...and not try to stand in its way. If we just leave DRM alone, it will not work (like the Sony fiasco), users and artists will reject it and society will evolve towards another compensation model that works for everyone and benefits from the current state of technology.
If the FSF tries to redefine free software in order to fight DRM, it will make GPL3 commercially unpopular and undermine the strengh of the free and open source software movement as a whole
Because if I want to sell support services, I have all (or at least some) of the resources that I need in order to support the product, and I am not tied to anybody's hidden agenda. If RMS suddenly decides to drop GCC, and it is still used by half the world, I can enter the market with GCC support service (not that I would like to do it).
I guess they count hits with an image or something like that, so you are essentially reducing the load on their servers while still allowing them to show ads and count hits.
I hate to say this, but IIRC TCPA should be THE solution for this kind of problem, with a chain of trust that allows the user to verify that every software component of the OS is authentic and hasn't been tampered with by a rootkit.
Of course, software alone doesn't define the behaviour of the machine: there's also the mighty Registry, and it would be next to impossible to apply TCPA principles there.
The app we are developing has to run on JRun 3.1 under HP Virtual Vault (an obsolete discontinued derivative of HP-UX), with JDK 1.3.1. Please don't ask why we are using such ancient infrastructure for a new application:(
We were allocated only one development environment on JRun for this project, but we have to use it as a user test environment, so we develop and do QA on Tomcat 3.3 under Linux. Tomcat 3.3 and JRun 3.1 supposedly implement that same version of the JSP and Servlet specifications, but JRun 3.1 has a few bugs that we discovered when we first tested the half-developed application on JRun.
We use Apache Ant to build the application from source, and every test environment (we have one for each developer, plus one for QA, plus one for User Testing, plus another as Pre-Production) has a separate file of "environmental properties", that we substitute in several configuration files, so we can forget about different paths, JDBC URLs, JDK location, etc.
Running the application on different base software has some minor inconveniences, but most of the time it works fine everywhere, and it has a benefit: we definitely HAVE to make everything configurable and portable, and that forces us to do good design.
There is just one thing that we can't test accurately on Linux: SPEED. The HP-UX machines we use are *slow*, and we can't emulate that accurately.
PB-700 and PB-770 were pocket calculators with a BASIC interpreter. I used them to solve linear equation systems with complex variables, and to evaluate expressions with complex numbers, and it was really useful to have them run at triple speed - and probably ten-fold battery consumption, but I had the correct results every time, while my classmates didn't, so changing three AA cells every week instead of every quarter was a minor inconvenience.
I did it by basically shorting a resistor used in an RC oscillator. Luckily, it didn't prevent the oscillator from working but made it run at max speed.
I am a great fan of FOSS, but I don't think of it as a panacea. There are software categories where nothing can beat FOSS in the long run, but I don't think games are one of those
Didn't you read the licenses of the products upon which you based your work? Did you really need a lawyer to understand the terms under which you received the software?
In that case, you deserve what you got, don't blame the GPL.
Re:Unknown Error In The Submission
on
Nuclear Batteries
·
· Score: 4, Informative
But this won't explode. It stores a lot of energy, but the POWER (energy/time) is very low. It's not like the wall outlet, which can give large amounts of energy in a very short time.
The article says that it could be used to trickle charge rechargeable batteries. Think of it as a battery "helper".
If all the insurance companies require it and use it to get out of liability, the benefit will be for the insurance companies, and it will essentially be paid by the victims of accidents caused by reckless drivers - that is, most of the victims. At that point, requiring drivers to have insurance will become nonsense - if you drive carefully, you will not cause accidents, and if you cause an accident, it will be because you are reckless, so the victims will never get paid by the insurance companies.
Maybe then the government will require pedestrians to have insurance, and then the pedestrian insurance companies will require pedestrians to carry GPS-enabled devices, and Big Brother will really get to watch our every move...
"Within the company,
less than 10 people [are working on the SCOsource initiative]... We do have, obviously, a lot more attorneys than that, who are focused on SCOsource. But the majority of the company resources are very directly pegged to the SCO Unix business."
It's no surprise, but it's interesting that it comes from him.
