But even one segment of code from an outside author, released to them under GPL, would require the release of their SW's source under the included code's GPL.
The simple solution to which is simply to remove the contributed code completely, and independently re-implement its functionality (if having that functionality is desired and/or necessary).
I had to do something similar (but for a release in the opposite direction -- from closed source to OSS) for the jSyncManager Project. The version 1.0 series was coded entirely by myself, and was only ever released as closed source software (albeit as 100% free-as-in-beer software via the web; I completed v1.0 of this project as a thesis project, and felt that getting outside help by allowing others to inspect and comment on the code might have been considered "cheating" by some). A few weeks after v1.0 was released, I was hired by IBM Canada as a software developer.
The problem then became that nasty contract provision you have to sign when you join a company like IBM: the "what's yours is ours, and what's ours is ours" agreement, which basically states that anything you develop while employed by the company, even if it is completely on your own time and uses nothing learned from your employment at the company, belongs to the company. Fortunately, I was able to list existing technologies I had developed prior to joining IBM on said contract -- they were exempt so long as I stopped working on them while employed by the company.
There was, however, significant interest in the technology within IBM, and an IBM branded version called "ManplatoSync for Java" eventually made its way to IBM's alphaWorks website. It included a significant rewrite of the GUI code, along with some new functionality, parts of which were contributed by other IBM employees. The intention was always to release the sources under the IBM Public License -- but the legal eagles who had continuing discussions (which I wasn't part of), and kept holding off on a source release (the whole discussion of which apparantly died once I was released from the company).
When I was later let go from the company, and free from their restrictions as to what I could and couldn't work on, I decided I wanted to release the jSyncManager as Open Source Software. But I couldn't just take ManplatoSync for Java and re-brand it back to the jSyncManager -- it was encumbered with IBM copyrights. I couldn't even retain functionality since jSyncManager v1.0 which I myself had written in those intervening 2.5 years, because it too was considered IBM property (nevermind the fact that I wrote it and didn't get paid one single red cent by IBM for any of it. Indeed, when I was later invited to speak on the technology at various conferences, the company forced me to use my own vacation time to do so).
At that point, I had two choices: give up and find something else to work on, or suck it up and go back to the pre-IBM sources and work from there. And that's what in the end I decided to do: I took my pre-IBM sources, made them Open Source, and then worked my ass off to re-implement all of the lost functionality (along with a lot of functionality that the IBM releases never had, like USB device support and network data synchronization), and released it all as GPL/LGPL software.
The Nessus team could very well have elected to do something similar -- just strip out any external contributions, and then work from there. The unfortunate thing about going from Openn Source to Closed Source, however, is that contributors are now forced to take the teams word for it that they stripped out any such contributions (assuming that they didn't re-assign copyright to the Nessus project when they were submitted -- something I've never asked any of my contributors to do), as you can't look at the source to see if your code is still in it (i
...and since Sony and Microsoft are involved in heavy, outlandish DRM, its unlikely any of their consoles will gain traction. Sony will sell you CD's but only if they get to corrupt your PC. And Microsoft will sell you songs that expire. Neither of these are popular features with most consumers.
I'm not terribly pleased with what Sony did with their CD's either, but I'm going to wait and see if their current attitude affects design decisions with the PS3. Sony's different divisions have often showed a shocking lack of integration in the past (I remember in the first PS2's, if you used the S-Video adapter with Sony Trinitron Wega TV's, an all (or nearly all) black screen would cause the display to blank -- something you'd think a tiny bit of testing with their own hardware would have quickly exposed), particularily with their "Computer Entertainment" division.
If the PS3 has the same limitations that the PS2 has, I don't think Sony has anything to worry about. So long as the system plays the games you buy, borrow, or rent when you put them in, they're going to do just fine. Personally, I don't need a video game console to play digital music or movies (I have an Airport Express with Airtunes, and a proper DVD player for those functions) -- I expect my console to play games. Having the media extras is a nice bonus, but is hardly the reason why anyone is running out to buy one of these systems (for now).
If music or movie playback is severely restricted on a gaming console, people simply won't use those functions, so long as they can still play games -- and if you can still play games, people will buy the systems, regardless of what Sony Music has done to some of their music CDs.
As for Microsoft -- well, I personally never cared about the Xbox. It's ultimately a boring product. I've never been terribly taken by any of the Xbox's games (IMO Halo was massively overrated -- but then again I'm not easily impressed by an FPS, and haven't been impressed by one since probably the original Doom). And so far, I don't see that the Xbox 360 is a big enough upgrade to give anyone much of a reason to care about it - DRM or no DRM. But that's just me -- to each their own.
The Xbox 360 explores new menu structures with a unique and pleasant GUI.
<sarcasm>
Yeah. After all, we know that the feature that made the Atari 2600, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Playstation/Playstation 2 such huge market smashes were the quality of their menus...
</sarcasm>
Perhaps this will mean something for the latest generation of consoles once they take on a bigger role as a general media centre -- some day. But I have a feeling that the quality of a consoles menus is hardly going to be a buying consideration for 99.999% of next generation console purchases. In the end, it's all about the games, and from what I've seen and heard about the 360 so far, the games are generally uninspiring in terms of either gameplay or graphics.
But hey, if it has nice menus, at least those MS fanboys who run out to buy one on Tuesday will have something to show their friends to try to defend their purchuse (jab jab jab:) ).
A few years ago, the Canadian Reform Party (which later renamed themselves to the Alliance Party) were in talks to merge with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. After days of public discussions as to what to call the new party, they decided to call themselves the Canadian Reform Alliance Party. It wasn't until after the final vote for this name passsed that someone stood up to inform everyone that the abbreviation was CRAP.
Of course, the oblig. Red Dwarf quote comes to mind here:
RIMMER: Erm, I think we're all beginning to lose sight of the real issue
here, which is: what are we going to call ourselves? Erm, and I think
it comes down to a choice between "The League Against Salivating
Monsters" or, my own personal preference, which is "The Committee for
the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their
Rehabilitation Into Society." Erm, one drawback with that -- the
abbreviation is "CLITORIS."
