No I'm not. I merely expressed two ideas in one post. Bush supporters missed a PR opportunity through inaction. NYPD acted (and I would say over-reacted, regardless of your feelings on any parties or their candidates) & it might just blow up in their faces.
Joshua Kinberg, creator of Bikes Against Bush, was arrested in NYC for vandalism.
No he wasn't:
Kinberg cooperated fully with the officers as he was being handcuffed, only asking, "can I ask what I'm being arrested for?" to which no one provided an answer. As of 11:00 PM Saturday evening, he was still in custody without being charged with anything.
bicycle can print text messages sent from web users directly onto the streets of Manhattan in
water-soluble chalk
Bush supports really dropped the ball on this one. They could have made their own bikes to go around spreading water on everything. Heck, they could have just rented a Zamboni machine! Not only would they wipe out this guy's statements, but they could make claims about cleaning up the streets of NYC.
Whoever went NYPD Blue on this guy should have thought a little. I have seen more offensive and more permanent "Public Art" in the City & nothing was done. This could easily blow up in their faces--persecuting someone who was conscientious enough to choose an instantly reomovable media to express tame political views in. They should have at least just let the guy off with a warning.
When Kinberg showed the police sergeant how the bicycle used a non-permanent spray chalk, the sergeant seemed to agree that it wasn't defacement, at which point Kinberg asked, "am I free to go?" After conferring about it, officers decided to call superiors, then came back moments later to place Kinberg under arrest and confiscate the bicycle.
Great--not even a sergeant seems to know the law well enough, but they still arrest him.
You give companies too much credit. If a company wanted something to really be hack friendly, there would be no complaints when it was hacked. They are not hack friendly if they complain about hacks. Your script kiddy comment is pretty lame. If the company made a product that someone with no skillz can hack it then the company got what they deserved.
I disagree entirely. It is a Very Good thing to make an API that is both open and easy to use. It benefits the company who creates and releases it because their programmers could easily add new features & their product will be more popular because of features that others are able to add. Problems happen when people start writing functions in this grey area, often violating the license of the use of the original product or API. This isn't the original company's fault at all--they didn't disregard "security/development/testing," and instead opted for transparency. It is the fault of the "script kiddies"--rather than contributing positive enhancements back to the community (which they could write because of the great API), they choose to write things that may break the license or even the law. Hence the grandparent's comment to RTFM.
One explicit example is TiVo. They have allowed people to add larger hard drives, write software to post TiVo contents online, etc. They don't want people to distribute TiVoed content on the net or to steal TiVo subscription service. Both are very possible, but neither is widely exploited. If someone was to start selling software to do either, TiVo should get upset! Not because they didn't know of the possibility, but because they trusted their user base. And that is bad for all of us--the next API won't be transparent.
To be fair, the device independent bitmap was created in 1988.They are well documented, usually not compressed, and so are perfectly suitable for smaller graphics that need to be opened on slower (such as circa-1988) PCs. It is true that TGA was available in 1984, but I wouldn't say it was any more open or "better" than BMP in 1988. One might as well ask "Why XBM/XPM or PBM/PGM/PPM?"
How come PNG is so lamely supported?
PNGs came into being in 1995 because of GIF licensing concerns. It accomplishes something entirely different than BMP. MS didn't really need to be concerned about the GIF license--they had enough money and clout. Support and even specification for some of PNG's neater features is somewhat new & MS was probably at a disadvantage by not starting implementation sooner. MS embraced both GIF & JPG, which weren't invented at MS. They should support PNG more sooner, but I think they are starting to.
How about pushing Ogg Vorbis/Theora with your media player?
The RFC for OGG is dated May 2003. Why should MS embrace that format immediately? Especially when most considered it to need too much good hardware when it was conceived (~1998 for Vorbis) & MS knowing that their customers used quite a bit of legacy hardware (at a minimum,they could count the boxes of 'Windows Upgrades' they sold. The stable version of the vorbis codec wasn't released until 2002. I dont see why MS should have started implementation any sooner than that & don't see why they ever should unless their own customers demand it.
Do you expect them to implement every specialty codec? They have to draw some line in the sand & it is good that third-party software can easily pick up the slack--even by extending what formats WMP can read.
I don't really think MS sets out to make the best anything--they set out to make a useable default choice.
I agree whole heartedly that other proprietaty binary formats should be better documented (especially the Office documents), but I guess I can see that doing so would give MS very little.
