Well I share the same feeling as several of the others that have complained about CUPS, I've found it impossible to work with at times.
On the other hand I've read a rant from a CUPS developer where he basically accused several distros of crippling CUPS by disabling or changing their default settings thereby making CUPS a lot less usable.
Western Europe? You must be kidding. In all the companies I worked for both in The Netherlands and in Spain illegal copies were common. Some of it was blatant: "just find a key somewhere" (which seems to happen often enough at my current job in Telefonica, Spain's largest Telecom Operator) some if it was more like "we don't know how many licenses we have exactly".
I don't know what the law actually says over here but these things never come to any kind of trial. When these kind of violations are found (by a watchdog organization for example) the company gets sent a letter and the company pays up. Companies want the problem to go away as quietly as possible and they know that pointing fingers will normally just make things worse.
That's contracts, this is licenses, there is a big difference. A license is a permission to use or copy or whatever, but the thing you got is still owned by the one who gave you the license. So as far as I know a court will be more on the author's side in that case (but just to remind you: IANAL).
No no, I definitely didn't imply anyhting like that, the whole thing is about interpretations, that's all. You are right of course that you can't cover holes in the license with words publicized outside it. But when talking about the _intent_ of a license, especially when the text of the license might open to several different and conflicting interpretations, you have to realize that a judge will take into account anything that the licensor has said publicly about his intentions.
In the case of AT&T I think it they said in their newletters that their license should be interpreted in such a way that they would never consider anything that was built on top of their OS as being somehow a "derivative" of their work, in that way laying to rest the fears of their customers that in some future AT&T could claim ownership of their code. Which is exactly the stunt SCO is trying to pull in their case vs IBM. So even though the license doesn't explicitly say anything about this and even though you could have discussion about the definition of derivative works IBM only pointed out that whatever the result of those discussions are, in the end it doesn't matter because AT&T has already explained that their license was NOT meant to cover code made by third parties.
Well the Union is smaller, that's right, but the GP mentioned Europe quite a bit of times more than EU. But if we really want to go nit-picking, he actually says the entire EU fits easily within any US state which is obviously wrong.
"but since that faq is not actually part of the GPL it is not binding on anyone's interpretation of the GPL"
IANAL but as far as I understand it this is not actually true. Public statement from the author(s) of a license will affect the decision a judge makes if it ever comes to a trial. IBM lawyers used newletters published by AT&T where they clarified certain points in their license in the SCO case to show that SCO's interpretation of the license was not the same as AT&T's. So if it ever comes down to the question "what does this sentence here actually mean?" a judge will definitely look at any statements made by the FSF.
Where the law and the text of the license are clear there won't be much discussion, but both law and licenses are not science and open for many interpretations, that's why we need judges.
I'm confused here, a story based in the future, high-tech gadgets far beyond our current capabilities, space ships, alien species.... isn't that what Sci-Fi _is_, basically?
Fantasy, on the other hand, is basically an alternate reality where nothing is as we know it, but it is better if it includes elves, gnomes and trolls. A long time ago we would probably have called them fairy tales.
Of course there is some overlap where fantasy enters into SF and vise versa and there are examples of writers who are difficult to put in either category, Jack Vance comes to mind.
That silly of course, the likes of Dell and HP are definitely not the cheapest of the industry and normally you pay them more exactly because you expect at least some modicum of support from them. Remember that on the bill there is actually an item where you pay for support. I expect them to hold their end of the bargain. Which means that unless they can prove somehow that the damage was done by mistreating the hardware somehow (which could either be by playing football with it or by using faulty drivers) I want them to honor my warranty.
The thing is of course that those companies often try to shirk their responsibilities. It has happened several times in my life that companies tried to tell me that the problem was my own fault and that I had therefore voided my warranty. Normally it is enough to suggest that they check (and think) again which suggests to me that they just try to see if you will fall for it and fold as soon as you complain.
