Where is the DRM circumvention. Did UMaple modify the original commercial clients? If all they did was set up a server that somebody accessed with a client, how is that circumventing DRM. It might be using the software for a purpose other than intended, but, my wife who teaches kindergarten takes old CDs and the kids make mosaics from them. That to is using it for a purpose other than intended.
I'm not saying what they did was legal, but it seems that a different statute than DRM circumvention would be at hand.
The problem is that is the attitude for 70% of the fortune 500 companies. Not just a few isolated companies. Its hard to write a business case where the risks are non tangible and cant have an exact number in Excel. Savings are tangible and can be shown.
Worse Wall street loves these CEOs as they cause variation which their HFT supercomputers can short. They make money either way and a large increase and fall of shareprice makes the investors happy. Not long term growth
You answered your own problem. CEOs make money, CIOs don't. Businesses are in business to make money (unless they are non-profits). Wallstreet and shareholders recognize this. If the CIO can't make a business case for replacing old, obsolete software and hardware, then he/she isn't a very good CIO. The fleet manager, usually without all of the education and training a CIO has, is able to make a business case for replacing vehicles.
Every dollar a business spends should be viewed as an investment with a return (ROI). If a business has a greater ROI by spending dollars on replacing trucks than it does buying ipads, then the smart thing is to replace the trucks. Sometimes it's just dumb luck and the ipads (or whatever technology spending is required) are requested at the same time something with an obviously greater ROI is needed and dollars are scarce (kind of like the Oscars when most years there aren't any good movies and then in one year two or three really good ones are up for best picture). Often, though, it isn't timing and it is simply a lousy CIO who can't build a could use case for the technology, but knows that everybody else is doing it so they should be, too. He/she is right, they should be too, but if they don't really know how or why to deploy, they won't every have a good ROI and it will be another failed project with money down the toilet.
When money is plentiful, it is easy to be speculative on projects (just look at the dot com 90s). However, when the enevitable bubble bursts, your company better have a CIO that knows your business and can evaluate projects and their expected ROI. I mean, just because someone is successful, say at Pepsi, doesn't mean they will be successful, say at Apple. It takes both knowing business and the business at hand.
That's okay CEOs appear to be failing in the eyes of everyone else.
I never did understand why executive management is considered so much more important than other roles or deserving of so much more pay. They specialize in communication, they communicate with other departments and other organizations, that's their job.
How is that skill any more demanding or important than a technical skill?
Last time I checked a decent IT degree requires just as much if not more work than an MBA, there is also a glut of MBAs out there looking for work. So what makes executive management any less replaceable?
Probably because the business courses somebody took 20 years ago are still useful today, whereas the computer science courses are not. Also, it is harder to off-shore executive functions than it is technical ones.
To the typical CEO of today, the Sales VPs make money while IT costs money.
CEO: All the CIOs keep saying we should waste money upgrading from IE 6 and our crappy Windows 2000 servers. All IT does is cost money money and I can't raise the share price by staying ahead of the competition when I can just let my infrastructure fall apart and lead by saving money and not innovating. Waaa CIOS suck
CEO: What?! What do you mean my IPAD can't display that IE 6 app properly? I pay for the state of the art outsourced development team. bla bla
Typical BS from CEOs who got promoted up for being good cost accountants with only an eye for increasing efficiency and cutting cost while not saying the forest from the trees.
20 years ago CEOs were former engineers and product developers. They understood investments and did not focus on just costs. WHenever I hear failing to be alianged with the needs of the business. I just picture someone being cheap and thinking all IT is good for is help desk and word and excel. Not anything else like database, ERP, or anything else that adds value. Its just a cost and nothing else.
If the CIO cannot make a business case to upgrade from IE 6 or Windows 2000 or that the CEO can understand the need, then maybe they shouldn't be the CIO. Likewise, a CEO who only focuses on costs shouldn't be a CEO. Such an organization with either of these types has a much bigger problem.
Unless your business has to do with selling information, then IT isn't a profit center, it is overhead. Overhead, should be allocated to the profit centers, however. The real problem occurs, though, when the real profit centers don't have a say in their IT costs. If doing the project internally means that it is going to cost them $X in allocation costs, but they can contract it out for 80% of that. The profit center wants to contract it out. The problem is that the IT overhead doesn't get reduced and is now just allocated among fewer profit centers and thereby appears to be ever increasing, even if it isn't in actual dollars.