Just what we need--more wiz-bang effects and styles for procrastinators to obsess over, rather than crafting presentations which are actually informative. The only redeeming feature I see is that it requires nice hardware, which means people will hopefully think twice before either sending me this eye-candy nonsense or before bringing their presentation on a CD to a conference.
You don't have to become a marketing weeny to make a nice looking presentation. I reuse my LaTeX sources in HA-Prosper (putting it in outline form & adding additional illustrations where useful, of course).
The user base is VRRY small. Before I submitted it to slashdot, there were six peers. And I assume it is skewed too--the ACM box at the bottom suggests that it is only for Comp. Sci. texts & experience suggests that that is probably a select subset of this.
The real trick is getting your peers to buy in to the program--they will likely have many references you'd be interested in anyway.
Unfortunately not. Nor does it seem to use MODS XML for record storage (which, incidentally, will be used by OpenOffive.org's bibliographic and the bibliophile project, which hopes to do cross searching across the open source literature databases.
SRW/U hopes to supplant Z39.50. Not only does it use MODS, but it still uses ZeeRex and CQL.
For more nerdy e-refererence stuff, check out darcusblog
the CVS server will slow down before the website. The CVS is hosted by sourceforge, which can handle significant load. The website is hosted on some University computer & I had trouble reaching it when I was emailed the link. So it might not be able to handle the load as well.
My impression is that the suggestion is to oppose software patents.
MS software wouldn't be immune, but would be safer--they do have a lot of patents out there, are likely somewhat more cautious about stepping on patents, and (most importantly!) have significant financial and legal resources at their disposal to fight patent disputes.
No shell scripts are really portable!
on
Bash 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think only a few would even try to argue that they are. Most shells aren only somewhat available on non *nix OSs & many aren't available ay all off of them. Bash is, at least, reasonably available on most OSs. It is also the de facto shell standard, being found on linux and most newer *nix variants.
Portable shell scripts are probably more impeded when they use tools that aren't part of the shell & which aren't on the target system.
If you want true script portability, it is probably better to use something like perl. If you are concerned with writing short, simple scripts, shell scripts are fine. But not even sh is commonly interperated, & bash is VERY common, so bash isn't really an inappropriate choice.
The table of how many devices of which type run which OS seems to only list which OS devices ship with. Linux has been ported to many Windows devices, so you cna flash them to Linux. While windows should work with many of the linux devices, I think it isn't trivial to buy a license to put it on your device that shipped with Linux & to then flash it to run windows.
Corrosion. Waste consists of acids, salts, and other water that simply rusts through the containers. This is a non-trivial materials science problem: there are many different containers containing different types of waste (and probably with different levels of documentation as to what the waste is made of).
The radiactivity itself dosn't significantly contribute to the corrosion.
The liquid waste is able to flow places where we don't want it to if it gets out.
But the fact that some of these containers have been there for 50 years and the fact that there are so many of them has made a few leaks all-but-unavoidable. The more dangerous stuff has been put in better containers and is carefully monitored. It should all be vitrified--that is turned into a glass. This solid waste is much less likely to flow to places it shouldn't & will be easier and safer to store for longer. The problem is that the funding to do this is often not granted or is cut.
a large number of fish spawn there every year. This is one case where FUD might actually do some good. I believe that the New Scientist article is extremely alarmist. I don't think it has the ability to damage the public's perception of nuclear energy any further than that perception is already tarnished & will certainly not change the logical decisions that are being made for the cleanup.
However, particular species of salmon are becoming rare in the Columbia & are often over-fished. Many restrictions placed on fishing don't apply to Native Americans. This has been (and will likely be a reoccurring ) hot political issue.
I'd like people to act more rationally. But if people are scared away from fishing (even though these fish have been shown to be quite safe), at least we can work on getting those salmon numbers up.
The very title of the article shows that the author doesn't understand Open Source Software. Very few blanket statements will apply to all open source projects or developers. His blanket statements are no different.
"If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it" I've heard this, but it has been rare & is becoming more rare. In fact, I most often see it in conversations between two end users (and often on F/OSS for Windows). This can usually be seen as noise--in many cases the developers are quick to offer a much better reply, saying it is on the TODO, or offering short suggestions of how one might start to make a patch if they are so inclined. In other cases, complaints aren't expressed in the right forum--if this was the "last word," as the article's author states, it is often because no developers are able to read it. End users should be better educated how to voice their gripes & have something happen--search bugzilla (or a developer's mailing list) & if you seem to be the first one with the complaint, make it politely in what appears to be the correct forum for bug reports/feature requests!