Balloons require two things to work: they need to be bouyant within some sort of gas, and they need external pressure to prevent them from expanding to the point of bursting.
You can't send a balloon into space, as there is no medium outside the atmosphere to keep them bouyant. Here is a simple example you can test. Get a bucket of water and a cork. Pull the cork to the bottom of the bucket, and let it go.
Now what does the cork do? It floats to the top of the water line. However, it doesn't launch itself into the air above the bucket and keep going up to the ceiling or sky. In this case, the cork is less dense than the initial surrrounding medium (water), but is more dense than the air.
A baloon would be no different. It would be less dense than the air (to a certain point at least), but is more dense than space, so like the cork in the bucket, it is never going to leave the atmosphere.
All of this ignores the other important factor which makes your plan impractical, and that is that baloons require external pressure to keep them from bursting. A gas typically attempts to fill the largest posssible space it can, and the pressure inside a baloon is typically relatively high (compared to the atmosphere, that is). Indeed, the pressure is typically more than enough to cause the baloon to explode, if it weren't for the pressure of the external atmosphere offsetting the pressure from inside the balloon.
Another experiment: get a party baloon and blow it up. Take it to a swimming pool, put on a mask or goggles, and dive with your baloon down to about 3M. Take a look at the balloon -- the pressure of the outside "atmosphere" (the water) will cause the baloon to shrink. The volume of air inside it hasn't changed at all.
If you have acccess to a scuba tank, you can also do this experiment in reverse. Take a flat baloon down to the 3M mark, and fill it with air until it looks like a normal balloon (you'll probably want to use the tank for this -- blowing up a balloon underwater with your lungs isn't an easy task). Now let it go. It will float upwards, and will most probably blow up once it hits the surface (and if it's some sort of super-strong balloon, it will have doubled in volume by the time it hits the surface).
Balloons just don't work in space -- they require an atmosphere both in which to float in, and to keep them intact. Space provides neither facility.
Ignoring for a moment that we need the oxygen portion here on earth, how would you propose to get the CO2 into space in the first place?
You can't just build a giant smoke-stack to pump it up there, as the earths gravitational well is just going to pick it all back up again. So then what? Load a ton or two at a time into rockets, blast them beyond the moon, and then leave them there? That in and of itself is a massive waste of energy and resources just to build and launch all those rockets, and even then you're barely putting a dent into the atmospheric CO2.
Yaz.
Interesting for kernel performance comparisons.
on
Debian GNU/Solaris
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If they can keep virtually everything outside the kernel consistent with Debian, and replace only the kernel and drivers with Solaris versions, this would prove to be an interesting system for benchmarking and contrasting the two kernels.
As it is right now, you can benchmark entire systems, but it is difficult to do any meaningful kernel benchmarks.
If there is a significant difference in any particular area in either direction, I can forsee future server administrators choosing their kernel based on how well it performs in certain tasks. Perhaps the Linux kernels memory management is better, but the Solaris kernel's SMP scales better. Now you don't have to worry about changing your user or administrative environment, package management tools, or applications -- you can run the same on both, and just change the kernel architecture underneath in order to gain a benefit in an area important to you.
Heck, I can forsee a day when what kernel you want to use is queried as part of the install process, and where you might have a mix of machines that all appear to be running Debian, but which may be using different kernels based on the needs of the system.
We have competing web browsers that (generally) conform to the same interface standards (in terms of HTML rendering) -- why not have a choice in kernels, without having to sacrifice your user and administrative environment (or Open Source ideals)?
I'm at somewhat of a loss myself. I've never had any problems with Q2DX enabled -- no kernel panics, no video corruption.
I only have two guesses as to what is going on here:
Some models of Macs, and/or Mac video cards, have problems when running in Q2DX mode, but not all of them, or
Some important Apple or third-party software (like the Pro apps, or MS Office, or Photoshop or the like) has serious issues when Q2DX is enabled.
Quartz Debug still claims that it has enabled Q2DX (when you run it and turn Q2DX on) -- but this was the case for 10.4.2 as well, so I'm not sure what has actually changed with this update in this area.
Perhaps not. Part of the Acid2 test is to test various positioning mechanisms. Some are static, some are more relative. It may just be that the elements which were left behind were the static elements.
AFAIK, Acid2 isn't really designed with scrolling in mind. I'm surprised you're able to scroll the page at all.
By simply brandishing a firearm, you can convince him that he risks death.
Spoken just like someone with military experience, but no experience with crimes against women.
I have military experience myself, and yes -- a gun is the best offensive/defensive weapon for an enemy which you know is there, and who is at a suitable distance. But crimes against women don't typically work that way.
Predators skulk in the dark, and often grab from behind in a manner suitable to restrict the victims movements. What use is a gun now? None what-so-ever. If a woman tries to pull a gun out of a handbag or a holster on a well-built man who has grabbed her from behind, he is going to be able to very easily restrict her ability to point it at him, and/or remove the weapon from her possession (where the victim now risks being injured or killed by her own weapon).
Criminal predators use a different method of attack from what occurs on a military combat zone, and it's one where a gun is not only significantly less useful, but where it could in fact increase your chance of fatality. In such a situation, self defence using your own body is more important as a way of removing the attackers constraint upon you, after which a gun can come into play as a way of ensuring your ability to escape -- but a gun alone isn't going to help if someone grabs you from behind, pinning your arms and covering your mouth. In such a case, if you did somehow manage to get the gun out (without freing yourself from their grasp), assuming there is a significant strength differential (big man vs. small woman), they're going to see this, will be able to easily wrench the weapon from your hand, making it useless for self defence (and perhaps giving them a tool they didn't have before to harm you with, or perhaps almost as bad, a tool they can harm others with in the future).