The real solution to this, however, is not to outsource projects, but to decentralize IT. If IT resources are directly accountable to the units they support, then, like any other limited resource, it is used more efficiently. Put differently, if I, as a manager, am going to get in trouble for a delayed project, then I should at least be in charge of the resources for that project, not some IT manager who doesn't have a stake in the project.
Experience has shown that decentralizing IT increases individual productivity and reduces costs. Unfortunately, it leaves a bunch of highly paid CIOs and IT managers looking for work, so they usually argue against it.
As opposed to the engineers who can't run a business? Web OS was a good piece of engineering. The bean counters new from day one, though, that it wouldn't be profitable. There is a reason why most venture capitalists have a business background instead of a technical background.
In the old days, IT had a business manager that had tech people working for them. In the old days, the role of IT was to support the mission of the business. It was a strategic resource and managed accordingly. In the old days, a business unit had a problem and IT provided a solution to that problem.
Today, in the information age, IT is its own little kingdom and very often is not aligned to the mission of the business at all. Instead, CIOs are more like marketing managers and their product is the latest and greatest technology (not the business' product line). The problem is that unless a business can monetize it's IT offerings, the business can't sustain its operations.
IT used to be about doing things better, smarter and more efficiently. Today it is about spending more and more to make things flashier with more pizzazz. In the old days IT was run by a business manager. Today its not.
No, the point is that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average, so there was environmental pressure driving larger animals to survive. Therefore, as the bigger dinosaurs bred more than their smaller siblings, the average size of their young went up, reinforcing their advantage until truly huge specimens became the norm.
Virg
Actually, there is no proof that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average. Being bigger may also mean being slower. Being slower would mean less likely to capture food (if a hunter) or more likely to be captured (if hunted). In addition, what may work to the advantage of one species may not be to another. It simply is not possible to make a blanket statement that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average ones.
MATE is independent of Mint and has its own team (Clem is a member, but Mint ddidn't start and doesn't run the project). The MATE team is small, but their goals are much more modest than Gnome's - they (thankfully!) have no ambitions to design a new 'desktop paradigm'.
I stand (or type) correct. That said, one of the issues with prompting the shift to Gnome 3 was that the code base for Gnome 2 was unwieldy. Hopefully, they will be able to maintain it. My real concern would be with the other gnome applications (evolution, brassero, etc.). Will these all be forked or will the G3 versions be used and if the G3 versions are used, trying to integrate them into G2 may be a monumental task.
The real question is how long can the limited Mint development team support both MATE and Cinnamon? One would think that eventually, one is going to have to go and since Gnome 2 had a ton of programmers, it doesn't seem possible that MATE is going to be sustainable in the long run.
It is difficult to understand how the male dominated programming culture is caused by the programmers when they aren't the ones making hiring decisions. In addition, one would have to look at the admissions department at universities to figure out why they are supposedly discriminating against female students, if most of the IT students are male.
If those two decision making groups turn out not to be the cause, then something else is probably at work at instead of searching for the real cause, it is easier just to blame the males. Put a different way, is the male dominated subculture mentioned in the article a cause or an effect of something bigger going on?
Maybe someone should point out to Oracle that the Oxford English Dictionary is a copyrighted work and yet people are free to use any of the language parts without violating copyright law. Likewise, even if Java is found to be copyrightable and actually was copyrighted, as a language, wouldn't people alsol be free to use any of the language parts without violating copyright law.
I'm pretty sure that language itself is not patentable, so if Oracle wins this case, they may effectively nullify any patents they have with Java.
If creating the compiler is a violation of copyright, assuming a programming language is found to be copyrightable, then the java compiler, which is not written in java, but c would be violating somebody else's copyright. So, if Oracle wins, because even a compiler is considered a derived work, then they themselves will be guilty, too.
Can they learn sign language like Gorillas, and communicate with sentence structure to convey an understanding of more abstract concepts like the passage of time? It seems like that could be a possibility, since sentence structure is kind of an extrapolation of spelling.