"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems" Well-written ("maintainable" or, as ESR says, transparent and discoverable) and highly used Open Source Software almost always receive patches or plugins not written by the development team. The Linux Kernel Team might keep tight reigns on what they maintain, but there are plenty of kernel patches that find their way all the way into the vanilla kernel, or are at least popular enough to be found in non-vanilla kernels. Many, many, more can be applied by end users.
Diff/patch are proof to me that this really isn't a myth. You might not choose to fix or even look at someone else's code, but you usually can (and, importantly, others are likely to).
All software should be free There's still a not-insignificant amount of contention on making more libre software & what that exactly means. See numerous licensing arguments of BSD vs. GPL, etc. As for making all software gratis, as the article implies, I don't really hear this too often. Most people in F/OSS are quick to point out that "Free" doesn't refer to "free beer" & will offer numerous F/OSS projects which are sold (a boxed linux distro, for example).
He doesn't really seem to understand the "Commoditization of Software." There are a few different types of applications & F/OSS has pursued most of them & certainly all of the popular ones. Sometimes development is unpaid. In other cases, commercial companies "who get it" or national labs/universities which receive public funding have done the authoring. The thing is that once that F/OSS alternative is out there, it will often develop into something people want to use & want to make better so that others will use it too.
Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software Better in what way? No one really claims that GNU-CAD is yet at the level of commercial counterparts, but it is foolish to say it is impossible for them to get to that level. (I also disagree that Windows has a better GUI than *nix.) For popular projects, the development is usually always better--code gets fixed faster & the number of users often indicates that the "Return on Investment" is better enough that losing some things (compatibility with proprietary binaries often being the biggie) to be worth it.
Scratching the personal itch The thing is that many developers are end-users as well. Evolution and Firefox are fine examples. It is also very likely that F/OSS will try to satisfy the end user needs--anyone can voice gripes about it. The thing is that many end users also happen to be developers. The other thing is that those who don't want to adopt F/OSS want a 1:1 replacement of the commercial software they've become locked-in to. Patents and some restrictive licenses ma
The 4500 series were not the last to offer commercial skip. The 5000 series had it as well. 5500s do not, but they have "Show|Nav." Rather than enabling commercial skip for a whole show, you press one button to jump past one set of commercials using the same algorithm as "Commercial Advance" used.
The TiVo has a better user interface, but I don't find my ReplayTV 5040 to be "quirky" at all & appreciate several features it has that the TiVo lacks.
To be fair, SonicBlue was fighting legal battles over the Rio and was competing across several lines of multimedia devices. If any suit hurt them, it was probably the patent suit with TiVo.
In any case, you are correct that ReplayTV hasn't had smooth times. Yes, TiVo has more customers. Over half of them come from DirectTiVo deals. DirecTV will cut this tie to TiVo, so who knows what will happen to them then.
ReplayTV should have had the foresight to adopt a partner in this way--about half of all PVR subscriptions come from cable and satellite subscriptions, rather than direct from TiVo or Replay.
I know many who have chosen to get a Replay, including myself. They are less expensive, have ethernet built-in, and older models have show-sharing and commercial advance. Newer models still have "Show|Nav," which is a manually activated commercial skip & the ability to jump forward/back an arbitrary number of minutes is much better than similar TiVo features. You can also still stream content to other Replay boxes (or a computer) if on a LAN.
Unfortunately not--it was voluntarily and prematurely ended by the media companies. They agreed not to sue Replay owners, but the legality of Tivo or others using the same technology wasn't tested. See EFF for more information.
Slashdot Mirror
No I'm not. I merely expressed two ideas in one post. Bush supporters missed a PR opportunity through inaction. NYPD acted (and I would say over-reacted, regardless of your feelings on any parties or their candidates) & it might just blow up in their faces.
Completely true and valid. Police officers on scene even thought that it wasn't defacement when he showed them it could be washed off.
Whoever went NYPD Blue on this guy should have thought a little. I have seen more offensive and more permanent "Public Art" in the City & nothing was done. This could easily blow up in their faces--persecuting someone who was conscientious enough to choose an instantly reomovable media to express tame political views in. They should have at least just let the guy off with a warning.Great--not even a sergeant seems to know the law well enough, but they still arrest him.
One explicit example is TiVo. They have allowed people to add larger hard drives, write software to post TiVo contents online, etc. They don't want people to distribute TiVoed content on the net or to steal TiVo subscription service. Both are very possible, but neither is widely exploited. If someone was to start selling software to do either, TiVo should get upset! Not because they didn't know of the possibility, but because they trusted their user base. And that is bad for all of us--the next API won't be transparent.
