And How! Or even just vi with TeX/LaTeX on a VT100 -- I'm not kidding, that's how I wrote my thesis,
as have probably a lot of people here -- typesetters of mathematics books and scholarly journals
use TeX/LaTeX/AMSTex, as it is simply the best system for typesetting equations, hands down.
My biggest disappointment with OOo, in fact, has been the fact that they didn't use LaTeX as a text
entry standard for their equation editor, complemented by the LyX pointy-clicky thing for accomplishing
the same goal. If it had used LaTex for its equation layout, it would be 10 years ahead of MS Office--by using a layout engine that's
been around for like 20 years (and MS isn't allowed to use!).
But let's not even mention MS, it's a toy by comparison to either LyX or
OOo.Sure, MSO is great for glorified secretaries and
their technologically incompetent bosses who couldn't do a line integral around their penes if their
lives depended on it--the "failed Freshman calculus repeatedly" people. Sure, they're running the world--
running it right into the ground, if you ask me.
Farmer's markets are even pretty good for home-made and second-hand toys, as are church bazaars (as distinct from what--cathedral cathedrals?), swap meets and flea markets. It's a way of participating in recycling and saving big bikkies at the same time. Farmer's markets are terrific for fresh vege, and the best way to get inexpensive organic meat is to get to know the farmer and the butcher themselves. Informal networks of people who can provide things you need in exchange for stuff you have, but don't need-- it's very much like the open source community, and promoting local food security in the face of rising petroleum prices.
Speaking of which, the profitability of all "globalized" markets pretty much rests on the shifting sands of cheap oil. It won't be cheaper for Walmart to ship cheap sweatshop crap from abroad when the price of oil goes way up. "But That's Bad for the Economy!" Shouts Wall Street. No, it's only Bad for Globalized Megacorps -- but it's good for local barter economies, good for public transportation, good for bicycle mechanics, good for local manufacturers and farmers, who may soon be able to undercut the likes of Walmart on cost while beating Walmart
on quality -- just because the shipping costs of locally-produced goods are so much lower.
I don't even understand this risk...I can only assume that this is because of their lack of understanding of the GPL (and these guys are lawyers??!)
Unfortunately, legal education in New Zealand is basically an undergraduate degree in "law" and then some postgraduate
coursework. It's an old-boys' club, and patent law is basically an extra "paper" you do -- NOTHING like the patent bar exam administered by the USPTO (which requires an undergraduate degree in patentable material to even be allowed to take it -- we're talking physics, EE, mech E, biochemistry here, ladies) and -- do they need a 3.x+ GPA in four grueling years of physical sciences or engineering to get into law school in order to litigate patents like in the US? NO. Do they have to get 650+ on an LSAT to even get into law school in the first place? NO. Do they have to have to pass the bar exam in every state they hope to practice in, plus federal? NO.
They're just a bunch of pretentious lightweight weenies in white wigs that call themselves lawyers
down there in "Godzone." What a bunch of wanking little prats. Good thing the amateurish approach of these
so-called "lawyers" affects fewer people than live in Chicago even.
It's not as though Chapman Tripp could have been unapprised of how utterly stupid
their claims are -- Simpson Grierson tried this FUD on a year or so ago, as well:
(see The Fud Buster
pages of the New Zealand Open Source Society. )
I hope the New Zealand Serious Fraud Office goes after Chapman Tripp's spreading such lies
which bring tangible monetary injury to the New Zealand Open Source community, measurable
every time we hear a prospect repeat the utter and unadulterated and deliberate bullshit
that these pathetic excuses for "IP Lawyers" are putting out.
The purpose of patents was to promote progress by encouraging inventors to publish the details of their inventions. In a world without patents, inventors had a strong motivation to keep the workings of their inventions (which were physical devices) as secret as possible, so that others couldn't duplicate them. The notion of patents was introduced to open up... the details of inventions so that others could learn from and build on the ideas.
Inventors recieve a temporary monopoly on their idea in exchange for publishing the details.
I really really like this! Thank you! It would be reasonable, then, for the USPTO to require that software patent holders actually publish their source code -- which is
the real equivalent of publishing diagrams and illustrations for a mechanical device. Currently, then, the GPL better
fulfills the role that SW patents ought to play.
I actually agree with you on the purpose of DRM. We still have a dialog on what the best strategy is
to thwart it, in the long run. With DRM aware code under Linux ("friendly" is going a bit too far!),
you have a much better chance of being able to track what's going on -- and when DRM starts doing unfriendly,
and unfair and unlawful things, it will be much simpler to document the fact with your DRM aware
software -- and for everyone else to see what's going on as well. Much better than if the HW/SW world
splits itself down the DRM-MS vs non-DRM-Linux divide. Hold your friends close -- and your enemy closer.
