The summary gives the impression that Launchpad development just started, but it's been around for a few months at least. Bug reports from the unsupported packages in Ubuntu's latest release go to Malone, which is a part of Launchpad. Also, I think people have been using Rosetta to do translations for Hoary as well. It looks promising.
IP law is bunk. Pure, unadulterated bunk and bullshit.
That is ridiculous, and I think it's sad that this got modded insightful. The writers of the American Constitution saw a need to protect creative works, inventions and the like, and I agree with them. If you can't make money off of your ideas anymore, you'd stop trying to think of new ideas because you'd have to get a paying job. People would only invent new things to "scratch an itch" or to accomplish something they needed within their paying job. Sure, that can still lead to amazing things, but in general, I don't think those are the most interesting inventions.
The problem isn't the notion of intellectual property, it's the current laws out there that need to be fixed. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So basically, they're trying to do for radio what Current is doing for video. The difference is no one is going to listen to what KYOU puts on the air, because there's already similar content all over the Internet. Current actually seems like something new and innovative, rather than a way to save a dying radio station.
Regardless, the advancements that have been made in the digital age have lowered the barrier to entry for being a content creator. Personally, I think the next decade of audio and video is going to evolve similar to the blogging revolution. Sure, there's going to be lots of crap out there, but there's also going to be good stuff that we'd never be exposed to otherwise.
Shortening the patent duration to five years would basically destroy the pharmaceutical companies, especially the biotech companies. It takes more than five years to get any return on investment, plus if the patent is granted before FDA approval, you're losing time. The problem here isn't the patent duration. Twenty years is actually pretty reasonable. The problem is the granting of the patents.
You're forgetting that there are open source Java projects. Red Hat is using them to compile OpenOffice for the next Fedora version. From what I've heard, it almost works completely.
Re:The register must know something we dont...
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You're telling me that in two years, we'll have 1000GB laptop drives (~10x up) and 1000000GB desktop drives (~2000x up)? Man, Moore must have been a pessimist.
As soon as your copy of XP can keep two folders auto-sync'd over a network, then you give me a call. Longhorn can do that, and it's one of the big features I'm waiting for.
But consider...is this notan important step to wiping out *.doc as the "standard" document format?
This will barely, if at all, contribute to the demise of.doc as the standard document format. One thing that you don't get out of PDFs is editablility, which is necessary in a business environment. Assuming Metro inherits this property of PDF,.doc isn't going anywhere, sadly.
If royalty free licenses were enough to get open source reimplementations out of legal murkiness, then no one would be complaining about Mono. I'll suspend judgement on this one until we see what the terms of the license are and what patents Microsoft holds on it.
sure, the variable names are short, but there's a hell of a lot of (implicit) commenting. The commenting has been shoved in your head since seventh grade, when Ms. Krabappel explained what they meant to you, and has been reinforced over and over since then. If there's that much commenting for the variables that you're using, then by all means, use short one letter variables. This usually isn't the case.
The whole point of paying for music when you could get it off P2P networks is to support an artist whose work you enjoy. If you buy music from allofmp3.com, none of that money goes to the artists. If you want to support artists without getting DRM-laden music, then buy CDs. If you really don't care about the artists and just like how convenient allofmp3.com is, then by means, continue. Making money off of other people's creative works without compensating them is under plain copyright infringement on my moral ladder.
Seriously, can anyone name a recent laptop where a recent version of Linux was actually more difficult to install than for a desktop?
Broken ACPI implementations are the problem. Manufacturers test their laptops with Windows, and once it works, they're happy. Most of the time, it'll work under Linux these days, but if the manufacturer did something quirky (a la Compaq), bad things happen. It's depressing to have a laptop without working suspend and hibernate.
Come on now, this is insightful? Everyone knows sarge isn't out yet, and I don't see how saying "finish sarge" is going to get it out any faster. Why don't you help? I'm sure they'd appreciate your donation, whether it's money, code or documentation.
If the parents said no to Grand Theft Auto, how did the kid get it? If the kid bought it on his own, take away his cash flow. If the kid downloaded it off some warez site, then this solution probably won't prevent that either. The program searches the ESRB ratings database to accomplish it's goal, and it has to get the name from somewhere. If it's the shortcut, the kid will change the name. If it's embedded in the game somehow, there'll probably be something in the crack that changes that too. You're never going to stop a clever kid with clever hacks. You stop a clever kid with good parenting. You don't have to spy on your kids 24 hours a day to get that done, but if you want, you can hang that threat over their heads. Personally, I don't think using force to prevent an undesired action, as this program does, is a good idea. Words and punishment work better in the long term.
I hate to once again echo the Slashdot party line on this, but software patents are just BAD.
It's easy for people who program software or are otherwise interested in the software ecosystem to see that software patents are a bad thing. The question is, how are they that different from patents in other industries?