And with respect to airplanes: I would LOVE to be able to pay more for legroom!! Show me which airlines actually give me that option please! The only options I see are: a) tourist class = you will have more room if you go to the bathroom or b) business class = you pay triple the price and get enough room to have two small children play in front of you (which I have seen happen) and maybe even c) first class = like b) but you pay even more and I guess that nice flight attendant will even wipe your ass for you because why else would you pay such insane amount of money? Never having flow first class I can't speak from personal experience though.
I always thought: why not take out one row of seats and divide that space between 3 or 4 other rows and offer some kind of tourist+ class which has a price 1/3 or 1/4 higher than the normal tourist class ticket? Instead I always hope I will be in time to ask for seats near the emergency exists.
But it seems I haven't been around too many "real" computer scientists. But somehow I can't see A. Tanenbaum (the only really well-known, still living, computer scientist I can think of right now that lives here in The Netherlands) doing much mathematics. I'm pretty sure his work involves mathematics, it just doesn't seem to appear much in his work.
Well, but to me at least graph theory and cryptograpy are purely mathematical that happen to be very useful for CS. Algorithm analysis is mostly mathmatical as well but at least it is completely focused on CS. Somebody else mentioned quantum computing, but that seems to be more about physics than CS.
When I think about CS I think about things like microkernels or clockless processor architectures (although the latter is partly electronics of course). So I was wondering what examples others could come up with.
Uhuh, so what do you tell them when they complain that their games have suddenly become unplayably slow?
Ah yes, they might need to install a driver of course. Well, no problem there, just install it and go. What? It didn't work? Ah you switched from ATI to nVidia, well then you first need to uninstall your ATI driver of course.
On the other hand I need to do the same on my Linux system but it's no more difficult than installing the "kmod-nvidia" package.
Definitely, it's not the easiest of things to get working yet but I'm happily using swsusp2 on mi Linux desktop for quite some time now. The problem I had was on a Windows laptop that are supposed to work 100% out of the box.. uh huh
Well I've got a brand new Dell Lattitude 620 at work and guess what? Hibernate doesn't work. This was with the OS installed by Dell. Then the company's sysadmins re-installed the laptop and it still won't work. I'm sure there is some simple solution, that's not it, but Windows definitely has it's own problems. (And this is a system with an installed OS, the manufacturer has supposedly made sure that everything works allright while Linux normally doesn't have the same advantage)
No no, you have it the wrong way around: it's YOUR definition of AI that is boring!;-)
What do most of us care about computer visions and computational linguistics, it's all just statistics ans formulas, it doesn't teach us enough about ourselves.
That's not to say it isn't interesting work but IMHO it has nothing to do with "Intelligence" (artificial or not, human vision is heavily based on pre-defined brain structures that take care of most of the filtering and pre-processing and has very little to do with being intelligent or not either). The big mistake is that somebody chose to apply the term AI to those fields of investigation anyway even though it's a complete misnomer.
Personally I think AI should be used to refer to the investigation of what makes us "Intelligent" (well, at least some of us;-), which probably includes philosophic discussions about what being intelligent actually means, and a way to recreate parts of that system.
"without the need to refer to any books or online manuals That might be true for you, maybe you've got some kind of photographic memory but for me it's 100x times easier to come back to a language that just says Map things instead of trying to remember what kind of variable %things is exactly. (NB: Had to google for the % symbol, thought it was @ for maps actually, see?)
That's silly, it would not give you any opportunity anymore to give higher notes. Imagine that you can't find any flaws in the book, according to you that means he would have to give it a 10. Then next week another book comes out that is way better in lots of aspects.... what to do now? Give it an 11?
Writing book reviews is not an exact science, you can hardly make some kind of formula and get a meaningful result, so maybe what he uses is something like this (just an example):
4 - book contains incorrect information and/or is generally badly written 5 - book is not bad but misses information in some key areas 6 - book is okay but nothing special either 7 - book is well written, does not contains any obvious mistakes, covers all key areas 8 - book is really well written, knows how to explain difficult subjects 9 - book is extremely well written, gives insight and makes complex subjects seem almost easy 10 - after reading this book you can call yourself an expert and won't need to read any more books on the subject
Well actually, that answer is really simple: 1 liter = 1 dm3 which I remember quite clearly because that was what we were taught. And at least in The Netherlands I've heard it often enough. It might not be the most used unit but we certainly use it.