Writing code to decode/provide keys to DRM HW...is holding the DRM enemy close. We can see what its up to.
Build encryptor for phones to hide nefarious deeds
Authorities take interest in you
Authorities tap your phone and find out that they can't decode your speech data
Authorities go ".. Hmmm.. I wonder what he is hiding?" and throws mainframe full of cracking software at the problem.
Several problems with this objection.
First of all STU phones have existed for years (and they keep replacing them with STU I, STU II, STU III etc) -- well because
the keep getting cracked. So your point that such a phone couldn't be built -- blunted somewhat.
Second of all, if you were conducting internet traffic on the same line as your voice traffic, both as packets, one can be
disguised as the other.
This is what VOIP already does -- and is it any wonder that commercial server-mediated
VOIP services are being pushed in a situation where FOSS/P2P could do? FOSS/P2P VOIP could be easily disguised as
music sharing...oops! That's under attack, too. I wonder why. Is it really just to protect the poor singer/songwriter (and the
profits of RIAA members)? Or is it to stigmatize and have an excuse to monitor your most likely covert channel?
If Linux were released under GPL3, then nobody with a DRM box could run
Linux on it. But by allowing Linux to run on DRM hardware, if
something doesn't work because of DRM, then the HW manufacturers are the
bad guys, and DRM at fault -- not those nice OSS people who just
want to help everybody.
It also gives us all ongoing opportunities to
observe misapplications of DRM technology (spyware, malware attempts)
by providing a nice platform. While finding ways of actually thwarting
lawful applications of DRM would be wrong, if there's an unlawful
misapplication of DRM that's easily observable (because Linux runs on
the thing) and possible to thwart...Cool!
So I have to say that Linus has it right, both in spirit and in
strategy wrt to the kernel. And there's nothing stopping anyone
from writing GPL3 applications that run on it -- but only if you
get a non-DRM box. Which is another way of strategically opposing
DRM -- allow your OS to run on it, but let it break half the apps,
so people have a reason to not buy DRM hardware.
If robotics means fewer people being used for cannon-fodder, I'm all for it. When we find a
way of reducing all apparent need for cannon-fodder -- robotic or human -- then it won't be an issue.
Much as I like Google, I've stopped reading the Google News much at all. First of all articles get the/. effect, and it's much the same coverage as you see in the NYT and BBC anyway. Worse, because it has a "popularity" filter on it. If I were in a field that relied on any more accurate coverage of world events, I'd have to go to primary sources anyway.
I tried Google Earth the other day too, and it has the same kind of "filter" -- eye candy for Africa, but if you have to look at a non-tourist spot, you're pretty much SOL. Since I'm in a field that does rely on more accurate GIS, I use real GIS software and data.
True, but the situation could become a little bit more muddled when -- while you may be an employee of a university, but the funding (which you wrote the proposal for) comes from a government agency.
Some government agencies require that all work done with their funding pass into the public domain, and yet the University typically tries to claim copyright (and patent rights) over the publications and inventions produced, at the same time.
Yet -- your grant is already paying the University for the "privelege" of doing your research at their institution. Sometimes this sum that the University gets is actually more than what goes into the science. Ostensibly, this money goes to "overhead" -- paying for the electricity and water bill and "facilities" for example. Yet, you have to buy most of your own equipment with grant money -- which is also taxed for overhead -- as well.
This system is inherently unfair. Taxpayer pays to get research done, you do all the work -- and the University keeps all the goodies? For what?
In fact, old Larry's institution, Stanford, is one of the worst offenders in the overhead game.
Which may be why he's proposing alternatives to the "employer keep all" scheme--which is fine for a commercial venture, but NOT fine at all for publically funded research at private universities. Who knows, this could be the thin edge of a very interesting wedge to start cracking that system.
In fact, Andy says he introduced it himself at 2am the day they built the final masters...
Oh yeah, sure! "intermittent bug that never showed up in testing, related to 'finder' not the OS?" Any paper longer than 10 pages and a few graphs invariably and without fail had exactly the same problem -- furthermore, this reference claims that the deadlock would eventually be broken, and then not appear again. Never saw that happen. Why was everybody darn sure to get a second floppy drive for their Mac well into the MacII era -- if it was just a little finder timing issue?
If it was such a simple problem, then why didn't he just issue a patch on the UCSD Pascal user group BITNET listserv...Oh. Yeah. Because it was no longer Open Source at that stage.
