Abiword will be fine, as will KWord. WordStar came first, and I seem to recall that even WordPerfect predated MS Word. (My memory is a bit hazy on that second one, though. The first version of MS Word that I had was V4 for DOS, so I was a late entrant into this area.) At any rate, nobody could argue that "word" is not generic here.
Killustrator is in trouble because only one product uses the term "illustrator": the Adobe one. Its biggest competitor is Corel Draw, not Corel Illustrator.
That's not an artifact of the GPL. That's an artifact of the bazaar development model.
Microsoft is trying to tell you that the GPL has problems (and semantic shift to the idea that open source has problems) for people who want to buy non-GPL licences. If anything, it's the bazaar development model has problems in this area, not the GPL.
But then, if you accept outside contributions, I guess you close yourself off from this way of getting revenue.
They can when the two companies can make an agreement regarding sharing the source; the company which owns the code can, if they wish, license the code to another company.
Which, of course, the GPL does not preclude. It's always fair game to approach a GPL developer and offer to buy a non-GPL'd licence. Most developers (obviously not FSF members, but others) would probably do it, for the right price. Some developers, like Troll Tech, might even offer such a deal up front.
What Microsoft will never concede is that the GPL is just like any other software licence in this respect. The only thing you can't do is use the vendor's code in GPL-violating ways without their permission. Nothing prevents you from seeking permission, and offering money or other consideration for the privilege, just like you would with a proprietary vendor.
Pretty much all of the film is rendered using the output straight from MTOR, not in layers. PRMan is really good with memory, so the gigabytes of gzipped geometry per frame don't cause a problem. The problem is the shaders, which form the inner loop of the REYES rendering architecture, which are written in an interpreted language. Rendering in layers would mean that you couldn't exploit occlusion culling and thus would have to do too much shading, which would blow your render time.
Having said that, it is possible that some shots were done in layers for compositing of 2D special effects. Shots without 2D special effects, however, were almost certainly done in one go.
When I was commuting, I used to get my petrol from one particular vendor. They consistently kept their prices low after the other stations put up their prices weekly and brought them down again as soon as they could.
I appreciated that. So I took to regularly buying some of their overpriced oil and overpriced drinks my small way of thanking them.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to realise that if I got something from Mandrake for free (which I haven't; I don't use their distro), I'd be more likely to give them something back, whether it's money, bug reports, documentation or code.
If you don't want to give Mandrake money, don't. You also don't have to tip the waiter. They get paid, after all. You don't have to tip the busker who's entertaining you as you walk by. The only difference between this and Mandrake is that with the waiter or the busker, there isn't the person standing in front you with the proverbial cap in hand and thus the social pressure to tip.
Part of the free software economy is to share and share alike. It can be summed up best using the words of a wise man: "You received without payment; give without payment". If you can't give code, bug fixes, documentation or other things, consider giving money instead. All up to you.
Say what you will about RMS, but he's a geek like you and me. Geeks don't lie in the name of artistic licence. They'd rather spend an hour explaining the technical distinctions than dumb it down.
So I find it next to impossible that RMS will argue that GPL = Open Source. In fact, knowing RMS, he won't even mention "open source" except to distinguish it from "free software".
You're probably just close enough that there is no visible swirl.
Melbourne (where I live) is pretty much on the same latitude as Chicago, only the opposite hemisphere. While I've never been to Chicago, I have been to California, which is closer to the equator, and the toilets swirl there.
American swirling toilets, as someone else has pointed out, work using a jet of water just under the rim which is directed at an angle, so that the water swirls. In most Australian toilets, on the other hand, a large volume of water is ejected from the cistern from under the rim and it goes straight down. There's a lot of splashing, and more noise, and no swirling.
It may also use more water. Thankfully, a lot of Australian toilets have a "half flush" feature where only half the volume of water is thrown into the bowl. However, it uses a clever mechanism so that the height of the water in the cistern, and therefore the pressure under which the water comes out, is the same as for a full flush.