That must be your reading of the word "notorious", I read is as meaning "generally known and talked of" not as "widely and unfavorably known" (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=notoriou s). Although even in the second meaning I still wouldn't see it as "name-calling".
I see 2 physicists (one of who seems to have made a living out of being contrary), one BBC science writer (we all know how trustworthy the BBC reporting is nowadays!) and one economist? Oh yeah, I'd definitely base my point of view on the information by these 4 people instead of thousands of climate scientists over the whole world.
Either one of those might be a modern-day Galileo (although he definitely wasn't an economist or writer dabbling in astronomy) but I'd rather not take any chances you know? Nothing bad would have happened if it turned out that Galileo was wrong but are you really willing to possibly bet the future of this world based on 2 books?
It cannot hurt to really try and do something about the obvious harm we are doing to our environment, so even if it turns out that all those scientists were wrong we will still have gained something in the end: a cleaner world that is a better plac to live in. That seems like a win-win situation to me.
That might depend a lot on where you live. Only a year ago here in Spain I had just bought a computer, installed Windows on it and a few days later I added some disks and changed the Gfx card. Of course it asked me to call MS.
This was late in the evening. I call... to hear that they only attend in office hours?? WTF?
Ok, so the next day I call again... and after a 20 minute wait suddenly the line goes dead.
So I call again and now I get a person on the line after 5 minutes, who listens to my story asks me something in rapid Spanish what I can't understand so I ask him if he can repeat the question... and just hangs up!!!
Fed up with all this I ask my girlfriend (who is a native Spanish speaker) to call. This time everything goes fine and Windows is re-activated after which my girlfriend starts to lecture the guy on the phone about what it means being consumer friendly and that it is actually easier to use a pirated version of Windows! The guys only response was that the hassle really is all for your own good. Suuuuure!;-)
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Well I share the same feeling as several of the others that have complained about CUPS, I've found it impossible to work with at times. On the other hand I've read a rant from a CUPS developer where he basically accused several distros of crippling CUPS by disabling or changing their default settings thereby making CUPS a lot less usable.
You do know that even in this document they're using FUD tactics, don't you. The case where they say "a Dutch court found an individual and numerous Internet service providers" was not won by them at all for example: http://constitutionalcode.blogspot.com/2005/12/sci entology-v-xs4all-supreme-court.html
Western Europe? You must be kidding. In all the companies I worked for both in The Netherlands and in Spain illegal copies were common. Some of it was blatant: "just find a key somewhere" (which seems to happen often enough at my current job in Telefonica, Spain's largest Telecom Operator) some if it was more like "we don't know how many licenses we have exactly".
I don't know what the law actually says over here but these things never come to any kind of trial. When these kind of violations are found (by a watchdog organization for example) the company gets sent a letter and the company pays up. Companies want the problem to go away as quietly as possible and they know that pointing fingers will normally just make things worse.
Well now you are just plain wrong: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200312142 10634851
That's contracts, this is licenses, there is a big difference. A license is a permission to use or copy or whatever, but the thing you got is still owned by the one who gave you the license. So as far as I know a court will be more on the author's side in that case (but just to remind you: IANAL).
No no, I definitely didn't imply anyhting like that, the whole thing is about interpretations, that's all. You are right of course that you can't cover holes in the license with words publicized outside it. But when talking about the _intent_ of a license, especially when the text of the license might open to several different and conflicting interpretations, you have to realize that a judge will take into account anything that the licensor has said publicly about his intentions.
In the case of AT&T I think it they said in their newletters that their license should be interpreted in such a way that they would never consider anything that was built on top of their OS as being somehow a "derivative" of their work, in that way laying to rest the fears of their customers that in some future AT&T could claim ownership of their code. Which is exactly the stunt SCO is trying to pull in their case vs IBM. So even though the license doesn't explicitly say anything about this and even though you could have discussion about the definition of derivative works IBM only pointed out that whatever the result of those discussions are, in the end it doesn't matter because AT&T has already explained that their license was NOT meant to cover code made by third parties.