Yeah, if someone was threatening me from 2 - 3 metres away (and they didn't have a gun drawn already...), a gun is the best means of discouraging their course of action. But that scenario doesn't play out sufficiently often enough for the average victim of violent crime to make carrying a gun worth their while.
My guess would be they might be using Intel's compiler (are they still calling it Proton?).
While I was working at IBM a couple of years back, that was the compiler of choice for the project I was working on (at least for when compiling for Windows), as it was found to have a significant performance advantage over any of Microsoft's compilers. It would make sense that Microsoft would see a similar performance advantage in their products.
I'd personally use Quicktime Broadcaster and the Darwin Streaming Server all the way. You already have the hardware for it, both are completely free (as in beer, although DSS is also free as in speech), and you have a wide selection of compressors and packetizers.
Yes, I've heard the Windows users cry "but we don't want to use Quicktime!". My suggestion would be not to force them to by using a standard packetizer and compressor. If quality is your goal, use H.264 for both -- Mac and Linux users can view such streams easily, and Windows users only need either Quicktime or VLC. Or, if you want to sacrifice some quality, use standard MPEG-4 for both. Quicktime Broadcaster will happily handle such formats, and everyone should be able to play them with whatever player they want.
So broadcast using the free Quicktime solutions, but use a standard format, and everyone can be made happy.
Remember that Americans (as in those born and educated in America) weren't responsible for the space feats of the 1960s. Those were the work of German engineers captured after WWII.
Wow, talk about oversimplification. Reality is significantly more complex.
German engineers played a role, but there was a whole lot more to putting man in space (and eventually on the moon) than straight rocketry, which is what most of the German engineers were specialists in. Indeed, a significant number of engineers on the Mercury, Apollo, and Shuttle programs were Canadians displaced after the collapse of the Avro Arrow program.
And let us also not forget about the contributions of another import to the US (this time from China), Tsien Hsue-shen.
All of which supports your initial statement, of course. However, attributing those feats solely to German engineers is an absurd oversimplification -- the talent that made the US's space successes possible were from a variety of countries.
Are these "features" of all CF bulbs, or is the brand I've been buying really crummy?
I've recently converted my apartment to CF bulbs as well, and I've noticed mixed results in this regard. The Noma 60W equivalent bulbs in my hall and bedroom lighting fixtures don't exhibit this problem -- or if they do, the brightness differential is so minimal that I don't notice. They come on immediately and are at full brightness immediately (or at least as fast as I can perceive).
I also have a dimmable 100W equivalent CF bulb in the fixture in my dining room. It's a large General Electric bulb (and by far the most expensive light bulb I've ever purchased...), and it does exhibit this problem. It takes several minutes to warm up to full brilliance. However, a (non-dimmable) 100W equivalent bulb in my bedroom lamp from Noma is at perceptably full brilliance immediately upon switching it on.
Finally, I have four vanity globe bulbs in my bathroom. They are 40W equivalent bulbs from a company called "Globe", and upon turning them on they exhibit flicker and an obvious warm-up time. However, their warm-up is fairly rapid -- they seem to come on at about 50% brilliance, but within a second or so are up to 90% or so (going purely by perception -- I don't have the equipment to actually measure this). Within the next few minutes they'll be up to 100%.
There are a number of other lights here which have been converted to CF, but the above covers all the bulb manufacturers and types I have installed here. I've learned to deal with the warm-up issue in the fixtures where it's noticeable, and can live with these minor issues.
If you have such bulbs in places where safety is a concern however, you might want to consider switching brands.
And believe it or not, the majority of iPod owners are PC users.
I certainly know it to be true -- why imply I might not?
The old system worked perfectly well for this, as previous generations of iPod could handle either connection type. So everybody was happy.
Maybe, instead of griping about apple dropping a seldom-used port on their iPod in order to make it smaller
There is no seperate physical port for USB vs Firewire on any of the iPods with dock connector. It's not an issue of having two plugs -- previous generations of iPod had the necessary circuitry within a single port to handle either connection type. So we're not talking about Apple dropping a physical port on the unit to make it smaller -- the port is the same size now that it has been for the last several iPod generations.
You know, 15 years ago or so I was routinely pointing out to writers like Mr. Dvorak how badly they were skewed towards writing about Microsofft and Windows, because it was what they were running, but the complaint fell on deaf ears.
So for all of these years, these "tech writers" have been helping to prop up Microsoft by writing puff pieces about their products, and have been able to make a living by doing so. But now that these same tech writers see a newer batch of tech writers which are moe interested in what Apple does than what Microsoft does, they just can't take it.
Well Mr. Dvorak (and your ilk), suck it up. You're the pot that calls the kettle black, and thus I have no sympathy for your position.
I can think of one very rational reason -- Macs can booth from a Firewire-based iPod, but can't from a USB-based iPod.
This has me a bit cheesed off, as I've used some space on my 3G iPod to install a minimal Tiger installation. I'm a road warrior, and if something were to go wrong with my PowerBook's hard drive while on the road, being able to boot off the iPod to do diagnostics and run utilities is a huge boon. It saved my bacon once when my PowerBooks hard drive decided it was time to stop working, and I had to quickly try to back-up the data I had most recently been working on.
I won't be able to do that with a 5G iPod now that it no longer supports Firewire. I suppose if I decide to upgrade to a 5G (or future) iPod that I'll just have to keep my 3G iPod around for booting from in emergency situations.
And on that note, there's nothing wrong with hiring someone who works for a company to write an editorial about issues affecting that company's industry. What's the problem with giving the oft-bullied pro-Microsoft person a chance to give an opinion?
I disagree. First off, if ZDNet were to base their hiring decisions based on who is getting bullied, then they should also have on staff writers who work for Real, Netscape, Novell, IBM, and a pile of other companies that Microsoft has bullied over the years. Besides which, it isn't as if the organization doesn't already have a long history of employing people who are pro-Microsoft.
