Yes, patents are evil, but mostly only when they are enforced, otherwise it's more of a "Hey, look what we thought of".
They're also a problem when you don't know whether they'll be enforced, and if they are, you don't know whether the courts will make a reasonable decision, and if they don't, you could be personally liable for damages. Even more of a problem when you have a family that would be affected as well.
What, self-appointed "activists" again? This annoys me to no end. The world is flooded with people who think they can become activists just by calling themselves by that name and weaving a few flags, blocking entrances to nuclear power plants and military facilities, &c. Repeat after me: Only activists appointed by the United Nations Board of Activism and Disease Control (UNBADGE) are real activists! Only activists appointed by the United Nations Board of Activism and Desease Control (UNBADGE) are real activists!
David Bennahum: Can you give me a sense of how the interest in these unmanned missions to Mars have influenced the urgency, or the interest, in a manned mission to Mars?
Dan Goldin: Can I respectfully push on you a little bit, and say "we have robotic missions and we have piloted missions." We do not have "manned missions" at NASA. We have thirty female astronauts.
DB: Okay.
DG: I don't want to be pushy about this, but when I took this job, I told my daughters, "You will no longer use the name 'the manned spacecraft program.'" Okay. In any case, I think that it was a watershed event, the Pathfinder mission.
Okay, so most of the article consists of, "Here's software X. They re-wrote it, and now it's not as good or as accepted. Why'd they do that? They suck."
Hey, that's exaggerating. The article's more like, "Here's software X. They re-wrote it, and now it's not as good or as accepted. Why'd they do that? I'm not blaming anybody, because I know all this is done by volunteers who do a fantastic job. I'm just saying that the benefits aren't sufficiently obvious to make it overwhelmingly compelling. Bizarre!"
Mhm.:-) Ok, I thought there are probably too many homebrewn OS's to cover everyone on/., but I guess this is just one pretty advanced one and you have a point;)
I think the question was not, why should somebody work on a one-person OS in their spare time (kudos to them), but why should it be posted on the/. frontpage? Seems reasonable to me to ask, "Why would people use it?"
Potential money saver: Differential buzz
on
IBM vs. Content Chaos
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The head of a research and development department could feed WebFountain all the e-mails, reports, PowerPoint presentations, and so on that her employees produced in the last six months. From this, WebFountain could give her a list of technologies that the department was paying attention to. She could then compare this list to the technologies in her sector that were creating a buzz online. Discrepancies between the two lists would be worth asking her managers about, allowing her to know whether or not the department was ahead of the market or falling dangerously behind.
This is a potentially very useful money-saver. Currently companies employ hoards of middle-management people who do little else than detecting discrepancies between the technologies that their department is focusing on and those that are currently all the buzz. Now we can create an automatic boss that sends out e-mails like, "What's this IP-over-XML thing and why don't we use it and how soon can you have all our critical systems migrated to it?"
Ever since the wayback machine started making waves, I'd guess about 2 years ago, I've noticed 2 things: There are far less updates of the archives, and it seems that the archive is regularly unable to keep up with the client load we impose on it.
I think that they possibly intentionally limit their bandwidth, so that it's faster to browse the real Web than them (because they don't want to become Google cache when a site is slashdotted, for example).
(Although they only would if the page in question is old enough... they have a policy of pages going in only 6 months after they have been spidered, probably for the same reason as above.)
I think this refers to a theory that was purported on Groklaw some time ago regarding SCO's court strategy. Apparently when a charitable cause is found unlawful as is, one possibility is that the judge tries to find a lawful charitable cause as close to the original one as possible, and "make it so as if that had been the original one," so that all the work invested in the original charitable cause is not lost. (I imagine that, for example, if a group of volunteers builds a house to be a homeless shelter and then it's found that for some reason it's not allowed to build a homeless shelter in that part of a city, a judge may decide that the house is sold and the proceeds go to some organization that helps homeless people, rather than going into some individual's pocket or having the house rot or something like that -- OTOH IANAL so the analogy may be flawed.) With GPL'ed code, if 1'000 people have copyrights in one particular project, odds are that if the GPL is invalidated nobody could make any use of that code, because nobody has all the copyrights to a usable isolated chunk of the code. So the person at Groklaw thought that the SCO lawyers hoped that the court would say that the closest lawful charitable cause would be donating the code to the public domain, and would therefore declare all GPL'ed code PD. I don't think it's gonna happen, but it appears not to be impossible.