The thing that everyone always mentions is how it's impossible to develop software without infringing on a patent. I agree. There are various other industries in which this is true as well, such as the biotechnology industry.
For example, let's take the polymerase chain reaction, a technique that is necessary to do anything in the biotechnology industry. A company holds a patent on the technique, and I'm not sure if the patent has expired yet. The reason why everyone in the industry needs to use PCR is simple: The industry has a specific lingua franca, DNA, on which every development must be built. There is almost always a "best" way to do something when it comes to biotechnology, because there is machinery inside living cells that you have to work with to get things done. If you can use, for example, an enzyme that a cell already uses to accomplish a task, that's probably going to be the best way to do that task, because building enzymes from scratch to perform a desired task is outside of our reach at this point. So once someone discovers this "best" way, everyone else is going to need it for things to progress.
This is similar to software in the sense that there is usually a best way to get something done. When it comes to algorithms, it's all math, so you definitely have a best way to do something.
We've witnessed how innovation has been stifled in the software industry due to patents, but I'm fairly sure it's happening in many other industries as well. When the founding fathers gave Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," a patent system was a good way of accomplishing that. Instead of focusing on the problem of software patents, we need to be discussing whether or not the patent system in its current for is actually promoting progress, and what changes need to be made to it to ensure that it does.
My only explanation is that Linux users are more often than not also Windows users. They dual boot.
True, I am one of those people.
Why not use MacOS X and be able to run mainstream apps and have a unix core without dual booting?
Because I like using software that's already mine, and always will be. Sure, I could run open source software on OS X, but the vast majority of it still requires X11 for it to work, and as a consequence there is absolutely no integration, and it looks like ass.
Why not run Yellow Dog Linux and truly thumb your nose at the MS/Intel duopoly?
Because Linux/PPC blows. For instance, if I wanted a laptop, the bundled wireless card would be worthless in Linux. Also, there's quite a bit of software out there that is closed source that I want to use on Linux, but is only compiled for x86. I wouldn't be able to use Flash or the various video codecs from my Windows partition, and that would make things suck.
Personally, I have nothing against Apple. My brother is going to college next year and is buying a computer to take with him. My suggestions to him are to either buy a Windows laptop and dual boot, but stay in Linux unless something he needs isn't working, or buy a Mac. The former option is probably too much work since he's never used Linux, so he's probably going to end up with a Mac. Good for him. It's better than the alternative.
For now. They don't have to innovate to be successful at this point, because business is flowing in. That will stop as the standard of living in India raises accordingly. When this happens, you'll have lots of smart, capable programmers who know how things are done, and will be able to build upon others' ideas to make new ones. I don't think the cultural differences people often cite are significant enough to stop smart people from doing great things.
Of course, the companies that start to innovate will be the ones with a lot of money in the first place, and if my grasp of political theory serves me well, those companies will have bought legislators by then to get the software patents they'll want to restrict competition. Ain't democracy grand? I hope they prove me wrong.
If you don't want to be tracked on the Internet, there's a simple solution: don't have a static IP address and turn off cookies.
With that said, if you think this feature is a privacy issue, you should probably have your web browser history and cache disabled. I can't wait for a virus that emails the victim's history and cache to everyone in their address book. Hilarity would definitely ensue.
The problem is choice. Some people would say that choice is good, but from a business perspective, choice is expensive too and sometimes the benefits of choice do not outweigh the costs.
So now instead of paying Microsoft to make your choices for you, you pay Red Hat or Novell to do it. You can even hire a consultant that will tailor the kernel to your specific needs if it's that big of an issue, and if it is, I doubt that Windows would suffice anyway.
Choice alone is a good thing, and when your choices are open it's even better. Find someone to do what you want well for as cheap as you can, or take one of the prepackaged solutions. It's not that big of a deal.
Change is hard. To add another operating system into an all-Microsoft operation would force the agency to hire more administrators that are familiar with the system, and possibly incur more expenses in the transition process. The agencies get their budget on a yearly basis, and I doubt that the introduction of another operating system would save them money on that time frame. In the long run, their administration costs would be lower (ignoring possible discrepancies between the salaries of Mac and Windows admins), but from what I can tell, government agencies are forced to look at the short term benefits when it comes to money issues.
There's an easy solution to the funding problem. It normally would hurt to throw away a $3 billion shuttle, but not if you take the right precautions in advance.
Pass a law giving NASA the sole movie rights to the rescue mission.
That by itself won't even be enough to cover the cost. But wait... there are 293,027,571 Americans according to Google. At $10 a ticket, that pretty much covers it. But how do you get everyone to watch it?
Pass a law that revokes the citizenship of anyone who can't present the ticket stub for the movie on request.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary gives the impression that Launchpad development just started, but it's been around for a few months at least. Bug reports from the unsupported packages in Ubuntu's latest release go to Malone, which is a part of Launchpad. Also, I think people have been using Rosetta to do translations for Hoary as well. It looks promising.