Only the maker of antequated operating systems would make a "museum quality" mouse.
I forgot to point out that Theora is still in alpha.
Do you expect them to implement every specialty codec? They have to draw some line in the sand & it is good that third-party software can easily pick up the slack--even by extending what formats WMP can read.
I don't really think MS sets out to make the best anything--they set out to make a useable default choice.
I agree whole heartedly that other proprietaty binary formats should be better documented (especially the Office documents), but I guess I can see that doing so would give MS very little.
Just what we need--more wiz-bang effects and styles for procrastinators to obsess over, rather than crafting presentations which are actually informative. The only redeeming feature I see is that it requires nice hardware, which means people will hopefully think twice before either sending me this eye-candy nonsense or before bringing their presentation on a CD to a conference.
You don't have to become a marketing weeny to make a nice looking presentation. I reuse my LaTeX sources in HA-Prosper (putting it in outline form & adding additional illustrations where useful, of course).
The user base is VRRY small. Before I submitted it to slashdot, there were six peers. And I assume it is skewed too--the ACM box at the bottom suggests that it is only for Comp. Sci. texts & experience suggests that that is probably a select subset of this.
The real trick is getting your peers to buy in to the program--they will likely have many references you'd be interested in anyway.
Unfortunately not. Nor does it seem to use MODS XML for record storage (which, incidentally, will be used by OpenOffive.org's bibliographic and the bibliophile project, which hopes to do cross searching across the open source literature databases.
.
SRW/U hopes to supplant Z39.50. Not only does it use MODS, but it still uses ZeeRex and CQL
For more nerdy e-refererence stuff, check out darcusblog
the CVS server will slow down before the website.
The CVS is hosted by sourceforge, which can handle significant load. The website is hosted on some University computer & I had trouble reaching it when I was emailed the link. So it might not be able to handle the load as well.
My impression is that the suggestion is to oppose software patents.
MS software wouldn't be immune, but would be safer--they do have a lot of patents out there, are likely somewhat more cautious about stepping on patents, and (most importantly!) have significant financial and legal resources at their disposal to fight patent disputes.
I think only a few would even try to argue that they are. Most shells aren only somewhat available on non *nix OSs & many aren't available ay all off of them. Bash is, at least, reasonably available on most OSs. It is also the de facto shell standard, being found on linux and most newer *nix variants.
Portable shell scripts are probably more impeded when they use tools that aren't part of the shell & which aren't on the target system.
If you want true script portability, it is probably better to use something like perl. If you are concerned with writing short, simple scripts, shell scripts are fine. But not even sh is commonly interperated, & bash is VERY common, so bash isn't really an inappropriate choice.
It lists the iPaq under Linux devices.
So it does. It still misses many devices--most ARM-equipped windows devices such as the Axim will also run it.
The table of how many devices of which type run which OS seems to only list which OS devices ship with. Linux has been ported to many Windows devices, so you cna flash them to Linux. While windows should work with many of the linux devices, I think it isn't trivial to buy a license to put it on your device that shipped with Linux & to then flash it to run windows.
The U.S. government and military will be brought to their knees by...Finland?!
Corrosion. Waste consists of acids, salts, and other water that simply rusts through the containers. This is a non-trivial materials science problem: there are many different containers containing different types of waste (and probably with different levels of documentation as to what the waste is made of).
The radiactivity itself dosn't significantly contribute to the corrosion.
The liquid waste is able to flow places where we don't want it to if it gets out.
But the fact that some of these containers have been there for 50 years and the fact that there are so many of them has made a few leaks all-but-unavoidable. The more dangerous stuff has been put in better containers and is carefully monitored. It should all be vitrified--that is turned into a glass. This solid waste is much less likely to flow to places it shouldn't & will be easier and safer to store for longer. The problem is that the funding to do this is often not granted or is cut.
Now what will people reply to dumb questions with if FGI won't work?
a large number of fish spawn there every year.
This is one case where FUD might actually do some good. I believe that the New Scientist article is extremely alarmist. I don't think it has the ability to damage the public's perception of nuclear energy any further than that perception is already tarnished & will certainly not change the logical decisions that are being made for the cleanup.
However, particular species of salmon are becoming rare in the Columbia & are often over-fished. Many restrictions placed on fishing don't apply to Native Americans. This has been (and will likely be a reoccurring ) hot political issue.
