggy it is) -- I don't like waiting for kdelibs to load... takes forever on my box -- and I generally run UDE/UWM instead.
So what if I'm I'm a user who wants to use RT-Linux for audio work, but don't have the time and/or energy to roll my own kernel (which I still haven't figured out how to do without panics)? I don't want this to sound confrontational, as I'm interested in overcoming this problem.
Because DeMuDi is stuck on 2.4, certain pleasantries of the desktop environments (like udev) are missing. On the other hand, the 2.6 alsa integration fails to set up my sound cards properly. More specifically, it doesn't allow me to set them up the way I want, although it is fairly likely that I just haven't figured it out.
One thing I don't understand about DeMuDi and Planet CCRMA is the default of Gnome. I'm personally pretty ambivalent about DE choice, but it seems to me that it would be a good idea to use the environment most fitting for the tools offered in the distro. All of the nice GUI sequencer/notation programs are qt/kde programs.
how about the "g" in "gtk" (the Gimp ToolKit)
Seems likely given the bluecurve roots of the fingerprint software window. The proof is in the pudding (or, rather, the networking cards), though.