Are they supposed to be immune to the risks associated with technological changes? I am not a citizen of the US, but if I was I woudn't want to be paying for a supercomputer when a cluster is good enough.
Maybe we should develop a strategy to license software in big packages that you cannot use at all if you sue for patent infringement in any part of the package, and continue designing software in small modules so that replacement of a challenged module is easier.
Let's narrow things a bit
on
Is Math A Sport?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Math is not a sport. Problem solving could be considered to be similar to a sport. You don't actually train on Math; you learn Math, and you train on solving problems. And you can show your progress and fitness (and speed) on solving a particular class of problems. I did, and I won the Olimpíada Matemática Argentina in 1989 and I would have gone to the International Mathematics Olympiad, if only the stupid government of Raúl Alfonsín (Argentina's president at the time) hadn't leaked all the central bank's reserves into every politician's pocket.
Plus, these competitions are also very fun (for those who like Math).
...and the capabilities required are not likely to have been tested by the certification exams, not even likely to be found together in an individual not already at the job.
We had to fill several positions for Java programmers lately, that in addition to Java programming required learning Server Side JavaScript (an ancient language) and touching many script written in that language. We wrote a custom Java/HTML/JSP exam that the candidates had to take. The exam tested what we thought was required for the job, and left out what we didn't care about.
We hired three people who passed the exam. One of them had taken several Java courses and his CV was pretty impressive, but he had an awful programming style, bad variable/class/method naming habits, an excessive inclination for using complicated OO design patterns, and an *unbelievable* tendency to misunderstand everything. We eventually lost patience and had to fire him, and trying for find a replacement we found out that in addition to the exam, it was better to interview the candidate and give him a ver brief OO design excercise that he could solve in private, but he had to explain the solution verbally.
The ability to understand a clear statement of the problem that he had to solve and the ability to explain his solution are as important as the knowledge of OO design principles in real life, and the former are unlikely to be tested by certification exams. Plus, if you criticize his design, to get to see how he reacts to criticism, which he also will have to take in real life.
Maybe the supposedly copied Linux kernel source code is just an excuse for SCO's lawyers to build a huge case and grab the investors' money (even Microsoft's money).
In the end, whatever the outcome of the lawsuits, we can be sure that Boies, Schiller & Flexner will be richer.
The piezoelectric used as ringer is very different from the piezoelectric used to generate high voltage to ignite gas grills, and it generates those voltages only when HIT, not when excited with tiny voltages (a few volts).
Slashdot Mirror
The guy must be rolling over in his grave!
What? He's not dead yet? He sure will wish he were dead when he finds out!
Wrong article...you have too many Slashdot windows open. I sure hope you are not working for me!
But 32 isn't the square of anything, so the bitmap can't be square, and it doesn't seem to be 8x4 or 2x16 (or 1x32)
...and not try to stand in its way. If we just leave DRM alone, it will not work (like the Sony fiasco), users and artists will reject it and society will evolve towards another compensation model that works for everyone and benefits from the current state of technology.
If the FSF tries to redefine free software in order to fight DRM, it will make GPL3 commercially unpopular and undermine the strengh of the free and open source software movement as a whole
Better make it a standard to document/peer review designs, specially if you are doing OOD/OOP. You DO design before you code, do you?
This is relevant to free software in general, and is not restricted to Linux!
They got the original router code from Stanford University in the first place, and now they complain so bitterly! Check this
Because if I want to sell support services, I have all (or at least some) of the resources that I need in order to support the product, and I am not tied to anybody's hidden agenda. If RMS suddenly decides to drop GCC, and it is still used by half the world, I can enter the market with GCC support service (not that I would like to do it).
I guess they count hits with an image or something like that, so you are essentially reducing the load on their servers while still allowing them to show ads and count hits.
Of course, software alone doesn't define the behaviour of the machine: there's also the mighty Registry, and it would be next to impossible to apply TCPA principles there.
in order to retain their best employees, the ones who stay whenever there's a problem.