Secondly, we have no way of seperating out what parts (if any) of Mr. Carrol's writings are what he truly believes, or what he thinks might advance his career at Microsoft. Do you think for one moment he would ever in a million years pen anything along the lines of what one might see over at the Mini-Microsoft blog?
Mr. Carrol is good for one thing, and that is writing MS puff pieces. We, as readers, can't determine if the content are indeed his own personal thoughts, if they're what Microsoft is paying him to say, or if he just thinks he might get ahead with his employer for saying them. And that makes it bad journalism and lacking in any semblance of integrity.
Having a pro-Microsoft advocate writing for them isn't the problem. The problem is when that advocate also works for and is paid by Microsoft. ZDNet has had a lot of MS-shills on staff over the years -- but at least they didn't also work for Microsoft (unless some of the rumours are true, and some people were getting paid under the table...).
It's worth noting that John Carrol is a Microsoft employee, who also writes for ZDNet. The journalistic integrity here is absolutely zero.
Now I don't blame him for his obvious slant. He's paid by Microsoft. Hell, he probably wants to think that his work, and the work of his co-workers is innovative. Who doesn't?
Personally, the fact that ZDNet brought him aboard as a writer is where the real problem lies. I remember at one time how ZDNet used to try to defend themselves against accusations of being MS-shills; but now they seem to embrace it whole-heartedly.
So, coming from this source -- can anybody be surprised by the conclusion? It's worth just what we've paid for it: absolutely nothing.
I have to admit, I do wonder somewhat if todays youth is at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of computing.
I was fortunate. I grew up in the generation where having a computer in your home was possible, with devices like the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20 (or 64) or original IBM PC (and later PC XT) weren't completely outside the purchasing ability of your typical middle-class income family.
For this, I count myself lucky. The level of complexity was significantly lower in some regards (the hardware and software didn't do anywhere near as much as a system can do today), however to actually use those systems you typically had to get to know the overall system better.
Today, if you can move a pointing device, you can use a computer. This is a huge step forward in usability and productivity over the old days, but it can also seductively mask the overall complexity inherent in the system. You don't need to know how to POKE a memory location to change the colour of your display's background -- a few simple clicks will do it for you.
By also having more limited possibilities way-back-when, it was somewhat easier to play around with the system, because there were a certain set of delineations as to what was and wasn't possible. Advances in both raw processing power and standard system features/capabilities means that there are so many more facets that jump at you at once, I can imagine it would be hard to figure out where to start just writing a basic program -- there is a huge explosion of options now which simply didn't exist back then. We didn't have half a dozen (or more) APIs per platform to do something, so one didn't have to waste a lot of time trying to figure out which API is best for the task at hand. You didn't have a choice, so you used what was available. And things like audio and video were severely limited by the hardwares capabilities.
There is also the fact that because storage is now cheap, and applications are expected to be more complicated, that the barriers to entry in terms of playing with source code have risen quite a bit. Gone are the days where, because storage was so expensive, you'd buy a book or a magazine with source code listings in it. I remember typing some of these things in, and playing around with them while I was doing so. It was very educational. But such facilities don't really exist today. Magazines can cheaply include a CD-ROM, and the most common platform out there doesn't have any sort of built-in interpreter that you can just type instructions into and play around with like the old systems did (even if it was BASIC).
Now as a user, I dont want to go back to those days. They're dead and gone for a good reason. But just as we give kids toy hammers and cars to play with to grasp certain concepts before we give them a real hammer or let them drive a real car, we don't seem to have a similar sort of system for learning computer software development. We seem to lack any good, common development environments for the young to learn programming concepts.
I started coding when I was 10 -- a relatively common age for my generation. But this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen anymore.
Now on the other side of things, todays 10 year old is more savvy in the way of telecommunications. They can do research on topics quickly and easily on the Internet, whereas the ability to do so when I was 10 simply didn't exist. So I don't think it's fair to say that todays youth are less tech savvy in general -- they have skills which we didn't (and many of whom in my generation still don't) possess. But I do think they are at a certain disadvantage when it comes to programming, if only because the barriers to entry have risen substantially (not to mention the fact that there are so many other cool distractions now that didn't exist back then).
You see, on the Mac, 64MB of VRAM is considered "ideal" for Quartz 2D Extreme, so the Windows Vista requirements are still 4 times higher.
Look, you came up with an idiotic comparison. And now you're trying to make an uneducated extrapolation that Vista's effects will even work in 64MB of VRAM, when the very site you quote only mentions 128MB VRAM and 256MB VRAM. Indeed, to quote from the very first paragraph:
A 128 megabyte display card will be good, and a 256 megabyte or better display card will be ideal.
So no, 128MB isn't listed as "better", only as "good". And anyone who has dealt with Microsoft for any length of time knows that this can typically be translated as meaning "anything less is going to suck".
You can't go around saying "people shouldn't moan about Vista's requirements -- the Mac has high requirements as well!" when, in actual fact, Apple's requirements are a quarter of what is currently known about Vista's requirements in the video processing capabilities you yourself decided to compare.
(And I'm not even going to get into the fact that Vista is still more than a year away, and that what we currently know about it's minimum requirements could very well go up during that time...the fact that you're comparing vaporware to released software that achieves the same ends with less hardware is telling in and of itself).
Right. But you just somehow know that Vista will need 500W for that display card.
Sigh...welcome to Reading Comprehension 101.
I didn't make any suggestion that Vista needs a 500W power supply. Others have (including the/. article summary), but I made no such suggestion. So don't attribute it to me.
However, you've set-up a fine strawman, so far be it for me to prevent you from knocking it down.
Yeah, like running some OS for which IE isn't available, like Linux, FreeBSD, or OS/2. Or running one for which the IE port is ages old and runs like completely and total crap (Mac OS X).
After all, we all know that people who run these OS's only do so because of irrational hatred for Microsoft, as every other rational person chooses their OS based on the fact that IE is available for it.
(I hope MS is paying these "analysts" well to make such boneheaded statements...).