Part of the confusion here is what we mean by "closed languague". I think of three separate things:
Language has only one proprietary implementation. This is really only a problem if the language has no "standard" (as opposed to a "de facto standard"). Consider an open source implementation of Visual Basic, for example. Microsoft would play with the language definition so the open source implementors would forever chase a moving target. A smart proprietary language implementor, of course, would not do this, but rather would capitalise on the interest to push their own products.
Kernighan's definition: The standard language is insufficiently expressive for practical use, therefore must be extended. Every vendor's extensions are different from everyone else's.
The actual language definition is copyrighted and precludes open source implementations.
On the last one, does anyone use Miranda(TM) any more? We used to, back in the days when we had no choice if we wanted lazy functional programming. But now we have Haskell, with at least three solid open source implementations and a number of other research platforms. Even Microsoft has taken an interest (hiring half of the Cambridge University Haskell research group).
IMHO filtering is only good for parents who don't want to answer the questions of their children, adults who are too inhibited to speak about somthing completely natural.
Well that's not half true. Parents who are too inhibited to speak to their kids about sex would use filtering, but so would non-inhibited parents.
I'm certainly not an inhibited parent. However, there are things that are "age inappropriate". In Australia, the OFLC calls them "adult themes". Not specific images or specific acts, but rather concepts which kids before a certain level of maturity would not understand. Can you, for example, imagine trying to explain BDSM to a four year old? Unless it was an exceptionally bright four year old, it would be, on the whole, better to try to shield said child (or at the most leave it with a "if you still don't know what it is when you turn [insert appropriate age], ask again") from such concepts until they're mature enough to be able to understand.
Secondly, remember computer-animated movies take a LONG to render.
Pixar can re-render one of their films in about a month. Is that a long time?
Besides, computer time is cheap. What's more expensive is people time. Remember that a feature length animation takes two or three years to animate. Shaving off a few minutes here and there really does save a significant amount of salary.
The guy from the so-called Glencullen University was named Danny Ramalotti. I thought I'd heard that name before. My wife reports that it is a character on the daytime soap Days of our Lives (verified with a web search). You'd think he could have picked an interesting pseudonym, at least.
We shouldn't know this factoid, of course, but that's what you get for working from home.
I think that the difficulty in characterising code as expression is that a programming language is a jargon language. I know that in following this case I've read a lot of US legal jargon (citations, Latin phrases and so on) which mean about as much to me as C++ would to an average lawyer. It's meaningful. It expresses something. It's hard for someone not fluent in the field to see what, though.
One example that might help is that programmers who write open source code often use it as part of their resume, much the same way as a photographer uses their portfolio or a filmmaker uses their show reel. Of course, this is not to say that a program must be in source form to be expressive; a song is expressive even if the composer doesn't publish sheet music, after all.
Another avenue to explore is that a lot of art is functional. I have a book open on my desk at the moment to a page featuring a chair designed by John Hutton. The chair is now in some art gallery somewhere. It's strange to think of a chair as a form of expression, but there you go. More close to home, we don't doubt that advertising art is art (Absolut Vodka, anyone?), but we also don't doubt that it's primarily functional (in this case, to get you to buy expensive alcoholic beverages).
You mean, if I don't believe your corporate propaganda, I must be ignorant?
That's not what he meant. I interpreted that statement as: if you need proof, stop playing with toy systems and try rolling out a large, real-world, distributed, scalable (insert as many other features as your application needs) production database, one which your business depends on otherwise you go out of business, using your favourite open source DMBS and a high-end commercial one like Oracle and see which one does the job adequately.
Of course, you may have to wait for a hardware failure, but that's okay, it'll happen within six months or so.
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Abiword will be fine, as will KWord. WordStar came first, and I seem to recall that even WordPerfect predated MS Word. (My memory is a bit hazy on that second one, though. The first version of MS Word that I had was V4 for DOS, so I was a late entrant into this area.) At any rate, nobody could argue that "word" is not generic here.