Birds (mostly I'm thinking of parrots) are known to develop large vocabularies, and gain a sense of context to the noises they make, as an exchange of information regarding their own situational awareness. Understanding noises and even words, and discerning their meanings relative to context is a task that many animals are capable of. Beyond mere habituation through operant conditioning, we have seen Dolphins, Dogs, Pigs, Horses, Elephants and all the Great Apes perform similar tasks through vocalization. But literacy and text is a pretty interesting twist for baboons.
Most, if not all of the animals you mention have language they use. That isn't doubted. The question is can they be taught a language that we, human beings, understand?
Words are made up of letters. Letters are specific shapes. So words are basically patterns of shapes. The baboons are able to identify specific patterns of shapes 75% of the time. That should come as no surprise, because in their natural environment, they must also be able to identify specific patterns of shapes to survive. Teaching them new patterns, while interesting, is just expanding on what they already do in nature.
It does not mean, however, they can distinguish one word from another, such as dog and cat, although I am sure they can be trained to do that. Nor does it mean that they can interpret the pattern d o g or the pattern c a t to mean a dog or a cat, although, again, I'm sure they can be trained to do that. The real question, as it relates to reading, is can they assimilate what they are seeing. If not, they aren't actually reading.
While driving a car and stopping because you see a big octagon shaped sign is not the same as reading the word "STOP" on it, even though both give the same desired outcome.
You are aware that meteors land cold right? Thermal conductivity does not permit the heating you are proposing. Sample return from the Moon proved very valuable. I'd expect the same from Mars.
They may land cold, but they sure get hot as they go through the atmosphere, where most of them burn up before ever reaching ground. Look at it this way, the space shuttle also landed "cold" but as we we tragically found out, it got pretty hot before the actual landing.
Which morals would those be? Promoting genocide, misogyny, stoning people to death, slavery etc etc? Those are the morals of the bible which are cherry picked "out" of the morals espoused by christians
How do those compare to the morals throughout history of peoples who were not christian? In other words, are those traits specific to christians or to humanity in general for the time periods involved?
If the creators are omnipotent, technically you could have a circular creation, where a creator creates their own creator at a previous point in time with the impetus to create the other creator.
That would only work in a closed system. Most religions view their deity as being outside the system (super-natural). In the Jewish/Christian/Islam view, God always existed and never was created. God then created the universe, which created time itself. But since God existed prior to time existing, there is not need for God to be created as there was no "before" God (just as there was no "before" the big bang).
Whether one believes in all of that or not is for personal decisions, however, the notion of a circular creation, at least in the major religions is not needed, and actually prohibited.
How is it that as a rule religions seem to think that their creator is so narcissistic that he/she/it would want/need/demand that people worship he/she/it?
My assessment of this has always been that if man was created in God's image, and man requires the worship and admiration of his peers, then God must also.
Your logic would be faulty then. Man also masturbates, does that mean God must, too?
I've always wondered why an omniescent deity would require open worship. If God knows all then surely it knows how you feel without you having to say anything.
Who says that an omniscient deity requires open worship? It is also quite possible that said deity doesn't require such worship but it does fill some need in the human psyche.
Not to argue the science involved, but wouldn't the act of heating the soil to sterilize it effectively change the chemistry, too? For instance, if the soil contained frozen gases or water, those could have reacted in the "biological tests" but, once heated, they would not be present in the control tests. In the 70s it was thought that there wasn't water on mars, so would the tests have been designed to account for water?
Not really. Bringing it back would allow closer study. It is nothing that hasn't landed here before owing to martian meteors, but an isolated sample could be checked for divergence from Earth life and give a check on how life disperses in the solar system.
Of course, bacteria arriving via a martian meteor would be subject to extremely high temperatures and effectively sterilized before impact. Coming back in via a capsule of some sort could pose a number of risks to various indigenous species on earth. It would make much more sense, and be a lot more cost effective to send the equipment to mars and run whatever tests are needed there, versus designing a craft to transport a collection vehicle that can then launch from the surface and return home.
Slashdot Mirror
How expensive is it?
How long does it take to charge?
How long can it hold its charge before it leaks?
How many recharge cycles can it do?
You left out: How can the oil industry profit from it?