There have been a number of posts in recent weeks that have been all/cry/moan/sob about Vista's requirements.
High computing requirements are a fact of life when you have an operating system that has a fully abstracted graphics layer (OS X comes to mind). No doubt Vista will be "borrowing" the quartz architecture. From Apple's site "Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and later, or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required."
Are you high? Can you not see the difference between a video card with 16MB VRAM versus 256MB VRAM? That's what Microsoft is suggesting you need to use Aero and Glass. Apple's Quartz Extreme only requires 64MB VRAM.
Want to know why people are moaning about Vista's requirements? Because Microsoft is requiring users to have four times the video memory to do what a Macintosh can do today.
And to try to make this post somewhat on-topic, my PowerBook does Quartz 2D Extreme with not only 64MB of VRAM, but also only uses a 65W power supply. And that drives the video display as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple solution to which is simply to remove the contributed code completely, and independently re-implement its functionality (if having that functionality is desired and/or necessary).
I had to do something similar (but for a release in the opposite direction -- from closed source to OSS) for the jSyncManager Project. The version 1.0 series was coded entirely by myself, and was only ever released as closed source software (albeit as 100% free-as-in-beer software via the web; I completed v1.0 of this project as a thesis project, and felt that getting outside help by allowing others to inspect and comment on the code might have been considered "cheating" by some). A few weeks after v1.0 was released, I was hired by IBM Canada as a software developer.
The problem then became that nasty contract provision you have to sign when you join a company like IBM: the "what's yours is ours, and what's ours is ours" agreement, which basically states that anything you develop while employed by the company, even if it is completely on your own time and uses nothing learned from your employment at the company, belongs to the company. Fortunately, I was able to list existing technologies I had developed prior to joining IBM on said contract -- they were exempt so long as I stopped working on them while employed by the company.
There was, however, significant interest in the technology within IBM, and an IBM branded version called "ManplatoSync for Java" eventually made its way to IBM's alphaWorks website. It included a significant rewrite of the GUI code, along with some new functionality, parts of which were contributed by other IBM employees. The intention was always to release the sources under the IBM Public License -- but the legal eagles who had continuing discussions (which I wasn't part of), and kept holding off on a source release (the whole discussion of which apparantly died once I was released from the company).
When I was later let go from the company, and free from their restrictions as to what I could and couldn't work on, I decided I wanted to release the jSyncManager as Open Source Software. But I couldn't just take ManplatoSync for Java and re-brand it back to the jSyncManager -- it was encumbered with IBM copyrights. I couldn't even retain functionality since jSyncManager v1.0 which I myself had written in those intervening 2.5 years, because it too was considered IBM property (nevermind the fact that I wrote it and didn't get paid one single red cent by IBM for any of it. Indeed, when I was later invited to speak on the technology at various conferences, the company forced me to use my own vacation time to do so).
At that point, I had two choices: give up and find something else to work on, or suck it up and go back to the pre-IBM sources and work from there. And that's what in the end I decided to do: I took my pre-IBM sources, made them Open Source, and then worked my ass off to re-implement all of the lost functionality (along with a lot of functionality that the IBM releases never had, like USB device support and network data synchronization), and released it all as GPL/LGPL software.
The Nessus team could very well have elected to do something similar -- just strip out any external contributions, and then work from there. The unfortunate thing about going from Openn Source to Closed Source, however, is that contributors are now forced to take the teams word for it that they stripped out any such contributions (assuming that they didn't re-assign copyright to the Nessus project when they were submitted -- something I've never asked any of my contributors to do), as you can't look at the source to see if your code is still in it (i
I'm not terribly pleased with what Sony did with their CD's either, but I'm going to wait and see if their current attitude affects design decisions with the PS3. Sony's different divisions have often showed a shocking lack of integration in the past (I remember in the first PS2's, if you used the S-Video adapter with Sony Trinitron Wega TV's, an all (or nearly all) black screen would cause the display to blank -- something you'd think a tiny bit of testing with their own hardware would have quickly exposed), particularily with their "Computer Entertainment" division.
If the PS3 has the same limitations that the PS2 has, I don't think Sony has anything to worry about. So long as the system plays the games you buy, borrow, or rent when you put them in, they're going to do just fine. Personally, I don't need a video game console to play digital music or movies (I have an Airport Express with Airtunes, and a proper DVD player for those functions) -- I expect my console to play games. Having the media extras is a nice bonus, but is hardly the reason why anyone is running out to buy one of these systems (for now).
If music or movie playback is severely restricted on a gaming console, people simply won't use those functions, so long as they can still play games -- and if you can still play games, people will buy the systems, regardless of what Sony Music has done to some of their music CDs.
As for Microsoft -- well, I personally never cared about the Xbox. It's ultimately a boring product. I've never been terribly taken by any of the Xbox's games (IMO Halo was massively overrated -- but then again I'm not easily impressed by an FPS, and haven't been impressed by one since probably the original Doom). And so far, I don't see that the Xbox 360 is a big enough upgrade to give anyone much of a reason to care about it - DRM or no DRM. But that's just me -- to each their own.
Yaz.
<sarcasm>
Yeah. After all, we know that the feature that made the Atari 2600, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Playstation/Playstation 2 such huge market smashes were the quality of their menus...
</sarcasm>
Perhaps this will mean something for the latest generation of consoles once they take on a bigger role as a general media centre -- some day. But I have a feeling that the quality of a consoles menus is hardly going to be a buying consideration for 99.999% of next generation console purchases. In the end, it's all about the games, and from what I've seen and heard about the 360 so far, the games are generally uninspiring in terms of either gameplay or graphics.
But hey, if it has nice menus, at least those MS fanboys who run out to buy one on Tuesday will have something to show their friends to try to defend their purchuse (jab jab jab :) ).
Yaz.