Killustrator is in trouble because only one product uses the term "illustrator": the Adobe one. Its biggest competitor is Corel Draw, not Corel Illustrator.
That depends what you mean by "compress". Just using lbxproxy might be a good compromise.
Disclaimer: I work for DotC.
RenderDotC doesn't raytrace either. You might be thinking of Mirage-3D, the author of which, the great Timm Dapper, also works for DotC.
Seriously. You can't build anything for miles around a space port, so the wildlife tends to thrive.
That's what they found in Florida, anyway.
That's not an artifact of the GPL. That's an artifact of the bazaar development model.
Microsoft is trying to tell you that the GPL has problems (and semantic shift to the idea that open source has problems) for people who want to buy non-GPL licences. If anything, it's the bazaar development model has problems in this area, not the GPL.
But then, if you accept outside contributions, I guess you close yourself off from this way of getting revenue.
Which, of course, the GPL does not preclude. It's always fair game to approach a GPL developer and offer to buy a non-GPL'd licence. Most developers (obviously not FSF members, but others) would probably do it, for the right price. Some developers, like Troll Tech, might even offer such a deal up front.
What Microsoft will never concede is that the GPL is just like any other software licence in this respect. The only thing you can't do is use the vendor's code in GPL-violating ways without their permission. Nothing prevents you from seeking permission, and offering money or other consideration for the privilege, just like you would with a proprietary vendor.
You and I both know that MP refers to MPEG. Most consumers do not. Naming something based on MP3 but not on MPEG may not be a violation.
Is "MP3" trademarked? If not, the scope is there to use a confusingly similar name to refer to Ogg Vorbis. Something like "MP3Ultra", perhaps.
The ORBS RBL has Robert Elz blacklisted because they're filtered away from his nets. (He doesn't like them trying to relay mail through his mailer.)
I suspect that auDA is an ORBS subscriber and just aren't getting his mail as a result.
Pretty much all of the film is rendered using the output straight from MTOR, not in layers. PRMan is really good with memory, so the gigabytes of gzipped geometry per frame don't cause a problem. The problem is the shaders, which form the inner loop of the REYES rendering architecture, which are written in an interpreted language. Rendering in layers would mean that you couldn't exploit occlusion culling and thus would have to do too much shading, which would blow your render time.
Having said that, it is possible that some shots were done in layers for compositing of 2D special effects. Shots without 2D special effects, however, were almost certainly done in one go.
When I was commuting, I used to get my petrol from one particular vendor. They consistently kept their prices low after the other stations put up their prices weekly and brought them down again as soon as they could.
I appreciated that. So I took to regularly buying some of their overpriced oil and overpriced drinks my small way of thanking them.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to realise that if I got something from Mandrake for free (which I haven't; I don't use their distro), I'd be more likely to give them something back, whether it's money, bug reports, documentation or code.
If you don't want to give Mandrake money, don't. You also don't have to tip the waiter. They get paid, after all. You don't have to tip the busker who's entertaining you as you walk by. The only difference between this and Mandrake is that with the waiter or the busker, there isn't the person standing in front you with the proverbial cap in hand and thus the social pressure to tip.
Part of the free software economy is to share and share alike. It can be summed up best using the words of a wise man: "You received without payment; give without payment". If you can't give code, bug fixes, documentation or other things, consider giving money instead. All up to you.
Say what you will about RMS, but he's a geek like you and me. Geeks don't lie in the name of artistic licence. They'd rather spend an hour explaining the technical distinctions than dumb it down.
So I find it next to impossible that RMS will argue that GPL = Open Source. In fact, knowing RMS, he won't even mention "open source" except to distinguish it from "free software".
That's really interesting. I've never met a libertarian who believed that the US should even have an office of the Surgeon-General.
Melbourne (where I live) is pretty much on the same latitude as Chicago, only the opposite hemisphere. While I've never been to Chicago, I have been to California, which is closer to the equator, and the toilets swirl there.