We were allocated only one development environment on JRun for this project, but we have to use it as a user test environment, so we develop and do QA on Tomcat 3.3 under Linux. Tomcat 3.3 and JRun 3.1 supposedly implement that same version of the JSP and Servlet specifications, but JRun 3.1 has a few bugs that we discovered when we first tested the half-developed application on JRun.
We use Apache Ant to build the application from source, and every test environment (we have one for each developer, plus one for QA, plus one for User Testing, plus another as Pre-Production) has a separate file of "environmental properties", that we substitute in several configuration files, so we can forget about different paths, JDBC URLs, JDK location, etc.
Running the application on different base software has some minor inconveniences, but most of the time it works fine everywhere, and it has a benefit: we definitely HAVE to make everything configurable and portable, and that forces us to do good design.
There is just one thing that we can't test accurately on Linux: SPEED. The HP-UX machines we use are *slow*, and we can't emulate that accurately.
I did it by basically shorting a resistor used in an RC oscillator. Luckily, it didn't prevent the oscillator from working but made it run at max speed.
I am a great fan of FOSS, but I don't think of it as a panacea. There are software categories where nothing can beat FOSS in the long run, but I don't think games are one of those
Didn't you read the licenses of the products upon which you based your work? Did you really need a lawyer to understand the terms under which you received the software?
In that case, you deserve what you got, don't blame the GPL.
But this won't explode. It stores a lot of energy, but the POWER (energy/time) is very low. It's not like the wall outlet, which can give large amounts of energy in a very short time.
The article says that it could be used to trickle charge rechargeable batteries. Think of it as a battery "helper".
Maybe then the government will require pedestrians to have insurance, and then the pedestrian insurance companies will require pedestrians to carry GPS-enabled devices, and Big Brother will really get to watch our every move...
He says It's no surprise, but it's interesting that it comes from him.
Are they supposed to be immune to the risks associated with technological changes? I am not a citizen of the US, but if I was I woudn't want to be paying for a supercomputer when a cluster is good enough.
Maybe we should develop a strategy to license software in big packages that you cannot use at all if you sue for patent infringement in any part of the package, and continue designing software in small modules so that replacement of a challenged module is easier.
Math is not a sport. Problem solving could be considered to be similar to a sport. You don't actually train on Math; you learn Math, and you train on solving problems. And you can show your progress and fitness (and speed) on solving a particular class of problems. I did, and I won the Olimpíada Matemática Argentina in 1989 and I would have gone to the International Mathematics Olympiad, if only the stupid government of Raúl Alfonsín (Argentina's president at the time) hadn't leaked all the central bank's reserves into every politician's pocket.
Plus, these competitions are also very fun (for those who like Math).
...and the capabilities required are not likely to have been tested by the certification exams, not even likely to be found together in an individual not already at the job.
We had to fill several positions for Java programmers lately, that in addition to Java programming required learning Server Side JavaScript (an ancient language) and touching many script written in that language. We wrote a custom Java/HTML/JSP exam that the candidates had to take. The exam tested what we thought was required for the job, and left out what we didn't care about.
We hired three people who passed the exam. One of them had taken several Java courses and his CV was pretty impressive, but he had an awful programming style, bad variable/class/method naming habits, an excessive inclination for using complicated OO design patterns, and an *unbelievable* tendency to misunderstand everything. We eventually lost patience and had to fire him, and trying for find a replacement we found out that in addition to the exam, it was better to interview the candidate and give him a ver brief OO design excercise that he could solve in private, but he had to explain the solution verbally.
The ability to understand a clear statement of the problem that he had to solve and the ability to explain his solution are as important as the knowledge of OO design principles in real life, and the former are unlikely to be tested by certification exams. Plus, if you criticize his design, to get to see how he reacts to criticism, which he also will have to take in real life.
And did you spot the "Free Trade Software Foundation"?
Maybe the supposedly copied Linux kernel source code is just an excuse for SCO's lawyers to build a huge case and grab the investors' money (even Microsoft's money).
In the end, whatever the outcome of the lawsuits, we can be sure that Boies, Schiller & Flexner will be richer.
The piezoelectric used as ringer is very different from the piezoelectric used to generate high voltage to ignite gas grills, and it generates those voltages only when HIT, not when excited with tiny voltages (a few volts).