A few years ago, the Canadian Reform Party (which later renamed themselves to the Alliance Party) were in talks to merge with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. After days of public discussions as to what to call the new party, they decided to call themselves the Canadian Reform Alliance Party. It wasn't until after the final vote for this name passsed that someone stood up to inform everyone that the abbreviation was CRAP.
Of course, the oblig. Red Dwarf quote comes to mind here:
Yaz.
Balloons require two things to work: they need to be bouyant within some sort of gas, and they need external pressure to prevent them from expanding to the point of bursting.
You can't send a balloon into space, as there is no medium outside the atmosphere to keep them bouyant. Here is a simple example you can test. Get a bucket of water and a cork. Pull the cork to the bottom of the bucket, and let it go.
Now what does the cork do? It floats to the top of the water line. However, it doesn't launch itself into the air above the bucket and keep going up to the ceiling or sky. In this case, the cork is less dense than the initial surrrounding medium (water), but is more dense than the air.
A baloon would be no different. It would be less dense than the air (to a certain point at least), but is more dense than space, so like the cork in the bucket, it is never going to leave the atmosphere.
All of this ignores the other important factor which makes your plan impractical, and that is that baloons require external pressure to keep them from bursting. A gas typically attempts to fill the largest posssible space it can, and the pressure inside a baloon is typically relatively high (compared to the atmosphere, that is). Indeed, the pressure is typically more than enough to cause the baloon to explode, if it weren't for the pressure of the external atmosphere offsetting the pressure from inside the balloon.
Another experiment: get a party baloon and blow it up. Take it to a swimming pool, put on a mask or goggles, and dive with your baloon down to about 3M. Take a look at the balloon -- the pressure of the outside "atmosphere" (the water) will cause the baloon to shrink. The volume of air inside it hasn't changed at all.
If you have acccess to a scuba tank, you can also do this experiment in reverse. Take a flat baloon down to the 3M mark, and fill it with air until it looks like a normal balloon (you'll probably want to use the tank for this -- blowing up a balloon underwater with your lungs isn't an easy task). Now let it go. It will float upwards, and will most probably blow up once it hits the surface (and if it's some sort of super-strong balloon, it will have doubled in volume by the time it hits the surface).
Balloons just don't work in space -- they require an atmosphere both in which to float in, and to keep them intact. Space provides neither facility.
Yaz.
Ignoring for a moment that we need the oxygen portion here on earth, how would you propose to get the CO2 into space in the first place?
You can't just build a giant smoke-stack to pump it up there, as the earths gravitational well is just going to pick it all back up again. So then what? Load a ton or two at a time into rockets, blast them beyond the moon, and then leave them there? That in and of itself is a massive waste of energy and resources just to build and launch all those rockets, and even then you're barely putting a dent into the atmospheric CO2.
Yaz.
If they can keep virtually everything outside the kernel consistent with Debian, and replace only the kernel and drivers with Solaris versions, this would prove to be an interesting system for benchmarking and contrasting the two kernels.
As it is right now, you can benchmark entire systems, but it is difficult to do any meaningful kernel benchmarks.
If there is a significant difference in any particular area in either direction, I can forsee future server administrators choosing their kernel based on how well it performs in certain tasks. Perhaps the Linux kernels memory management is better, but the Solaris kernel's SMP scales better. Now you don't have to worry about changing your user or administrative environment, package management tools, or applications -- you can run the same on both, and just change the kernel architecture underneath in order to gain a benefit in an area important to you.
Heck, I can forsee a day when what kernel you want to use is queried as part of the install process, and where you might have a mix of machines that all appear to be running Debian, but which may be using different kernels based on the needs of the system.
We have competing web browsers that (generally) conform to the same interface standards (in terms of HTML rendering) -- why not have a choice in kernels, without having to sacrifice your user and administrative environment (or Open Source ideals)?
Yaz.
I'm at somewhat of a loss myself. I've never had any problems with Q2DX enabled -- no kernel panics, no video corruption.
I only have two guesses as to what is going on here:
Quartz Debug still claims that it has enabled Q2DX (when you run it and turn Q2DX on) -- but this was the case for 10.4.2 as well, so I'm not sure what has actually changed with this update in this area.
Yaz.
Perhaps not. Part of the Acid2 test is to test various positioning mechanisms. Some are static, some are more relative. It may just be that the elements which were left behind were the static elements.
AFAIK, Acid2 isn't really designed with scrolling in mind. I'm surprised you're able to scroll the page at all.
Yaz.
Spoken just like someone with military experience, but no experience with crimes against women.
I have military experience myself, and yes -- a gun is the best offensive/defensive weapon for an enemy which you know is there, and who is at a suitable distance. But crimes against women don't typically work that way.
Predators skulk in the dark, and often grab from behind in a manner suitable to restrict the victims movements. What use is a gun now? None what-so-ever. If a woman tries to pull a gun out of a handbag or a holster on a well-built man who has grabbed her from behind, he is going to be able to very easily restrict her ability to point it at him, and/or remove the weapon from her possession (where the victim now risks being injured or killed by her own weapon).
Criminal predators use a different method of attack from what occurs on a military combat zone, and it's one where a gun is not only significantly less useful, but where it could in fact increase your chance of fatality. In such a situation, self defence using your own body is more important as a way of removing the attackers constraint upon you, after which a gun can come into play as a way of ensuring your ability to escape -- but a gun alone isn't going to help if someone grabs you from behind, pinning your arms and covering your mouth. In such a case, if you did somehow manage to get the gun out (without freing yourself from their grasp), assuming there is a significant strength differential (big man vs. small woman), they're going to see this, will be able to easily wrench the weapon from your hand, making it useless for self defence (and perhaps giving them a tool they didn't have before to harm you with, or perhaps almost as bad, a tool they can harm others with in the future).
Yeah, if someone was threatening me from 2 - 3 metres away (and they didn't have a gun drawn already...), a gun is the best means of discouraging their course of action. But that scenario doesn't play out sufficiently often enough for the average victim of violent crime to make carrying a gun worth their while.