Where is the DRM circumvention. Did UMaple modify the original commercial clients? If all they did was set up a server that somebody accessed with a client, how is that circumventing DRM. It might be using the software for a purpose other than intended, but, my wife who teaches kindergarten takes old CDs and the kids make mosaics from them. That to is using it for a purpose other than intended.
I'm not saying what they did was legal, but it seems that a different statute than DRM circumvention would be at hand.
The problem is that is the attitude for 70% of the fortune 500 companies. Not just a few isolated companies. Its hard to write a business case where the risks are non tangible and cant have an exact number in Excel. Savings are tangible and can be shown.
Worse Wall street loves these CEOs as they cause variation which their HFT supercomputers can short. They make money either way and a large increase and fall of shareprice makes the investors happy. Not long term growth
You answered your own problem. CEOs make money, CIOs don't. Businesses are in business to make money (unless they are non-profits). Wallstreet and shareholders recognize this. If the CIO can't make a business case for replacing old, obsolete software and hardware, then he/she isn't a very good CIO. The fleet manager, usually without all of the education and training a CIO has, is able to make a business case for replacing vehicles.
Every dollar a business spends should be viewed as an investment with a return (ROI). If a business has a greater ROI by spending dollars on replacing trucks than it does buying ipads, then the smart thing is to replace the trucks. Sometimes it's just dumb luck and the ipads (or whatever technology spending is required) are requested at the same time something with an obviously greater ROI is needed and dollars are scarce (kind of like the Oscars when most years there aren't any good movies and then in one year two or three really good ones are up for best picture). Often, though, it isn't timing and it is simply a lousy CIO who can't build a could use case for the technology, but knows that everybody else is doing it so they should be, too. He/she is right, they should be too, but if they don't really know how or why to deploy, they won't every have a good ROI and it will be another failed project with money down the toilet.
When money is plentiful, it is easy to be speculative on projects (just look at the dot com 90s). However, when the enevitable bubble bursts, your company better have a CIO that knows your business and can evaluate projects and their expected ROI. I mean, just because someone is successful, say at Pepsi, doesn't mean they will be successful, say at Apple. It takes both knowing business and the business at hand.
That's okay CEOs appear to be failing in the eyes of everyone else.
I never did understand why executive management is considered so much more important than other roles or deserving of so much more pay. They specialize in communication, they communicate with other departments and other organizations, that's their job.
How is that skill any more demanding or important than a technical skill?
Last time I checked a decent IT degree requires just as much if not more work than an MBA, there is also a glut of MBAs out there looking for work. So what makes executive management any less replaceable?
Probably because the business courses somebody took 20 years ago are still useful today, whereas the computer science courses are not. Also, it is harder to off-shore executive functions than it is technical ones.
To the typical CEO of today, the Sales VPs make money while IT costs money.
CEO: All the CIOs keep saying we should waste money upgrading from IE 6 and our crappy Windows 2000 servers. All IT does is cost money money and I can't raise the share price by staying ahead of the competition when I can just let my infrastructure fall apart and lead by saving money and not innovating. Waaa CIOS suck
CEO: What?! What do you mean my IPAD can't display that IE 6 app properly? I pay for the state of the art outsourced development team. bla bla
Typical BS from CEOs who got promoted up for being good cost accountants with only an eye for increasing efficiency and cutting cost while not saying the forest from the trees.
20 years ago CEOs were former engineers and product developers. They understood investments and did not focus on just costs. WHenever I hear failing to be alianged with the needs of the business. I just picture someone being cheap and thinking all IT is good for is help desk and word and excel. Not anything else like database, ERP, or anything else that adds value. Its just a cost and nothing else.
If the CIO cannot make a business case to upgrade from IE 6 or Windows 2000 or that the CEO can understand the need, then maybe they shouldn't be the CIO. Likewise, a CEO who only focuses on costs shouldn't be a CEO. Such an organization with either of these types has a much bigger problem.
Unless your business has to do with selling information, then IT isn't a profit center, it is overhead. Overhead, should be allocated to the profit centers, however. The real problem occurs, though, when the real profit centers don't have a say in their IT costs. If doing the project internally means that it is going to cost them $X in allocation costs, but they can contract it out for 80% of that. The profit center wants to contract it out. The problem is that the IT overhead doesn't get reduced and is now just allocated among fewer profit centers and thereby appears to be ever increasing, even if it isn't in actual dollars.