Well the Union is smaller, that's right, but the GP mentioned Europe quite a bit of times more than EU. But if we really want to go nit-picking, he actually says the entire EU fits easily within any US state which is obviously wrong.
"but since that faq is not actually part of the GPL it is not binding on anyone's interpretation of the GPL"
IANAL but as far as I understand it this is not actually true. Public statement from the author(s) of a license will affect the decision a judge makes if it ever comes to a trial. IBM lawyers used newletters published by AT&T where they clarified certain points in their license in the SCO case to show that SCO's interpretation of the license was not the same as AT&T's. So if it ever comes down to the question "what does this sentence here actually mean?" a judge will definitely look at any statements made by the FSF.
Where the law and the text of the license are clear there won't be much discussion, but both law and licenses are not science and open for many interpretations, that's why we need judges.
I don't know what you have been smoking but Europe is actually bigger than the US.
I'm confused here, a story based in the future, high-tech gadgets far beyond our current capabilities, space ships, alien species.... isn't that what Sci-Fi _is_, basically?
Fantasy, on the other hand, is basically an alternate reality where nothing is as we know it, but it is better if it includes elves, gnomes and trolls. A long time ago we would probably have called them fairy tales.
Of course there is some overlap where fantasy enters into SF and vise versa and there are examples of writers who are difficult to put in either category, Jack Vance comes to mind.
That silly of course, the likes of Dell and HP are definitely not the cheapest of the industry and normally you pay them more exactly because you expect at least some modicum of support from them. Remember that on the bill there is actually an item where you pay for support. I expect them to hold their end of the bargain. Which means that unless they can prove somehow that the damage was done by mistreating the hardware somehow (which could either be by playing football with it or by using faulty drivers) I want them to honor my warranty.
The thing is of course that those companies often try to shirk their responsibilities. It has happened several times in my life that companies tried to tell me that the problem was my own fault and that I had therefore voided my warranty. Normally it is enough to suggest that they check (and think) again which suggests to me that they just try to see if you will fall for it and fold as soon as you complain.
And with respect to airplanes: I would LOVE to be able to pay more for legroom!! Show me which airlines actually give me that option please! The only options I see are: a) tourist class = you will have more room if you go to the bathroom or b) business class = you pay triple the price and get enough room to have two small children play in front of you (which I have seen happen) and maybe even c) first class = like b) but you pay even more and I guess that nice flight attendant will even wipe your ass for you because why else would you pay such insane amount of money? Never having flow first class I can't speak from personal experience though.
I always thought: why not take out one row of seats and divide that space between 3 or 4 other rows and offer some kind of tourist+ class which has a price 1/3 or 1/4 higher than the normal tourist class ticket? Instead I always hope I will be in time to ask for seats near the emergency exists.
"I'm sure you've heard that before."
:-)
Well actually, no
But it seems I haven't been around too many "real" computer scientists. But somehow I can't see A. Tanenbaum (the only really well-known, still living, computer scientist I can think of right now that lives here in The Netherlands) doing much mathematics. I'm pretty sure his work involves mathematics, it just doesn't seem to appear much in his work.
Well, but to me at least graph theory and cryptograpy are purely mathematical that happen to be very useful for CS. Algorithm analysis is mostly mathmatical as well but at least it is completely focused on CS. Somebody else mentioned quantum computing, but that seems to be more about physics than CS.
When I think about CS I think about things like microkernels or clockless processor architectures (although the latter is partly electronics of course). So I was wondering what examples others could come up with.
Just out of curiosity, could you give some examples of what "real" CS is?
Uhuh, so what do you tell them when they complain that their games have suddenly become unplayably slow?
Ah yes, they might need to install a driver of course. Well, no problem there, just install it and go. What? It didn't work? Ah you switched from ATI to nVidia, well then you first need to uninstall your ATI driver of course.
On the other hand I need to do the same on my Linux system but it's no more difficult than installing the "kmod-nvidia" package.