I'd like people to act more rationally. But if people are scared away from fishing (even though these fish have been shown to be quite safe), at least we can work on getting those salmon numbers up.
The very title of the article shows that the author doesn't understand Open Source Software. Very few blanket statements will apply to all open source projects or developers. His blanket statements are no different.
"If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it"
I've heard this, but it has been rare & is becoming more rare. In fact, I most often see it in conversations between two end users (and often on F/OSS for Windows). This can usually be seen as noise--in many cases the developers are quick to offer a much better reply, saying it is on the TODO, or offering short suggestions of how one might start to make a patch if they are so inclined. In other cases, complaints aren't expressed in the right forum--if this was the "last word," as the article's author states, it is often because no developers are able to read it. End users should be better educated how to voice their gripes & have something happen--search bugzilla (or a developer's mailing list) & if you seem to be the first one with the complaint, make it politely in what appears to be the correct forum for bug reports/feature requests!
"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems"
Well-written ("maintainable" or, as ESR says, transparent and discoverable) and highly used Open Source Software almost always receive patches or plugins not written by the development team. The Linux Kernel Team might keep tight reigns on what they maintain, but there are plenty of kernel patches that find their way all the way into the vanilla kernel, or are at least popular enough to be found in non-vanilla kernels. Many, many, more can be applied by end users.
Diff/patch are proof to me that this really isn't a myth. You might not choose to fix or even look at someone else's code, but you usually can (and, importantly, others are likely to).
All software should be free
There's still a not-insignificant amount of contention on making more libre software & what that exactly means. See numerous licensing arguments of BSD vs. GPL, etc. As for making all software gratis, as the article implies, I don't really hear this too often. Most people in F/OSS are quick to point out that "Free" doesn't refer to "free beer" & will offer numerous F/OSS projects which are sold (a boxed linux distro, for example).
He doesn't really seem to understand the "Commoditization of Software." There are a few different types of applications & F/OSS has pursued most of them & certainly all of the popular ones. Sometimes development is unpaid. In other cases, commercial companies "who get it" or national labs/universities which receive public funding have done the authoring. The thing is that once that F/OSS alternative is out there, it will often develop into something people want to use & want to make better so that others will use it too.
Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software
Better in what way? No one really claims that GNU-CAD is yet at the level of commercial counterparts, but it is foolish to say it is impossible for them to get to that level. (I also disagree that Windows has a better GUI than *nix.) For popular projects, the development is usually always better--code gets fixed faster & the number of users often indicates that the "Return on Investment" is better enough that losing some things (compatibility with proprietary binaries often being the biggie) to be worth it.
Scratching the personal itch
The thing is that many developers are end-users as well. Evolution and Firefox are fine examples. It is also very likely that F/OSS will try to satisfy the end user needs--anyone can voice gripes about it. The thing is that many end users also happen to be developers. The other thing is that those who don't want to adopt F/OSS want a 1:1 replacement of the commercial software they've become locked-in to. Patents and some restrictive licenses ma
"Mod parent Flamebait"
:-)
Oh really? And what about your post?
Grandparent and others just took your bait
The 4500 series were not the last to offer commercial skip. The 5000 series had it as well. 5500s do not, but they have "Show|Nav." Rather than enabling commercial skip for a whole show, you press one button to jump past one set of commercials using the same algorithm as "Commercial Advance" used.
The TiVo has a better user interface, but I don't find my ReplayTV 5040 to be "quirky" at all & appreciate several features it has that the TiVo lacks.
To be fair, SonicBlue was fighting legal battles over the Rio and was competing across several lines of multimedia devices. If any suit hurt them, it was probably the patent suit with TiVo.
In any case, you are correct that ReplayTV hasn't had smooth times. Yes, TiVo has more customers. Over half of them come from DirectTiVo deals. DirecTV will cut this tie to TiVo, so who knows what will happen to them then.
ReplayTV should have had the foresight to adopt a partner in this way--about half of all PVR subscriptions come from cable and satellite subscriptions, rather than direct from TiVo or Replay.
I know many who have chosen to get a Replay, including myself. They are less expensive, have ethernet built-in, and older models have show-sharing and commercial advance. Newer models still have "Show|Nav," which is a manually activated commercial skip & the ability to jump forward/back an arbitrary number of minutes is much better than similar TiVo features. You can also still stream content to other Replay boxes (or a computer) if on a LAN.
Unfortunately not--it was voluntarily and prematurely ended by the media companies. They agreed not to sue Replay owners, but the legality of Tivo or others using the same technology wasn't tested. See EFF for more information.