Yaz.
My guess would be they might be using Intel's compiler (are they still calling it Proton?).
While I was working at IBM a couple of years back, that was the compiler of choice for the project I was working on (at least for when compiling for Windows), as it was found to have a significant performance advantage over any of Microsoft's compilers. It would make sense that Microsoft would see a similar performance advantage in their products.
Yaz.
I'd personally use Quicktime Broadcaster and the Darwin Streaming Server all the way. You already have the hardware for it, both are completely free (as in beer, although DSS is also free as in speech), and you have a wide selection of compressors and packetizers.
Yes, I've heard the Windows users cry "but we don't want to use Quicktime!". My suggestion would be not to force them to by using a standard packetizer and compressor. If quality is your goal, use H.264 for both -- Mac and Linux users can view such streams easily, and Windows users only need either Quicktime or VLC. Or, if you want to sacrifice some quality, use standard MPEG-4 for both. Quicktime Broadcaster will happily handle such formats, and everyone should be able to play them with whatever player they want.
So broadcast using the free Quicktime solutions, but use a standard format, and everyone can be made happy.
Yaz.
...but then again, it's a Mac program, and you can't be a tech writer and like something Apple has produced unless you're biased.
Yaz.
Wow, talk about oversimplification. Reality is significantly more complex.
German engineers played a role, but there was a whole lot more to putting man in space (and eventually on the moon) than straight rocketry, which is what most of the German engineers were specialists in. Indeed, a significant number of engineers on the Mercury, Apollo, and Shuttle programs were Canadians displaced after the collapse of the Avro Arrow program.
And let us also not forget about the contributions of another import to the US (this time from China), Tsien Hsue-shen.
All of which supports your initial statement, of course. However, attributing those feats solely to German engineers is an absurd oversimplification -- the talent that made the US's space successes possible were from a variety of countries.
Yaz.
I've recently converted my apartment to CF bulbs as well, and I've noticed mixed results in this regard. The Noma 60W equivalent bulbs in my hall and bedroom lighting fixtures don't exhibit this problem -- or if they do, the brightness differential is so minimal that I don't notice. They come on immediately and are at full brightness immediately (or at least as fast as I can perceive).
I also have a dimmable 100W equivalent CF bulb in the fixture in my dining room. It's a large General Electric bulb (and by far the most expensive light bulb I've ever purchased...), and it does exhibit this problem. It takes several minutes to warm up to full brilliance. However, a (non-dimmable) 100W equivalent bulb in my bedroom lamp from Noma is at perceptably full brilliance immediately upon switching it on.
Finally, I have four vanity globe bulbs in my bathroom. They are 40W equivalent bulbs from a company called "Globe", and upon turning them on they exhibit flicker and an obvious warm-up time. However, their warm-up is fairly rapid -- they seem to come on at about 50% brilliance, but within a second or so are up to 90% or so (going purely by perception -- I don't have the equipment to actually measure this). Within the next few minutes they'll be up to 100%.
There are a number of other lights here which have been converted to CF, but the above covers all the bulb manufacturers and types I have installed here. I've learned to deal with the warm-up issue in the fixtures where it's noticeable, and can live with these minor issues.
If you have such bulbs in places where safety is a concern however, you might want to consider switching brands.
Yaz.
I certainly know it to be true -- why imply I might not?
The old system worked perfectly well for this, as previous generations of iPod could handle either connection type. So everybody was happy.
There is no seperate physical port for USB vs Firewire on any of the iPods with dock connector. It's not an issue of having two plugs -- previous generations of iPod had the necessary circuitry within a single port to handle either connection type. So we're not talking about Apple dropping a physical port on the unit to make it smaller -- the port is the same size now that it has been for the last several iPod generations.
Yaz.
You know, 15 years ago or so I was routinely pointing out to writers like Mr. Dvorak how badly they were skewed towards writing about Microsofft and Windows, because it was what they were running, but the complaint fell on deaf ears.
So for all of these years, these "tech writers" have been helping to prop up Microsoft by writing puff pieces about their products, and have been able to make a living by doing so. But now that these same tech writers see a newer batch of tech writers which are moe interested in what Apple does than what Microsoft does, they just can't take it.
Well Mr. Dvorak (and your ilk), suck it up. You're the pot that calls the kettle black, and thus I have no sympathy for your position.
Yaz.
I can think of one very rational reason -- Macs can booth from a Firewire-based iPod, but can't from a USB-based iPod.
This has me a bit cheesed off, as I've used some space on my 3G iPod to install a minimal Tiger installation. I'm a road warrior, and if something were to go wrong with my PowerBook's hard drive while on the road, being able to boot off the iPod to do diagnostics and run utilities is a huge boon. It saved my bacon once when my PowerBooks hard drive decided it was time to stop working, and I had to quickly try to back-up the data I had most recently been working on.
I won't be able to do that with a 5G iPod now that it no longer supports Firewire. I suppose if I decide to upgrade to a 5G (or future) iPod that I'll just have to keep my 3G iPod around for booting from in emergency situations.
Yaz.
I disagree. First off, if ZDNet were to base their hiring decisions based on who is getting bullied, then they should also have on staff writers who work for Real, Netscape, Novell, IBM, and a pile of other companies that Microsoft has bullied over the years. Besides which, it isn't as if the organization doesn't already have a long history of employing people who are pro-Microsoft.
Secondly, we have no way of seperating out what parts (if any) of Mr. Carrol's writings are what he truly believes, or what he thinks might advance his career at Microsoft. Do you think for one moment he would ever in a million years pen anything along the lines of what one might see over at the Mini-Microsoft blog?
Mr. Carrol is good for one thing, and that is writing MS puff pieces. We, as readers, can't determine if the content are indeed his own personal thoughts, if they're what Microsoft is paying him to say, or if he just thinks he might get ahead with his employer for saying them. And that makes it bad journalism and lacking in any semblance of integrity.
