For one good use of a MP3 capable watch what about people who exercise by running or jogging? Seems like a watch would be much better than something you clip on your belt (which many people don't wear when jogging anyway).
I would agree with you in most of your points, but would point out that most higher courts are different. At least the US Supreme Court is primarily concerned with the meaning of the law, and it's original purpose. That's the impression and understanding I have. Perhaps this is also considered in lower court of appeals, but perhaps not.
Of course it does little good to only have one court, or a few courts if you count the courts of appeal, considering the original purpose of a law. Yes, many cases are appealed and get overturned, but I'd think that a much larger percentage are not. This has a direct impact on the behaviour of citizens and shapes the way in which society functions.
I don't know where to take this line of thought from here, but felt that it meritted mentioning...
Clearly some kind of legal framework is necessary. If I've got a great idea but can't protect it in law, M$ wins. As soon as a "deep pockets" high tech business gets a whiff of it, they can immediately direct more resources to it than I ever could. Very few first-to-market battles will be won by the little guy in the years to come.
That's illogical. If you can't protect it in law because there was no protection for ideas then it would follow that MS could not protect it in law either, nor would they be able to protect any of their other, original, ideas. I doubt MS would be as powerful to begin with if they didn't have the protection of law and everyone was sharing Windows 98 CD's like they share Linux CD's. Since they wouldn't have received the revenue for those sales, because not many original sales would have been made, they wouldn't have been some big powerful corporation that could "immediately direct more resources to it than I ever could."
You bought directly into the concept that ideas should be considered property but only tear down one side of that concept in your arguement against tearing down the concept of IP. This sounds like a tactic that MS would use to convice people to support their efforts against software "piracy."
It sounds like you need a paradigm shift in order to understand the other side of the argument...
I don't think that was the point at all. I think the point was that even though a table of contents may not have been obvious and was novel it should not have been patented if that occured to the inventor. Could you imagine if everyone had to pay a patent use fee for every book that had a table of contents? Don't you think the original holders would have tried to extend the coverage of this ficticious patent to all summaries or table of contents no matter their form, such as directories or index.html or any such similar concept? This would have been horrible, and it would have significantly stifled innovation and the progress of science (technology). Sure, patents have a limited time they are enforceable, but if the original inventors got that first patent you can be sure they would have patented every other form of a table of contents and would still hold patents for the whole concept in use today.
Are you suggesting that the wheel should have been patented and that no one should have been able to use it unless they payed the original inventor? Unbelievable!
NUTSCRAPE really sucks, the screen writing is slow and glitchy, and it is constantly flashing the entire screen
That's probably because you didn't have enough financial resources to purchase a decent video card that could support greater than 8 bit depth, limiting you to 256 colors. What you were probably seeing was probably a "colormap flash" because nutscrape, as you call it, was configured to use a private colormap so that images could be viewed at least somewhat acceptably.
A true Linux user would have had enough knowledge and experience to figure this out. That's probably why the average Linux user is more financially stable than non-Linux users. Knowledge and experience pays.
Yes, this is perfectly true, but it would allow DCCA (or whoever the appropriate entity is) to sue Xing for not protecting the information given to them as required by the license. I don't believe it would apply to the people who read and reverse-engineered Xing's unprotected CSS implementation.
"A trade secret law, however, does not offer protection against discovery by fair and honest means, such as by independent invention, accidental disclosure, or by so-called reverse engineering, that is by starting with the known product and working backward to divine the process which aided in its development or manufacture."
Xing accidentally disclosed the trade secret by not properly securing it. The cat's out of the bag. True DCCA may be able to sue Xing for allowing it to happen, but do you really think that Xing intentionally made those mistakes? Besides the courts can't really stuff the trade secret back into the bag and make everyone forget what they know. They are screwed (DCCA). If they wanted real protection they should have used a real encryption protocol and patented it. That would have given them what, 17 years, of protection where they had a real legal basis for bringing suit against those that illegally used it. NOT that I support software patents at all, but that gives you an idea of how idiotic I think DCCA is.
I know Diamond Slicer's post was supposed to be funny, but damnit some of the stuff he said makes sense (and others don't).
I am a geek - and all geeks are superior to other types of humans.
No, this is a bigoted and hateful statement. I would put it as we are superior in the things that count in this day and age than any other group of humans. Or, put another way, information technology is the most important, highest growth, sector of the economy, which few can argue with.