Before you ask, Launchpad isn't open source. Yet.
IP law is bunk. Pure, unadulterated bunk and bullshit.
That is ridiculous, and I think it's sad that this got modded insightful. The writers of the American Constitution saw a need to protect creative works, inventions and the like, and I agree with them. If you can't make money off of your ideas anymore, you'd stop trying to think of new ideas because you'd have to get a paying job. People would only invent new things to "scratch an itch" or to accomplish something they needed within their paying job. Sure, that can still lead to amazing things, but in general, I don't think those are the most interesting inventions.
The problem isn't the notion of intellectual property, it's the current laws out there that need to be fixed. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Also, their cafeteria is still in beta.
So basically, they're trying to do for radio what Current is doing for video. The difference is no one is going to listen to what KYOU puts on the air, because there's already similar content all over the Internet. Current actually seems like something new and innovative, rather than a way to save a dying radio station.
Regardless, the advancements that have been made in the digital age have lowered the barrier to entry for being a content creator. Personally, I think the next decade of audio and video is going to evolve similar to the blogging revolution. Sure, there's going to be lots of crap out there, but there's also going to be good stuff that we'd never be exposed to otherwise.
Shortening the patent duration to five years would basically destroy the pharmaceutical companies, especially the biotech companies. It takes more than five years to get any return on investment, plus if the patent is granted before FDA approval, you're losing time. The problem here isn't the patent duration. Twenty years is actually pretty reasonable. The problem is the granting of the patents.
You're forgetting that there are open source Java projects. Red Hat is using them to compile OpenOffice for the next Fedora version. From what I've heard, it almost works completely.
You're telling me that in two years, we'll have 1000GB laptop drives (~10x up) and 1000000GB desktop drives (~2000x up)? Man, Moore must have been a pessimist.
But you can fit more bits on a platter if they Get Perpendicular!
"Hey! Check me out! I'm dancing! I'm dancing!"
As soon as your copy of XP can keep two folders auto-sync'd over a network, then you give me a call. Longhorn can do that, and it's one of the big features I'm waiting for.
You mean like iFolder?
But consider...is this notan important step to wiping out *.doc as the "standard" document format?
.doc as the standard document format. One thing that you don't get out of PDFs is editablility, which is necessary in a business environment. Assuming Metro inherits this property of PDF, .doc isn't going anywhere, sadly.
This will barely, if at all, contribute to the demise of
If royalty free licenses were enough to get open source reimplementations out of legal murkiness, then no one would be complaining about Mono. I'll suspend judgement on this one until we see what the terms of the license are and what patents Microsoft holds on it.
Please don't post my code on Slashdot.
Come see me in my office.
- Your Supervisor
The whole point of paying for music when you could get it off P2P networks is to support an artist whose work you enjoy. If you buy music from allofmp3.com, none of that money goes to the artists. If you want to support artists without getting DRM-laden music, then buy CDs. If you really don't care about the artists and just like how convenient allofmp3.com is, then by means, continue. Making money off of other people's creative works without compensating them is under plain copyright infringement on my moral ladder.
The Recycle Bin icon is actually just a satellite picture from Google Maps.
Seriously, can anyone name a recent laptop where a recent version of Linux was actually more difficult to install than for a desktop?
Broken ACPI implementations are the problem. Manufacturers test their laptops with Windows, and once it works, they're happy. Most of the time, it'll work under Linux these days, but if the manufacturer did something quirky (a la Compaq), bad things happen. It's depressing to have a laptop without working suspend and hibernate.
Come on now, this is insightful? Everyone knows sarge isn't out yet, and I don't see how saying "finish sarge" is going to get it out any faster. Why don't you help? I'm sure they'd appreciate your donation, whether it's money, code or documentation.
If the parents said no to Grand Theft Auto, how did the kid get it? If the kid bought it on his own, take away his cash flow. If the kid downloaded it off some warez site, then this solution probably won't prevent that either. The program searches the ESRB ratings database to accomplish it's goal, and it has to get the name from somewhere. If it's the shortcut, the kid will change the name. If it's embedded in the game somehow, there'll probably be something in the crack that changes that too. You're never going to stop a clever kid with clever hacks. You stop a clever kid with good parenting. You don't have to spy on your kids 24 hours a day to get that done, but if you want, you can hang that threat over their heads. Personally, I don't think using force to prevent an undesired action, as this program does, is a good idea. Words and punishment work better in the long term.
I hate to once again echo the Slashdot party line on this, but software patents are just BAD.
It's easy for people who program software or are otherwise interested in the software ecosystem to see that software patents are a bad thing. The question is, how are they that different from patents in other industries?