Having a pro-Microsoft advocate writing for them isn't the problem. The problem is when that advocate also works for and is paid by Microsoft. ZDNet has had a lot of MS-shills on staff over the years -- but at least they didn't also work for Microsoft (unless some of the rumours are true, and some people were getting paid under the table...).
Yaz.
It's worth noting that John Carrol is a Microsoft employee, who also writes for ZDNet. The journalistic integrity here is absolutely zero.
Now I don't blame him for his obvious slant. He's paid by Microsoft. Hell, he probably wants to think that his work, and the work of his co-workers is innovative. Who doesn't?
Personally, the fact that ZDNet brought him aboard as a writer is where the real problem lies. I remember at one time how ZDNet used to try to defend themselves against accusations of being MS-shills; but now they seem to embrace it whole-heartedly.
So, coming from this source -- can anybody be surprised by the conclusion? It's worth just what we've paid for it: absolutely nothing.
Yaz.
I have to admit, I do wonder somewhat if todays youth is at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of computing.
I was fortunate. I grew up in the generation where having a computer in your home was possible, with devices like the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20 (or 64) or original IBM PC (and later PC XT) weren't completely outside the purchasing ability of your typical middle-class income family.
For this, I count myself lucky. The level of complexity was significantly lower in some regards (the hardware and software didn't do anywhere near as much as a system can do today), however to actually use those systems you typically had to get to know the overall system better.
Today, if you can move a pointing device, you can use a computer. This is a huge step forward in usability and productivity over the old days, but it can also seductively mask the overall complexity inherent in the system. You don't need to know how to POKE a memory location to change the colour of your display's background -- a few simple clicks will do it for you.
By also having more limited possibilities way-back-when, it was somewhat easier to play around with the system, because there were a certain set of delineations as to what was and wasn't possible. Advances in both raw processing power and standard system features/capabilities means that there are so many more facets that jump at you at once, I can imagine it would be hard to figure out where to start just writing a basic program -- there is a huge explosion of options now which simply didn't exist back then. We didn't have half a dozen (or more) APIs per platform to do something, so one didn't have to waste a lot of time trying to figure out which API is best for the task at hand. You didn't have a choice, so you used what was available. And things like audio and video were severely limited by the hardwares capabilities.
There is also the fact that because storage is now cheap, and applications are expected to be more complicated, that the barriers to entry in terms of playing with source code have risen quite a bit. Gone are the days where, because storage was so expensive, you'd buy a book or a magazine with source code listings in it. I remember typing some of these things in, and playing around with them while I was doing so. It was very educational. But such facilities don't really exist today. Magazines can cheaply include a CD-ROM, and the most common platform out there doesn't have any sort of built-in interpreter that you can just type instructions into and play around with like the old systems did (even if it was BASIC).
Now as a user, I dont want to go back to those days. They're dead and gone for a good reason. But just as we give kids toy hammers and cars to play with to grasp certain concepts before we give them a real hammer or let them drive a real car, we don't seem to have a similar sort of system for learning computer software development. We seem to lack any good, common development environments for the young to learn programming concepts.
I started coding when I was 10 -- a relatively common age for my generation. But this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen anymore.
Now on the other side of things, todays 10 year old is more savvy in the way of telecommunications. They can do research on topics quickly and easily on the Internet, whereas the ability to do so when I was 10 simply didn't exist. So I don't think it's fair to say that todays youth are less tech savvy in general -- they have skills which we didn't (and many of whom in my generation still don't) possess. But I do think they are at a certain disadvantage when it comes to programming, if only because the barriers to entry have risen substantially (not to mention the fact that there are so many other cool distractions now that didn't exist back then).
Yaz.
No, you're high.
You see, on the Mac, 64MB of VRAM is considered "ideal" for Quartz 2D Extreme, so the Windows Vista requirements are still 4 times higher.
Look, you came up with an idiotic comparison. And now you're trying to make an uneducated extrapolation that Vista's effects will even work in 64MB of VRAM, when the very site you quote only mentions 128MB VRAM and 256MB VRAM. Indeed, to quote from the very first paragraph:
So no, 128MB isn't listed as "better", only as "good". And anyone who has dealt with Microsoft for any length of time knows that this can typically be translated as meaning "anything less is going to suck".
You can't go around saying "people shouldn't moan about Vista's requirements -- the Mac has high requirements as well!" when, in actual fact, Apple's requirements are a quarter of what is currently known about Vista's requirements in the video processing capabilities you yourself decided to compare.
(And I'm not even going to get into the fact that Vista is still more than a year away, and that what we currently know about it's minimum requirements could very well go up during that time...the fact that you're comparing vaporware to released software that achieves the same ends with less hardware is telling in and of itself).
Yaz.
Sigh...welcome to Reading Comprehension 101.
I didn't make any suggestion that Vista needs a 500W power supply. Others have (including the /. article summary), but I made no such suggestion. So don't attribute it to me.
However, you've set-up a fine strawman, so far be it for me to prevent you from knocking it down.
Yaz.
Yeah, like running some OS for which IE isn't available, like Linux, FreeBSD, or OS/2. Or running one for which the IE port is ages old and runs like completely and total crap (Mac OS X).
After all, we all know that people who run these OS's only do so because of irrational hatred for Microsoft, as every other rational person chooses their OS based on the fact that IE is available for it.
(I hope MS is paying these "analysts" well to make such boneheaded statements...).
Yaz.
Are you high? Can you not see the difference between a video card with 16MB VRAM versus 256MB VRAM? That's what Microsoft is suggesting you need to use Aero and Glass. Apple's Quartz Extreme only requires 64MB VRAM.
Want to know why people are moaning about Vista's requirements? Because Microsoft is requiring users to have four times the video memory to do what a Macintosh can do today.
And to try to make this post somewhat on-topic, my PowerBook does Quartz 2D Extreme with not only 64MB of VRAM, but also only uses a 65W power supply. And that drives the video display as well.
Yaz.