Without some protection of having your work stolen ( and future income derived from it ) from you, why bother at all?
Reverse engineering from the commercial product is not always so easy as you make it. It's not simply a matter of taking the product off the shelf and having factories pop up like mushrooms.
A company might be confident that reverse engineering would be too expensive for its competitors, or that it would take long enough to make it irrelevant...
It might well be that in a market that evolves quick enough, patents do more to slow and even prevent innovation that to encourage it.
I know how/.ers feel about software patents, but it is right to extend that attitude to the hardware sector? These aren't ones and zeroes, these are platters and heads. The materials cost actual money, and thousands of actual people depend on those materials to make their living. If it was open season on everything, we would have nothing, we would still be in mud huts using two cups and a string to communicate.
You've missed the point of most people's opposition to software patents. It's not that software is inexpensive, we all know it can be quite expensive to develop. I'm sure Microsoft expends a lot on their offices.
It's that patents should be non-trivial enough that duplicating them by chance is very improbable, and software patents are never like that. When patents don't satisfy that condition, they become a tool to stifle innovation and competition for the benefit of companies with deep pockets.
Nobody denies that the theoretical justification for patents, stimulating invention, is worthy. The problem is precisely that today they're being used very successfully for the opposite purpose.
This device can tell someone how many people are in your house and give them some big hints about what they are doing (on blob on top of another, etc).
This could mean the beginning of a whole new type of porn. I can see the popups: "Blobs doing things you never thought blobs could do!!! Subscribe to the BEST blob porn in the Internet!!!"
Not all parents want their children exposed to everything on the Internet, especially porn.
I find it strange that porn is the only content to be avoided that is explicitly mentioned by the story submitter and many comments. There are lots of things in the Internet that would be way more disturbing for children than porn, such as very extreme violence. Until that kind of content can be filtered I wouldn't even start thinking about filtering porn.
Just for the record, the sound system used in the Farbrausch 64k demos is done in 95% hand-optimized assembler, is only 4.5K in size in its newest incarnation and needs less than 10% CPU on a recent PC for synthesizing a complete song in realtime.
How do you compose your songs? MIDI?
I haven't found yet a song composing tool that gives me the same feeling that Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker did. I know about Modplug Tracker, but it seems kind of kludgy.
Novell is trying to create a professional desktop environment for Linux. To this end, choosing the highest quality toolkit is much more important than having to pay a small fee for the development of non-GPL applications.
Gtk's licensing only has an advantage over Qt's for those shops that want to create commercial non-GPL applications yet are too small to afford Qt's relatively cheap license. Novell have obviously decided that those shops aren't such an important market to sway their choice.
Why care about a far away "big dead rock" which "may have held life at some point", when we can make our own planet a big dead rock which may have held life at some point? In two hundred years, we won't need to go to Mars because we will have a planet-sized replica just here on Earth! Won't it be convenient?
'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux.'
In other words, on the long term KDE will not remain the default GUI.
This reminds me of the recent article on deconstruction where the author analyzed the affirmation "JFK was not a homosexual" to be a proof of the inherent homophobia in our society. But he was being absurd on purpose.
as part of a recent initiative to do something about KDE's reputation for only doing their own stuff, seemingly "starting over" (their own office suite, their own browser etc)
KOffice and Konqueror were started long before OpenOffice and Mozilla became open source.
The problem with tying executive compensation to company performance is that it disincentivates caring about anything but short-term. It makes executives uninterested about how their strategy damages the company or the country's economy as long as they can get four or five years of stellar profits. If (when) their current company goes down, they just move to another company using their well-greased social networks.
Perhaps the solution would be establishing a minimum duration for any executive job of, say, ten years. That would make them care.
Slashdot Mirror
Without some protection of having your work stolen ( and future income derived from it ) from you, why bother at all?
Reverse engineering from the commercial product is not always so easy as you make it. It's not simply a matter of taking the product off the shelf and having factories pop up like mushrooms.
A company might be confident that reverse engineering would be too expensive for its competitors, or that it would take long enough to make it irrelevant...
It might well be that in a market that evolves quick enough, patents do more to slow and even prevent innovation that to encourage it.