The thing that everyone always mentions is how it's impossible to develop software without infringing on a patent. I agree. There are various other industries in which this is true as well, such as the biotechnology industry.
For example, let's take the polymerase chain reaction, a technique that is necessary to do anything in the biotechnology industry. A company holds a patent on the technique, and I'm not sure if the patent has expired yet. The reason why everyone in the industry needs to use PCR is simple: The industry has a specific lingua franca, DNA, on which every development must be built. There is almost always a "best" way to do something when it comes to biotechnology, because there is machinery inside living cells that you have to work with to get things done. If you can use, for example, an enzyme that a cell already uses to accomplish a task, that's probably going to be the best way to do that task, because building enzymes from scratch to perform a desired task is outside of our reach at this point. So once someone discovers this "best" way, everyone else is going to need it for things to progress.
This is similar to software in the sense that there is usually a best way to get something done. When it comes to algorithms, it's all math, so you definitely have a best way to do something.
We've witnessed how innovation has been stifled in the software industry due to patents, but I'm fairly sure it's happening in many other industries as well. When the founding fathers gave Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," a patent system was a good way of accomplishing that. Instead of focusing on the problem of software patents, we need to be discussing whether or not the patent system in its current for is actually promoting progress, and what changes need to be made to it to ensure that it does.
My only explanation is that Linux users are more often than not also Windows users. They dual boot.
True, I am one of those people.
Why not use MacOS X and be able to run mainstream apps and have a unix core without dual booting?
Because I like using software that's already mine, and always will be. Sure, I could run open source software on OS X, but the vast majority of it still requires X11 for it to work, and as a consequence there is absolutely no integration, and it looks like ass.
Why not run Yellow Dog Linux and truly thumb your nose at the MS/Intel duopoly?
Because Linux/PPC blows. For instance, if I wanted a laptop, the bundled wireless card would be worthless in Linux. Also, there's quite a bit of software out there that is closed source that I want to use on Linux, but is only compiled for x86. I wouldn't be able to use Flash or the various video codecs from my Windows partition, and that would make things suck.
Personally, I have nothing against Apple. My brother is going to college next year and is buying a computer to take with him. My suggestions to him are to either buy a Windows laptop and dual boot, but stay in Linux unless something he needs isn't working, or buy a Mac. The former option is probably too much work since he's never used Linux, so he's probably going to end up with a Mac. Good for him. It's better than the alternative.
Now that they've got that done, they can work on getting people to function on less sleep. I want to be a microsleeper.
Growing yes, innovating hardly.
For now. They don't have to innovate to be successful at this point, because business is flowing in. That will stop as the standard of living in India raises accordingly. When this happens, you'll have lots of smart, capable programmers who know how things are done, and will be able to build upon others' ideas to make new ones. I don't think the cultural differences people often cite are significant enough to stop smart people from doing great things.
Of course, the companies that start to innovate will be the ones with a lot of money in the first place, and if my grasp of political theory serves me well, those companies will have bought legislators by then to get the software patents they'll want to restrict competition. Ain't democracy grand? I hope they prove me wrong.
If you don't want to be tracked on the Internet, there's a simple solution: don't have a static IP address and turn off cookies.
With that said, if you think this feature is a privacy issue, you should probably have your web browser history and cache disabled. I can't wait for a virus that emails the victim's history and cache to everyone in their address book. Hilarity would definitely ensue.
The problem is choice. Some people would say that choice is good, but from a business perspective, choice is expensive too and sometimes the benefits of choice do not outweigh the costs.
So now instead of paying Microsoft to make your choices for you, you pay Red Hat or Novell to do it. You can even hire a consultant that will tailor the kernel to your specific needs if it's that big of an issue, and if it is, I doubt that Windows would suffice anyway.
Choice alone is a good thing, and when your choices are open it's even better. Find someone to do what you want well for as cheap as you can, or take one of the prepackaged solutions. It's not that big of a deal.
Change is hard. To add another operating system into an all-Microsoft operation would force the agency to hire more administrators that are familiar with the system, and possibly incur more expenses in the transition process. The agencies get their budget on a yearly basis, and I doubt that the introduction of another operating system would save them money on that time frame. In the long run, their administration costs would be lower (ignoring possible discrepancies between the salaries of Mac and Windows admins), but from what I can tell, government agencies are forced to look at the short term benefits when it comes to money issues.
There's an easy solution to the funding problem. It normally would hurt to throw away a $3 billion shuttle, but not if you take the right precautions in advance.
Pass a law giving NASA the sole movie rights to the rescue mission.
That by itself won't even be enough to cover the cost. But wait... there are 293,027,571 Americans according to Google. At $10 a ticket, that pretty much covers it. But how do you get everyone to watch it?
Pass a law that revokes the citizenship of anyone who can't present the ticket stub for the movie on request.
I really need to get into policy work.