And...what about that UCSD logo stored on the ROM? How did THAT get there?
What about the fact that the UC Regents were paid to stop distributing UCSD Pascal?
What about the fact that Apple freely admits to "borrowing" from UCSD Pascal for Apple Pascal, then Lisa Pascal...from which MacOS was derived? Sorry, but when a company ADMITS to deriving their OS from a well-known university project, it is not a "conspiracy theory" to say, "Hey! They derived their OS from a well-known university project!" No -- it is restating what the company itself admit to.
The point is that an ostensibly Open Source license that did not guarantee freedom of the code in perpetuity led to anything good eventually being turned proprietary and being taken out of the hands of open source developers.
And I honestly doubt that this "hail the great men of genius" book is going to tell the story of the open source developers and contributers to an OS Apple simply ripped off. And sold as their own. And then portrayed themselves as "empowering the people" (in their 1984 ad) when in fact what they had done was take the right to use the source of a previously open source OS away from the people who developed, used and contributed to it.
It's not a conspiracy. It's just what happens to software in the absence of proper FREE (as in GPL) software licensing.
UCSD Pascal Operating System was an Open Source Operating System developed in the 70's at University of California, San Diego.
It was, up until some time in the early 80's, widely ported to and distributed on microcomputers. Terak, Olivetti and Apple, for example. All you had to do, really, to port the UCSD Pascal Operating System to a new machine was to write a Pascal P-code compiler for it, make a few tweaks for the custom devices -- and you were off and running. There was a vibrant and active community of developers around the world writing applications and coming up with solutions to other problems for the UCSD Pascal Operating System at that time. We typically communicated via BITNET.
It had a few features -- one of them, a cool logo of a trident made up of ascii characters -- and of course a few bugs, the most notable being the disk deadlock problem, which went something like this:
open a document from floppy
edit the document
attempt to write the document back to floppy
oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
insert system disk
oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
insert the document disk
oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
insert the system disk
oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
insert the document disk
oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
insert the system disk
oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
insert the document disk
oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
insert the system disk
oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
insert the document disk
oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
insert the system disk
oops, in order to write the file to the floppy it came from need to insert the other floppy
insert the document disk
oops, need to insert the system disk so the OS knows how to write a file
insert the system disk...
You get the picture. There is no actual breaking out of the deadlock. Your modifications are lost and you would also often lose the original document, since it would wind up in a corrupt state.
The usual solution was to get a second floppy drive (5 1/4", natch).
Two things happened in the early 80's: The Reagents of the State of California, under the terms of the Open Source (not GPL, not Free Software -- the terms hadn't even been invented yet) license, were free to withdraw, from public distribution, the UCSD Pascal operating system.
Coincidentally, Apple Software released the Lisa -- which had a remarkably similar operating system--from which the original MacOS was derived. Apple claimed (and still do) that they did not rip off UCSD Pascal because see? we wrote our own compiler!
BZZZT! misleading answer. Anyone can write a P-code compiler. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OS?? Hrmmm... No response!
If they didn't use large chunks of the UCSD Pascal Operating System in the Lisa and then the Macintosh OS, why on earth could you still bring up the UCSD LOGO on-screen when doing a raw read of certain parts of the ROM and... why on earth did they replicate the one most annoying BUG ???
Darlin', you have such lovely natural blonde hair! But do tell us... why on earth do you dye your roots black?
Well, obviously, Apple "borrowed heavily" from the UCSD Pascal Oper
When I find myself, in NZ, being blamed for everything the US is, does, or ever was or ever did do...I simply own up to it:
YES I AM PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING GEORGE BUSH (both of 'em), BILL CLINTON, RON REAGAN, JIMMY CARTER (very bad man!) and LYNDON B. JOHNSON, RICHARD NIXON, GENERAL MOTORS, DOW CHEMICAL, MONSANTO CORPORATION, AND BILLY GRAHAM EVER DECIDED TO DO.
Of course its absurd, but you actually hear kiwis arguing that there's something intrinsic about "being American" that makes us "prone" do "doing things like that."
In other words, people abroad can be just as bigoted, pig-headed and fundamentally stupid as Americans are thought to be. In fact, I think they're just projecting their own stupidity and bigotry on americans -- unfairly.
Not only are women less likely to become Pro-Ams, their range of activity is probably
more constrained, especially when they have children. They tend to build their
Pro-Am careers more around home and family...
excuse me? Very few people indeed get paid for parenting per se
which makes it by definition an "amateur" activity -- you wouldn't (or shouldn't) do
it unless you love what you're doing (and love your children). And yet, don't (we
hope that) parents take their roles as parents as seriously as any professional activity?