American swirling toilets, as someone else has pointed out, work using a jet of water just under the rim which is directed at an angle, so that the water swirls. In most Australian toilets, on the other hand, a large volume of water is ejected from the cistern from under the rim and it goes straight down. There's a lot of splashing, and more noise, and no swirling.
It may also use more water. Thankfully, a lot of Australian toilets have a "half flush" feature where only half the volume of water is thrown into the bowl. However, it uses a clever mechanism so that the height of the water in the cistern, and therefore the pressure under which the water comes out, is the same as for a full flush.
Now aren't you glad you asked?
Part of the confusion here is what we mean by "closed languague". I think of three separate things:
On the last one, does anyone use Miranda(TM) any more? We used to, back in the days when we had no choice if we wanted lazy functional programming. But now we have Haskell, with at least three solid open source implementations and a number of other research platforms. Even Microsoft has taken an interest (hiring half of the Cambridge University Haskell research group).
There's a lesson in here somewhere.
For the record, Australian toilet bowls work on a slightly different mechanism. Our water doesn't swirl, it goes straight down.
Just FYI.
Well that's not half true. Parents who are too inhibited to speak to their kids about sex would use filtering, but so would non-inhibited parents.
I'm certainly not an inhibited parent. However, there are things that are "age inappropriate". In Australia, the OFLC calls them "adult themes". Not specific images or specific acts, but rather concepts which kids before a certain level of maturity would not understand. Can you, for example, imagine trying to explain BDSM to a four year old? Unless it was an exceptionally bright four year old, it would be, on the whole, better to try to shield said child (or at the most leave it with a "if you still don't know what it is when you turn [insert appropriate age], ask again") from such concepts until they're mature enough to be able to understand.
That's including credits, right? If so, that's what I'd expect. About 100 minutes (or 3600 feet).
What was the median, as a matter of interest? I think that'd be a slightly fairer measure.
Pixar can re-render one of their films in about a month. Is that a long time?
Besides, computer time is cheap. What's more expensive is people time. Remember that a feature length animation takes two or three years to animate. Shaving off a few minutes here and there really does save a significant amount of salary.
As a matter of interest, if the local government tries to amend the law, can they be sued for making an unauthorised derivative work?
You're right. Just goes to show you how much I watch them.
The guy from the so-called Glencullen University was named Danny Ramalotti. I thought I'd heard that name before. My wife reports that it is a character on the daytime soap Days of our Lives (verified with a web search). You'd think he could have picked an interesting pseudonym, at least.
We shouldn't know this factoid, of course, but that's what you get for working from home.
I think that the difficulty in characterising code as expression is that a programming language is a jargon language. I know that in following this case I've read a lot of US legal jargon (citations, Latin phrases and so on) which mean about as much to me as C++ would to an average lawyer. It's meaningful. It expresses something. It's hard for someone not fluent in the field to see what, though.
One example that might help is that programmers who write open source code often use it as part of their resume, much the same way as a photographer uses their portfolio or a filmmaker uses their show reel. Of course, this is not to say that a program must be in source form to be expressive; a song is expressive even if the composer doesn't publish sheet music, after all.
Another avenue to explore is that a lot of art is functional. I have a book open on my desk at the moment to a page featuring a chair designed by John Hutton. The chair is now in some art gallery somewhere. It's strange to think of a chair as a form of expression, but there you go. More close to home, we don't doubt that advertising art is art (Absolut Vodka, anyone?), but we also don't doubt that it's primarily functional (in this case, to get you to buy expensive alcoholic beverages).
Here endeth the rambling.
That's not what he meant. I interpreted that statement as: if you need proof, stop playing with toy systems and try rolling out a large, real-world, distributed, scalable (insert as many other features as your application needs) production database, one which your business depends on otherwise you go out of business, using your favourite open source DMBS and a high-end commercial one like Oracle and see which one does the job adequately.
Of course, you may have to wait for a hardware failure, but that's okay, it'll happen within six months or so.