The real solution to this, however, is not to outsource projects, but to decentralize IT. If IT resources are directly accountable to the units they support, then, like any other limited resource, it is used more efficiently. Put differently, if I, as a manager, am going to get in trouble for a delayed project, then I should at least be in charge of the resources for that project, not some IT manager who doesn't have a stake in the project.
Experience has shown that decentralizing IT increases individual productivity and reduces costs. Unfortunately, it leaves a bunch of highly paid CIOs and IT managers looking for work, so they usually argue against it.
As opposed to the engineers who can't run a business? Web OS was a good piece of engineering. The bean counters new from day one, though, that it wouldn't be profitable. There is a reason why most venture capitalists have a business background instead of a technical background.
In the old days, IT had a business manager that had tech people working for them. In the old days, the role of IT was to support the mission of the business. It was a strategic resource and managed accordingly. In the old days, a business unit had a problem and IT provided a solution to that problem.
Today, in the information age, IT is its own little kingdom and very often is not aligned to the mission of the business at all. Instead, CIOs are more like marketing managers and their product is the latest and greatest technology (not the business' product line). The problem is that unless a business can monetize it's IT offerings, the business can't sustain its operations.
IT used to be about doing things better, smarter and more efficiently. Today it is about spending more and more to make things flashier with more pizzazz. In the old days IT was run by a business manager. Today its not.
No, the point is that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average, so there was environmental pressure driving larger animals to survive. Therefore, as the bigger dinosaurs bred more than their smaller siblings, the average size of their young went up, reinforcing their advantage until truly huge specimens became the norm.
Virg
Actually, there is no proof that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average. Being bigger may also mean being slower. Being slower would mean less likely to capture food (if a hunter) or more likely to be captured (if hunted). In addition, what may work to the advantage of one species may not be to another. It simply is not possible to make a blanket statement that bigger specimens of smaller dinosaurs had an advantage over the average ones.
The intelligent gene is Levis.
MATE is independent of Mint and has its own team (Clem is a member, but Mint ddidn't start and doesn't run the project). The MATE team is small, but their goals are much more modest than Gnome's - they (thankfully!) have no ambitions to design a new 'desktop paradigm'.
I stand (or type) correct. That said, one of the issues with prompting the shift to Gnome 3 was that the code base for Gnome 2 was unwieldy. Hopefully, they will be able to maintain it. My real concern would be with the other gnome applications (evolution, brassero, etc.). Will these all be forked or will the G3 versions be used and if the G3 versions are used, trying to integrate them into G2 may be a monumental task.
I wish the MATE team all the best.
The real question is how long can the limited Mint development team support both MATE and Cinnamon? One would think that eventually, one is going to have to go and since Gnome 2 had a ton of programmers, it doesn't seem possible that MATE is going to be sustainable in the long run.
It is difficult to understand how the male dominated programming culture is caused by the programmers when they aren't the ones making hiring decisions. In addition, one would have to look at the admissions department at universities to figure out why they are supposedly discriminating against female students, if most of the IT students are male.
If those two decision making groups turn out not to be the cause, then something else is probably at work at instead of searching for the real cause, it is easier just to blame the males. Put a different way, is the male dominated subculture mentioned in the article a cause or an effect of something bigger going on?
Maybe someone should point out to Oracle that the Oxford English Dictionary is a copyrighted work and yet people are free to use any of the language parts without violating copyright law. Likewise, even if Java is found to be copyrightable and actually was copyrighted, as a language, wouldn't people alsol be free to use any of the language parts without violating copyright law.
I'm pretty sure that language itself is not patentable, so if Oracle wins this case, they may effectively nullify any patents they have with Java.
If creating the compiler is a violation of copyright, assuming a programming language is found to be copyrightable, then the java compiler, which is not written in java, but c would be violating somebody else's copyright. So, if Oracle wins, because even a compiler is considered a derived work, then they themselves will be guilty, too.
Can they learn sign language like Gorillas, and communicate with sentence structure to convey an understanding of more abstract concepts like the passage of time? It seems like that could be a possibility, since sentence structure is kind of an extrapolation of spelling.