Or more? Isn't it rather all-consuming.
Parenting is the consummate and probably first and foremost "pro-am" activity,
it has been going on for a very long time. "Pro-am" is nothing new -- women
pretty much invented it, and nothing could be more natural. Perhaps this is a more
natural way to organise society.
So listen to your mother: she paved the way for the open source geek.
I was educated as a engineering physicist, and put myself through
engineering school programming (Pascal on micros, in the 70's),
having picked it up in high school.
Needless to say that I did both my Masters and Phd thesis in computational physics,
staying as far away from FORTRAN as possible (touching it only with mixed-language programming,
and then only through C, M4, sh and, after it was invented, C++)
and doing as much of my own unix systems administration as necessary -- and taking
two years beteween my MSc and PhD to work just as a sysadmin.
After my 5th postdoc -- underpaid, overworked: so some f-ing faculty member can steal your best work and then say
"oh to keep your job you have to write ANOTHER proposal (while I publish the work that came
out of your last proposal heh heh heh)" -- I figured out that programming in
the so-called real world paid twice the money for half the hours and about a quarter of the
intellectual energy expended: and for which I was GROSSLY overqualified.
One small fly in the ointment: as a female, no matter WHAT was on my CV, people just
assumed that I was somebody's glorified secretary that figured out how to write SQL
queries from Access or some pathetic shit like that, and should be ordered around by guys with half my
technical background. What a hoot! Dot-com himbos, I call them. Billerica Blow-Dries.
Buncha Lightweight Blowhards if you ask me. Had to ditch a few of those "real world"
jobs before finding one where I'm employed to do what I'd already spent 20 years
already doing. Duhhhhh....WRITING CODE? D'ya THINK?
I like the past-past tense formed with the irregular past tense plus the regular past-tense ending, and then
coming to the conclusion that they mean something
slightly different. It's nothing a prescriptive grammarian would accept but... works in Brooklyn!
For example, "I lent the book to him" vs. "I lented it to him." The latter implies you got it back, that the full transaction was completed.
Is it the grammar that's innate, or the generation of rulesets, followed by the misapplication and reinterpretation of those rules -- whether they're grammatical or visual/spatial or musical.... Maybe it's just the grammatical rulesets that need to be generated and regenerated so frequently by children that makes the rulesets so sophisticated. If we communicated more by means of pictures or musical notes, would those evolve as quickly?
The title of the article referred to in the economist is:
The men in white coats are winning, slowly
However, according to the organisation American Women in Science, at least 50% of
the people with bachelors and masters' degrees in biology
today are women, and nearly 40% of the Ph.Ds.
Whether they're winning or losing, slowly or quickly -- they're certainly not all men -- not by
a long shot. In fact, more than a
third of these "men" in white coats -- these biologists, scientists, researchers, genetecists are, in fact, women.
Smaller OS & apps to go with lower spec compu
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Bloatware -- it's not just for Microsoft anymore. Your typical latest SuSE and RedHats require 64MB of
main memory or more, and god forbid you try running OOo on the thing. Still too much!
What to do for your granma's
system? You want something with up-to-date kernel, a low-profile windowing system and a nice
combination of office apps that don't chew up memory and disk like they were going out of style.
Most of the military embedded, comms and simulation
systems have traditionally
been developed on a Unix platforms, and the
embedded work was typically done with VxWorks.
Migrating to linux means minimal porting costs from Unix platforms, it means preservation
of the skill set already developed in military R&D outfits (FFRDCs) and it means
freeing various corners of that world from the commercial interests of
providers of proprietary *nix platforms. It also opens up a whole world
of development environments for embedded systems. Porting from Unix to Linux
can be combined with a refactoring exercise to make those systems more reliable, too --
whereas porting to say Windows -- would just be a complete mess.
An ever-changing mess, as MS issues a never-ending stream of binary patches and updates
and API changes and has a never ending string of vulnerabilities that cannot be
patched in the field because nobody has the source.
Linux is the logical choice, the rational choice for these systems from the
standpoint of simplifying and unifying software development processes, having access
to a greater range of development tools, and for making these systems more reliable.
The cost benefits of the software systems reliability, simplicity and visibility
considerations compounds the savings on the licensing fees.
Those MS licenses they're also getting?
Windows machines are used for administrative purposes --
think glorified typewriter, not the next guided missile system.
It was far more worrying (and completely unrealistic, and
probably politically motivated) when the military was considering
standardizing their systems on MS--which is like hiring a
secretary to drive a tank.