Definitely, it's not the easiest of things to get working yet but I'm happily using swsusp2 on mi Linux desktop for quite some time now. The problem I had was on a Windows laptop that are supposed to work 100% out of the box.. uh huh
Well I've got a brand new Dell Lattitude 620 at work and guess what? Hibernate doesn't work. This was with the OS installed by Dell. Then the company's sysadmins re-installed the laptop and it still won't work. I'm sure there is some simple solution, that's not it, but Windows definitely has it's own problems. (And this is a system with an installed OS, the manufacturer has supposedly made sure that everything works allright while Linux normally doesn't have the same advantage)
No no, you have it the wrong way around: it's YOUR definition of AI that is boring! ;-)
;-), which probably includes philosophic discussions about what being intelligent actually means, and a way to recreate parts of that system.
What do most of us care about computer visions and computational linguistics, it's all just statistics ans formulas, it doesn't teach us enough about ourselves.
That's not to say it isn't interesting work but IMHO it has nothing to do with "Intelligence" (artificial or not, human vision is heavily based on pre-defined brain structures that take care of most of the filtering and pre-processing and has very little to do with being intelligent or not either). The big mistake is that somebody chose to apply the term AI to those fields of investigation anyway even though it's a complete misnomer.
Personally I think AI should be used to refer to the investigation of what makes us "Intelligent" (well, at least some of us
That's silly, it would not give you any opportunity anymore to give higher notes. Imagine that you can't find any flaws in the book, according to you that means he would have to give it a 10. Then next week another book comes out that is way better in lots of aspects.... what to do now? Give it an 11?
Writing book reviews is not an exact science, you can hardly make some kind of formula and get a meaningful result, so maybe what he uses is something like this (just an example):
4 - book contains incorrect information and/or is generally badly written
5 - book is not bad but misses information in some key areas
6 - book is okay but nothing special either
7 - book is well written, does not contains any obvious mistakes, covers all key areas
8 - book is really well written, knows how to explain difficult subjects
9 - book is extremely well written, gives insight and makes complex subjects seem almost easy
10 - after reading this book you can call yourself an expert and won't need to read any more books on the subject
Well actually, that answer is really simple: 1 liter = 1 dm3 which I remember quite clearly because that was what we were taught. And at least in The Netherlands I've heard it often enough. It might not be the most used unit but we certainly use it.
That must be your reading of the word "notorious", I read is as meaning "generally known and talked of" not as "widely and unfavorably known" (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=notoriou s). Although even in the second meaning I still wouldn't see it as "name-calling".
I see 2 physicists (one of who seems to have made a living out of being contrary), one BBC science writer (we all know how trustworthy the BBC reporting is nowadays!) and one economist? Oh yeah, I'd definitely base my point of view on the information by these 4 people instead of thousands of climate scientists over the whole world.
Either one of those might be a modern-day Galileo (although he definitely wasn't an economist or writer dabbling in astronomy) but I'd rather not take any chances you know? Nothing bad would have happened if it turned out that Galileo was wrong but are you really willing to possibly bet the future of this world based on 2 books?
It cannot hurt to really try and do something about the obvious harm we are doing to our environment, so even if it turns out that all those scientists were wrong we will still have gained something in the end: a cleaner world that is a better plac to live in. That seems like a win-win situation to me.
That might depend a lot on where you live. Only a year ago here in Spain I had just bought a computer, installed Windows on it and a few days later I added some disks and changed the Gfx card. Of course it asked me to call MS.
;-)
This was late in the evening. I call... to hear that they only attend in office hours?? WTF?
Ok, so the next day I call again... and after a 20 minute wait suddenly the line goes dead.
So I call again and now I get a person on the line after 5 minutes, who listens to my story asks me something in rapid Spanish what I can't understand so I ask him if he can repeat the question... and just hangs up!!!
Fed up with all this I ask my girlfriend (who is a native Spanish speaker) to call. This time everything goes fine and Windows is re-activated after which my girlfriend starts to lecture the guy on the phone about what it means being consumer friendly and that it is actually easier to use a pirated version of Windows! The guys only response was that the hassle really is all for your own good. Suuuuure!
Like in every packaged version of Firefox in every Linux distro because it would of course conflict while the whole package + central repository idea.