Birds (mostly I'm thinking of parrots) are known to develop large vocabularies, and gain a sense of context to the noises they make, as an exchange of information regarding their own situational awareness. Understanding noises and even words, and discerning their meanings relative to context is a task that many animals are capable of. Beyond mere habituation through operant conditioning, we have seen Dolphins, Dogs, Pigs, Horses, Elephants and all the Great Apes perform similar tasks through vocalization. But literacy and text is a pretty interesting twist for baboons.
Most, if not all of the animals you mention have language they use. That isn't doubted. The question is can they be taught a language that we, human beings, understand?
Words are made up of letters. Letters are specific shapes. So words are basically patterns of shapes. The baboons are able to identify specific patterns of shapes 75% of the time. That should come as no surprise, because in their natural environment, they must also be able to identify specific patterns of shapes to survive. Teaching them new patterns, while interesting, is just expanding on what they already do in nature.
It does not mean, however, they can distinguish one word from another, such as dog and cat, although I am sure they can be trained to do that. Nor does it mean that they can interpret the pattern d o g or the pattern c a t to mean a dog or a cat, although, again, I'm sure they can be trained to do that. The real question, as it relates to reading, is can they assimilate what they are seeing. If not, they aren't actually reading.
While driving a car and stopping because you see a big octagon shaped sign is not the same as reading the word "STOP" on it, even though both give the same desired outcome.
You are aware that meteors land cold right? Thermal conductivity does not permit the heating you are proposing. Sample return from the Moon proved very valuable. I'd expect the same from Mars.
They may land cold, but they sure get hot as they go through the atmosphere, where most of them burn up before ever reaching ground. Look at it this way, the space shuttle also landed "cold" but as we we tragically found out, it got pretty hot before the actual landing.
Is the US upset that the Aussies are storing data on-shore or that the government there is telling the truth of the perils of storing off-shore?
Which morals would those be? Promoting genocide, misogyny, stoning people to death, slavery etc etc? Those are the morals of the bible which are cherry picked "out" of the morals espoused by christians
How do those compare to the morals throughout history of peoples who were not christian? In other words, are those traits specific to christians or to humanity in general for the time periods involved?
If the creators are omnipotent, technically you could have a circular creation, where a creator creates their own creator at a previous point in time with the impetus to create the other creator.
That would only work in a closed system. Most religions view their deity as being outside the system (super-natural). In the Jewish/Christian/Islam view, God always existed and never was created. God then created the universe, which created time itself. But since God existed prior to time existing, there is not need for God to be created as there was no "before" God (just as there was no "before" the big bang).
Whether one believes in all of that or not is for personal decisions, however, the notion of a circular creation, at least in the major religions is not needed, and actually prohibited.
How is it that as a rule religions seem to think that their creator is so narcissistic that he/she/it would want/need/demand that people worship he/she/it?
My assessment of this has always been that if man was created in God's image, and man requires the worship and admiration of his peers, then God must also.
Your logic would be faulty then. Man also masturbates, does that mean God must, too?
I've always wondered why an omniescent deity would require open worship. If God knows all then surely it knows how you feel without you having to say anything.
Who says that an omniscient deity requires open worship? It is also quite possible that said deity doesn't require such worship but it does fill some need in the human psyche.
Not to argue the science involved, but wouldn't the act of heating the soil to sterilize it effectively change the chemistry, too? For instance, if the soil contained frozen gases or water, those could have reacted in the "biological tests" but, once heated, they would not be present in the control tests. In the 70s it was thought that there wasn't water on mars, so would the tests have been designed to account for water?
Not really. Bringing it back would allow closer study. It is nothing that hasn't landed here before owing to martian meteors, but an isolated sample could be checked for divergence from Earth life and give a check on how life disperses in the solar system.
Of course, bacteria arriving via a martian meteor would be subject to extremely high temperatures and effectively sterilized before impact. Coming back in via a capsule of some sort could pose a number of risks to various indigenous species on earth. It would make much more sense, and be a lot more cost effective to send the equipment to mars and run whatever tests are needed there, versus designing a craft to transport a collection vehicle that can then launch from the surface and return home.