Re:ipv6 vs ipv4 inaccuracy in CNN article
on
The Internet At 35
·
· Score: 1
Agreed!
The article put down to technology a problem that should properly be lain
at the feet of bureaucracy and politics.
It's not the fault of the addressing
protocol itself that its address space has been (in retrospect)
misallocated.
The historical reasons for the misallocation
is a whole nother topic, and I suspect has
less to do with greed than with institutional inertia.
ipv6 vs ipv4 inaccuracy in CNN article
on
The Internet At 35
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Change doesn't come easily, however. For instance, the IPv6 numbering system was deemed an Internet standard about five years ago, but the vast majority of software and hardware today still runs on the older IPv4, which is rapidly running out of room.
Ipv4 running out of room is a bit of a myth -- there's still plenty of companies and uninversities
with huge blocks of ipv4 address space that they have for historical reasons.
Most ipv4 stacks run on top of an ipv6 stack now and have for several years.
I don't see what hardware has to do with it, unless they mean those old routers
on the backbone. Most peoples' desktop's and server's NICs can already handle ipv6, and
there's nothing stopping them from writing and using ipv6-based applications (client and
server). Gettiing ipv6 packets through an ipv4-only backbone
segment is just a matter of setting up a tunnel.
Slashdot Mirror
And How! Or even just vi with TeX/LaTeX on a VT100 -- I'm not kidding, that's how I wrote my thesis, as have probably a lot of people here -- typesetters of mathematics books and scholarly journals use TeX/LaTeX/AMSTex, as it is simply the best system for typesetting equations, hands down.
My biggest disappointment with OOo, in fact, has been the fact that they didn't use LaTeX as a text entry standard for their equation editor, complemented by the LyX pointy-clicky thing for accomplishing the same goal. If it had used LaTex for its equation layout, it would be 10 years ahead of MS Office--by using a layout engine that's been around for like 20 years (and MS isn't allowed to use!).
But let's not even mention MS, it's a toy by comparison to either LyX or OOo.Sure, MSO is great for glorified secretaries and their technologically incompetent bosses who couldn't do a line integral around their penes if their lives depended on it--the "failed Freshman calculus repeatedly" people. Sure, they're running the world-- running it right into the ground, if you ask me.
Farmer's markets are even pretty good for home-made and second-hand toys, as are church bazaars (as distinct from what--cathedral cathedrals?), swap meets and flea markets. It's a way of participating in recycling and saving big bikkies at the same time. Farmer's markets are terrific for fresh vege, and the best way to get inexpensive organic meat is to get to know the farmer and the butcher themselves. Informal networks of people who can provide things you need in exchange for stuff you have, but don't need-- it's very much like the open source community, and promoting local food security in the face of rising petroleum prices.
Speaking of which, the profitability of all "globalized" markets pretty much rests on the shifting sands of cheap oil. It won't be cheaper for Walmart to ship cheap sweatshop crap from abroad when the price of oil goes way up. "But That's Bad for the Economy!" Shouts Wall Street. No, it's only Bad for Globalized Megacorps -- but it's good for local barter economies, good for public transportation, good for bicycle mechanics, good for local manufacturers and farmers, who may soon be able to undercut the likes of Walmart on cost while beating Walmart on quality -- just because the shipping costs of locally-produced goods are so much lower.
Unfortunately, legal education in New Zealand is basically an undergraduate degree in "law" and then some postgraduate coursework. It's an old-boys' club, and patent law is basically an extra "paper" you do -- NOTHING like the patent bar exam administered by the USPTO (which requires an undergraduate degree in patentable material to even be allowed to take it -- we're talking physics, EE, mech E, biochemistry here, ladies) and -- do they need a 3.x+ GPA in four grueling years of physical sciences or engineering to get into law school in order to litigate patents like in the US? NO. Do they have to get 650+ on an LSAT to even get into law school in the first place? NO. Do they have to have to pass the bar exam in every state they hope to practice in, plus federal? NO.
They're just a bunch of pretentious lightweight weenies in white wigs that call themselves lawyers down there in "Godzone." What a bunch of wanking little prats. Good thing the amateurish approach of these so-called "lawyers" affects fewer people than live in Chicago even.
It's not as though Chapman Tripp could have been unapprised of how utterly stupid their claims are -- Simpson Grierson tried this FUD on a year or so ago, as well: (see The Fud Buster pages of the New Zealand Open Source Society. )
I hope the New Zealand Serious Fraud Office goes after Chapman Tripp's spreading such lies which bring tangible monetary injury to the New Zealand Open Source community, measurable every time we hear a prospect repeat the utter and unadulterated and deliberate bullshit that these pathetic excuses for "IP Lawyers" are putting out.