I know how /.ers feel about software patents, but it is right to extend that attitude to the hardware sector? These aren't ones and zeroes, these are platters and heads. The materials cost actual money, and thousands of actual people depend on those materials to make their living. If it was open season on everything, we would have nothing, we would still be in mud huts using two cups and a string to communicate.
You've missed the point of most people's opposition to software patents. It's not that software is inexpensive, we all know it can be quite expensive to develop. I'm sure Microsoft expends a lot on their offices.
It's that patents should be non-trivial enough that duplicating them by chance is very improbable, and software patents are never like that. When patents don't satisfy that condition, they become a tool to stifle innovation and competition for the benefit of companies with deep pockets.
Nobody denies that the theoretical justification for patents, stimulating invention, is worthy. The problem is precisely that today they're being used very successfully for the opposite purpose.
This device can tell someone how many people are in your house and give them some big hints about what they are doing (on blob on top of another, etc).
This could mean the beginning of a whole new type of porn. I can see the popups: "Blobs doing things you never thought blobs could do!!! Subscribe to the BEST blob porn in the Internet!!!"
Ok, I'll go take a cold shower now.
Not all parents want their children exposed to everything on the Internet, especially porn.
I find it strange that porn is the only content to be avoided that is explicitly mentioned by the story submitter and many comments. There are lots of things in the Internet that would be way more disturbing for children than porn, such as very extreme violence. Until that kind of content can be filtered I wouldn't even start thinking about filtering porn.
If you want to know more, have a look at the articles section of my home page, where I've written a bit about the inner workings.
Interesting stuff. I don't quite agree with your criticisms of modules, but you're far more knowledgeable than me, so I won't insist ;-).
Just for the record, the sound system used in the Farbrausch 64k demos is done in 95% hand-optimized assembler, is only 4.5K in size in its newest incarnation and needs less than 10% CPU on a recent PC for synthesizing a complete song in realtime.
How do you compose your songs? MIDI?
I haven't found yet a song composing tool that gives me the same feeling that Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker did. I know about Modplug Tracker, but it seems kind of kludgy.
I'll just switch to UDP.
Because we all know this could never have happened in the U.S.
Novell is trying to create a professional desktop environment for Linux. To this end, choosing the highest quality toolkit is much more important than having to pay a small fee for the development of non-GPL applications.
Gtk's licensing only has an advantage over Qt's for those shops that want to create commercial non-GPL applications yet are too small to afford Qt's relatively cheap license. Novell have obviously decided that those shops aren't such an important market to sway their choice.
Or rather, what The Man would like you to believe it is "pure gold" ;-).
what isn't pure gold to the conspiracy community?
And it won't.
XFree86 4.3 just got into Debian unstable. Debian won't arrive at avoiding 4.4 until eight or nine months from now.
Unless you consider "might makes right" the only thing you'll ever need to know about morality.
Why care about a far away "big dead rock" which "may have held life at some point", when we can make our own planet a big dead rock which may have held life at some point? In two hundred years, we won't need to go to Mars because we will have a planet-sized replica just here on Earth! Won't it be convenient?
I was wrong. Thanks to all who posted informative responses without being too much of a jerk.
pH is a logarithmic measure. Saying "A pH of near zero" is like saying "a near infinite number of people" i.e. nonsense.
Considering the nature of the most abundant content in the Internet, it's oddly appropriate.
Your method doesn't work if he uses the word "literally" twice in the same line.
In other words, on the long term KDE will not remain the default GUI.
This reminds me of the recent article on deconstruction where the author analyzed the affirmation "JFK was not a homosexual" to be a proof of the inherent homophobia in our society. But he was being absurd on purpose.
as part of a recent initiative to do something about KDE's reputation for only doing their own stuff, seemingly "starting over" (their own office suite, their own browser etc)
KOffice and Konqueror were started long before OpenOffice and Mozilla became open source.
I was just going to suggest that somebody push you off a cliff, in case you feel like inventing something else.
What does the bttv/v4l patch do?
Perhaps the solution would be establishing a minimum duration for any executive job of, say, ten years. That would make them care.
Never before experienced? Before what?