Actually, my impression of them is that once Linux/Free Software has really taken over even on desktops &c (which of course may never happen, but I think it will), they'll tell you that that's what they said all along. Then, you may call me cynical:-)
Now there's a good point! After all, almost every household in the western world has a microwave already, so that's also a great way to bridge the Digital Divide! Em,...
Slashdot Mirror
They're also a problem when you don't know whether they'll be enforced, and if they are, you don't know whether the courts will make a reasonable decision, and if they don't, you could be personally liable for damages. Even more of a problem when you have a family that would be affected as well.
[s/Desease/Disease/;. Damn, why didn't I just copy&paste it?!?]
What, self-appointed "activists" again? This annoys me to no end. The world is flooded with people who think they can become activists just by calling themselves by that name and weaving a few flags, blocking entrances to nuclear power plants and military facilities, &c. Repeat after me: Only activists appointed by the United Nations Board of Activism and Disease Control (UNBADGE) are real activists! Only activists appointed by the United Nations Board of Activism and Desease Control (UNBADGE) are real activists!
As I already replied to the other poster: Yeah, sure.
You mean, nobody could be stupid enough to think that man = male human being?
David Bennahum: Can you give me a sense of how the interest in these unmanned missions to Mars have influenced the urgency, or the interest, in a manned mission to Mars?
Dan Goldin: Can I respectfully push on you a little bit, and say "we have robotic missions and we have piloted missions." We do not have "manned missions" at NASA. We have thirty female astronauts.
DB: Okay.
DG: I don't want to be pushy about this, but when I took this job, I told my daughters, "You will no longer use the name 'the manned spacecraft program.'" Okay. In any case, I think that it was a watershed event, the Pathfinder mission.
Okay, so most of the article consists of, "Here's software X. They re-wrote it, and now it's not as good or as accepted. Why'd they do that? They suck."
Hey, that's exaggerating. The article's more like, "Here's software X. They re-wrote it, and now it's not as good or as accepted. Why'd they do that? I'm not blaming anybody, because I know all this is done by volunteers who do a fantastic job. I'm just saying that the benefits aren't sufficiently obvious to make it overwhelmingly compelling. Bizarre!"
Mhm. :-) Ok, I thought there are probably too many homebrewn OS's to cover everyone on /., but I guess this is just one pretty advanced one and you have a point ;)
I think the question was not, why should somebody work on a one-person OS in their spare time (kudos to them), but why should it be posted on the /. frontpage? Seems reasonable to me to ask, "Why would people use it?"
This is a potentially very useful money-saver. Currently companies employ hoards of middle-management people who do little else than detecting discrepancies between the technologies that their department is focusing on and those that are currently all the buzz. Now we can create an automatic boss that sends out e-mails like, "What's this IP-over-XML thing and why don't we use it and how soon can you have all our critical systems migrated to it?"
That must be runnink on KDE? :-o
As "IP lawyer stuff (OSI model layer 3) is transparent...
As for the first request, the lore goes that story is refered to as "the S-word"[*] inside ID...
[*] (Search for it on the page linked.)
A 33% decline is a decline by a third. A decline from 36% to 24% is also a decline by a third. Ok, there was rounding involved. What's your problem?
(The ayes have it! The ayes have it!)
It would be even better if both would be possible, although I do appreciate how difficult that would be to find!
Could well be, then I would've jumped to conclusions on that point, sorry :)
Ever since the wayback machine started making waves, I'd guess about 2 years ago, I've noticed 2 things: There are far less updates of the archives, and it seems that the archive is regularly unable to keep up with the client load we impose on it.
I think that they possibly intentionally limit their bandwidth, so that it's faster to browse the real Web than them (because they don't want to become Google cache when a site is slashdotted, for example).
(Although they only would if the page in question is old enough... they have a policy of pages going in only 6 months after they have been spidered, probably for the same reason as above.)
(Again, IANAL.)
Actually, my impression of them is that once Linux/Free Software has really taken over even on desktops &c (which of course may never happen, but I think it will), they'll tell you that that's what they said all along. Then, you may call me cynical :-)
Hey, the Digital "Rights" Management community would *die* for that! ;-)
50'000'000$ a "huge" debt? My god, that musta been before the bomb, baby...
:-)
Now there's a good point! After all, almost every household in the western world has a microwave already, so that's also a great way to bridge the Digital Divide! Em, ...
;-)
It's already two years after 2001, it's about time!
From the article:
Did this make anybody else go, "TCP/IP over XML, anyone?"
(Yeah, I know they meant "instead of XMPP," but the wording *did* confuse me at first :-))