I really really like this! Thank you! It would be reasonable, then, for the USPTO to require that software patent holders actually publish their source code -- which is the real equivalent of publishing diagrams and illustrations for a mechanical device. Currently, then, the GPL better fulfills the role that SW patents ought to play.
I actually agree with you on the purpose of DRM. We still have a dialog on what the best strategy is to thwart it, in the long run. With DRM aware code under Linux ("friendly" is going a bit too far!), you have a much better chance of being able to track what's going on -- and when DRM starts doing unfriendly, and unfair and unlawful things, it will be much simpler to document the fact with your DRM aware software -- and for everyone else to see what's going on as well. Much better than if the HW/SW world splits itself down the DRM-MS vs non-DRM-Linux divide. Hold your friends close -- and your enemy closer. Writing code to decode/provide keys to DRM HW...is holding the DRM enemy close. We can see what its up to.
Several problems with this objection. First of all STU phones have existed for years (and they keep replacing them with STU I, STU II, STU III etc) -- well because the keep getting cracked. So your point that such a phone couldn't be built -- blunted somewhat.
Second of all, if you were conducting internet traffic on the same line as your voice traffic, both as packets, one can be disguised as the other.
This is what VOIP already does -- and is it any wonder that commercial server-mediated VOIP services are being pushed in a situation where FOSS/P2P could do? FOSS/P2P VOIP could be easily disguised as music sharing...oops! That's under attack, too. I wonder why. Is it really just to protect the poor singer/songwriter (and the profits of RIAA members)? Or is it to stigmatize and have an excuse to monitor your most likely covert channel?
If Linux were released under GPL3, then nobody with a DRM box could run Linux on it. But by allowing Linux to run on DRM hardware, if something doesn't work because of DRM, then the HW manufacturers are the bad guys, and DRM at fault -- not those nice OSS people who just want to help everybody.
It also gives us all ongoing opportunities to observe misapplications of DRM technology (spyware, malware attempts) by providing a nice platform. While finding ways of actually thwarting lawful applications of DRM would be wrong, if there's an unlawful misapplication of DRM that's easily observable (because Linux runs on the thing) and possible to thwart...Cool!
So I have to say that Linus has it right, both in spirit and in strategy wrt to the kernel. And there's nothing stopping anyone from writing GPL3 applications that run on it -- but only if you get a non-DRM box. Which is another way of strategically opposing DRM -- allow your OS to run on it, but let it break half the apps, so people have a reason to not buy DRM hardware.
And he says as much, too.
Guys, it's the USPTO, not the USPO. The USPO is the United States Post Office. The USPTO is the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
If robotics means fewer people being used for cannon-fodder, I'm all for it. When we find a way of reducing all apparent need for cannon-fodder -- robotic or human -- then it won't be an issue.
the bluetooth ear piece resembles a small yellow fish..
AKA the Babelfish! Woo-Hoo! Thank You! Grazie! Gracias! Tak! Merci!
Much as I like Google, I've stopped reading the Google News much at all. First of all articles get the
I tried Google Earth the other day too, and it has the same kind of "filter" -- eye candy for Africa, but if you have to look at a non-tourist spot, you're pretty much SOL. Since I'm in a field that does rely on more accurate GIS, I use real GIS software and data.
True, but the situation could become a little bit more muddled when -- while you may be an employee of a university, but the funding (which you wrote the proposal for) comes from a government agency.
Some government agencies require that all work done with their funding pass into the public domain, and yet the University typically tries to claim copyright (and patent rights) over the publications and inventions produced, at the same time.
Yet -- your grant is already paying the University for the "privelege" of doing your research at their institution. Sometimes this sum that the University gets is actually more than what goes into the science. Ostensibly, this money goes to "overhead" -- paying for the electricity and water bill and "facilities" for example. Yet, you have to buy most of your own equipment with grant money -- which is also taxed for overhead -- as well.
This system is inherently unfair. Taxpayer pays to get research done, you do all the work -- and the University keeps all the goodies? For what?
In fact, old Larry's institution, Stanford, is one of the worst offenders in the overhead game.
Which may be why he's proposing alternatives to the "employer keep all" scheme--which is fine for a commercial venture, but NOT fine at all for publically funded research at private universities. Who knows, this could be the thin edge of a very interesting wedge to start cracking that system.
Oh yeah, sure! "intermittent bug that never showed up in testing, related to 'finder' not the OS?" Any paper longer than 10 pages and a few graphs invariably and without fail had exactly the same problem -- furthermore, this reference claims that the deadlock would eventually be broken, and then not appear again. Never saw that happen. Why was everybody darn sure to get a second floppy drive for their Mac well into the MacII era -- if it was just a little finder timing issue?
If it was such a simple problem, then why didn't he just issue a patch on the UCSD Pascal user group BITNET listserv...Oh. Yeah. Because it was no longer Open Source at that stage.
And...what about that UCSD logo stored on the ROM? How did THAT get there?
What about the fact that the UC Regents were paid to stop distributing UCSD Pascal?
What about the fact that Apple freely admits to "borrowing" from UCSD Pascal for Apple Pascal, then Lisa Pascal ...from which MacOS was derived? Sorry, but when a company ADMITS to deriving their OS from a well-known university project, it is not a "conspiracy theory" to say, "Hey! They derived their OS from a well-known university project!" No -- it is restating what the company itself admit to.
The point is that an ostensibly Open Source license that did not guarantee freedom of the code in perpetuity led to anything good eventually being turned proprietary and being taken out of the hands of open source developers.
And I honestly doubt that this "hail the great men of genius" book is going to tell the story of the open source developers and contributers to an OS Apple simply ripped off. And sold as their own. And then portrayed themselves as "empowering the people" (in their 1984 ad) when in fact what they had done was take the right to use the source of a previously open source OS away from the people who developed, used and contributed to it.
It's not a conspiracy. It's just what happens to software in the absence of proper FREE (as in GPL) software licensing.
UCSD Pascal Operating System was an Open Source Operating System developed in the 70's at University of California, San Diego.
It was, up until some time in the early 80's, widely ported to and distributed on microcomputers. Terak, Olivetti and Apple, for example. All you had to do, really, to port the UCSD Pascal Operating System to a new machine was to write a Pascal P-code compiler for it, make a few tweaks for the custom devices -- and you were off and running. There was a vibrant and active community of developers around the world writing applications and coming up with solutions to other problems for the UCSD Pascal Operating System at that time. We typically communicated via BITNET.
It had a few features -- one of them, a cool logo of a trident made up of ascii characters -- and of course a few bugs, the most notable being the disk deadlock problem, which went something like this:
You get the picture. There is no actual breaking out of the deadlock. Your modifications are lost and you would also often lose the original document, since it would wind up in a corrupt state.
The usual solution was to get a second floppy drive (5 1/4", natch).
Two things happened in the early 80's: The Reagents of the State of California, under the terms of the Open Source (not GPL, not Free Software -- the terms hadn't even been invented yet) license, were free to withdraw, from public distribution, the UCSD Pascal operating system.
Coincidentally, Apple Software released the Lisa -- which had a remarkably similar operating system--from which the original MacOS was derived. Apple claimed (and still do) that they did not rip off UCSD Pascal because see? we wrote our own compiler!
BZZZT! misleading answer. Anyone can write a P-code compiler. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OS?? Hrmmm... No response!
If they didn't use large chunks of the UCSD Pascal Operating System in the Lisa and then the Macintosh OS, why on earth could you still bring up the UCSD LOGO on-screen when doing a raw read of certain parts of the ROM and ... why on earth did they replicate the one most annoying BUG ???
Well, obviously, Apple "borrowed heavily" from the UCSD Pascal Oper
True.
When I find myself, in NZ, being blamed for everything the US is, does, or ever was or ever did do...I simply own up to it:
Of course its absurd, but you actually hear kiwis arguing that there's something intrinsic about "being American" that makes us "prone" do "doing things like that."
In other words, people abroad can be just as bigoted, pig-headed and fundamentally stupid as Americans are thought to be. In fact, I think they're just projecting their own stupidity and bigotry on americans -- unfairly.
excuse me? Very few people indeed get paid for parenting per se which makes it by definition an "amateur" activity -- you wouldn't (or shouldn't) do it unless you love what you're doing (and love your children). And yet, don't (we hope that) parents take their roles as parents as seriously as any professional activity? Or more? Isn't it rather all-consuming.
Parenting is the consummate and probably first and foremost "pro-am" activity, it has been going on for a very long time. "Pro-am" is nothing new -- women pretty much invented it, and nothing could be more natural. Perhaps this is a more natural way to organise society.
So listen to your mother: she paved the way for the open source geek.
I was educated as a engineering physicist, and put myself through engineering school programming (Pascal on micros, in the 70's), having picked it up in high school.
Needless to say that I did both my Masters and Phd thesis in computational physics, staying as far away from FORTRAN as possible (touching it only with mixed-language programming, and then only through C, M4, sh and, after it was invented, C++) and doing as much of my own unix systems administration as necessary -- and taking two years beteween my MSc and PhD to work just as a sysadmin.
After my 5th postdoc -- underpaid, overworked: so some f-ing faculty member can steal your best work and then say "oh to keep your job you have to write ANOTHER proposal (while I publish the work that came out of your last proposal heh heh heh)" -- I figured out that programming in the so-called real world paid twice the money for half the hours and about a quarter of the intellectual energy expended: and for which I was GROSSLY overqualified.
One small fly in the ointment: as a female, no matter WHAT was on my CV, people just assumed that I was somebody's glorified secretary that figured out how to write SQL queries from Access or some pathetic shit like that, and should be ordered around by guys with half my technical background. What a hoot! Dot-com himbos, I call them. Billerica Blow-Dries. Buncha Lightweight Blowhards if you ask me. Had to ditch a few of those "real world" jobs before finding one where I'm employed to do what I'd already spent 20 years already doing. Duhhhhh....WRITING CODE? D'ya THINK?
Very nice succinct summary!
I like the past-past tense formed with the irregular past tense plus the regular past-tense ending, and then coming to the conclusion that they mean something slightly different. It's nothing a prescriptive grammarian would accept but... works in Brooklyn!
For example, "I lent the book to him" vs. "I lented it to him." The latter implies you got it back, that the full transaction was completed.
Is it the grammar that's innate, or the generation of rulesets, followed by the misapplication and reinterpretation of those rules -- whether they're grammatical or visual/spatial or musical.... Maybe it's just the grammatical rulesets that need to be generated and regenerated so frequently by children that makes the rulesets so sophisticated. If we communicated more by means of pictures or musical notes, would those evolve as quickly?
RPG already overcomes the shortcomings of SQL
However, according to the organisation American Women in Science, at least 50% of the people with bachelors and masters' degrees in biology today are women, and nearly 40% of the Ph.Ds.
Whether they're winning or losing, slowly or quickly -- they're certainly not all men -- not by a long shot. In fact, more than a third of these "men" in white coats -- these biologists, scientists, researchers, genetecists are, in fact, women.
Bloatware -- it's not just for Microsoft anymore. Your typical latest SuSE and RedHats require 64MB of main memory or more, and god forbid you try running OOo on the thing. Still too much!
What to do for your granma's system? You want something with up-to-date kernel, a low-profile windowing system and a nice combination of office apps that don't chew up memory and disk like they were going out of style.
Run Uptodate Linux Everywhere is one place to look.
Vector Linux is another.
Most of the military embedded, comms and simulation systems have traditionally been developed on a Unix platforms, and the embedded work was typically done with VxWorks.
Migrating to linux means minimal porting costs from Unix platforms, it means preservation of the skill set already developed in military R&D outfits (FFRDCs) and it means freeing various corners of that world from the commercial interests of providers of proprietary *nix platforms. It also opens up a whole world of development environments for embedded systems. Porting from Unix to Linux can be combined with a refactoring exercise to make those systems more reliable, too -- whereas porting to say Windows -- would just be a complete mess. An ever-changing mess, as MS issues a never-ending stream of binary patches and updates and API changes and has a never ending string of vulnerabilities that cannot be patched in the field because nobody has the source.
Linux is the logical choice, the rational choice for these systems from the standpoint of simplifying and unifying software development processes, having access to a greater range of development tools, and for making these systems more reliable. The cost benefits of the software systems reliability, simplicity and visibility considerations compounds the savings on the licensing fees.
Those MS licenses they're also getting? Windows machines are used for administrative purposes -- think glorified typewriter, not the next guided missile system. It was far more worrying (and completely unrealistic, and probably politically motivated) when the military was considering standardizing their systems on MS--which is like hiring a secretary to drive a tank.
Agreed!
The article put down to technology a problem that should properly be lain at the feet of bureaucracy and politics.
It's not the fault of the addressing protocol itself that its address space has been (in retrospect) misallocated.
The historical reasons for the misallocation is a whole nother topic, and I suspect has less to do with greed than with institutional inertia.
Ipv4 running out of room is a bit of a myth -- there's still plenty of companies and uninversities with huge blocks of ipv4 address space that they have for historical reasons.
Most ipv4 stacks run on top of an ipv6 stack now and have for several years. I don't see what hardware has to do with it, unless they mean those old routers on the backbone. Most peoples' desktop's and server's NICs can already handle ipv6, and there's nothing stopping them from writing and using ipv6-based applications (client and server). Gettiing ipv6 packets through an ipv4-only backbone segment is just a matter of setting up a tunnel.
PS I think they meant internet turns 23 -- in hex