I run Linux. (Distro is kept secret for fear of alienating geek voters)
Now, this is a little silly also. A true geek would not mind at all telling the distroS they've used. For me it was SLS (?), Slackware (?), RedHat 5.2, Debian 2.0, RedHat 6.1, Corel (beta) and Debian (potato). Sometime in the future I'd like to try out Caldera, SuSe, and a few of the lesser known distro's.
I can code C,C++,Pascal,Basic,Visual Basic, HTML and have a rudimentary (very poor) knowledge of Perl.
Take out the Visual Basic but add in 80x86 assembly, 390 assembly, strong knowledge of perl, basic knolwedge of java, smalltalk, tcl, SQL, and of course all the shells. There's probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting but havn't used in years so I don't consider them to count.
If elected: I will destroy Windows - and open the WinNT source.
Don't solve the end result problems but the root problem. Work with Congress to pass laws forbidding the kinds of things that Microsoft did to legerage their monopoly. Remember, it's not illegal or particularly unethical to have a monopoly, only to use it in an unethical way.
I will destroy etoys.com amazon.com and any other.com that is annoying and stupid.
That's kind of vauge. I'd by executive order revoke all patents for programs or algorithms. What are they going to do, impeach and remove me from office because I won't enforce a law that I believe is unconstitutional? I'd also implement stiff fines for companies that knowingly submit frivolous patents and fire any patent inspector that does not do their job throughly. I'd rather have patent applications sit for 10 years to be reviewed than grant one patent that should never be granted.
I'd also work with Congress and craft new laws that deliniate the boundaries between the Internet and how the copyright and trademark laws apply. Most of this work would be in describing areas in which the copyright and trademark laws do NOT apply, as the assumption is that they do apply everywhere in every situation.
I will let DeCSS go to the stars (tell DVD guys to go to hell)
This would fall under the frivolous lawsuit if you ask me, and I would increase the fines for frivolous suits in proportion to how much they are seeking and the general (paper) worth of Internet stocks.
I will make the stupids slaves. (This should attract voters.)
This is unneeded. They are already slaves in their own way.
Note: The above presentation assumes that only smart people vote. Sadly (I am in Minnesota USA) that is not the case - our gov is Jesse "The Body" Ventura (an ex-pro wrestler whos iq ranges from 1 to 5). While literacy tests and like should not be reinstituted how about making a geeks vote count for 2.
Well, I wouldn't agree with that, but I could see instituting another layer of representatives or delegates so that the average Joe who doesn't know find that his vote counts even less. Just like there are checks and balances in the government, there needs to be checks and balances in the populance to protect against stupidity. How about allowing geeks to veto any president no matter how many popular or electoral votes they received? Let the people pick their president, but don't let them make stupid choices.
Yes, I vote... but rarely does the canidate of choice get elected.
Yes but we are talking about security flaws are we not? We are not talking about a bug in the software that makes the OS crash once a day. That is a inconvienance.
Take for example an ISP that uses Microsoft software in order to store it's customers credit card information. It's not loss of life or limb, but plenty of people would be pissed off if someone broke into the computer, stole the credit card information, and charged long distance calls to the other side of the world on end-user cards. Pissed people would be the end users themselves, the ISP, and the credit card companies (because they would have to deal with the customers and spend time and money to straigten things out). Should Microsoft be held responsible if this should happen? I'd find it hard to easily argue this in court, but I can think of several points given certain circumstances.
Say that there was a history of security flaws in Microsoft software over time (there is). Say that Microsoft always came out with a fix sooner or later (they do), but the underlying architecture seems to be the root cause of the issue (it does). Say that the only reason that Microsoft designed their systems the way they did was so that they could try to leverage their monopoly in the business PC OS market into their application program and internet commerce markets (who knows, but it seems plausible). If this could be proved then I think Microsoft should be held liable for not designing their software securely solely because it assisted in illegally using their monopoly to leverage and tie other products.
Why do people make programming seem so damn difficult. It's not. I don't know how to fix my car if it breaks down. I don't know the rules of the game for hockey. I don't know how to play golf. I don't know half of the teams in the NFL. Are any of these things difficult? I thought not. It all depends on where you apply yourself. I'd be amazed to find anyone that could program, was a car mechanic, new the rules to every sports game, payed extra for the satellite sports channels so the watched every basketball game ever played, and still had time for their family.
Arguing that programming is difficult is a crock. Sure, when all you had was C and assembly it was. COBOL was for business applications, which have little use in home environments. Now, you have things like Perl and Python that any guy on the street could learn relatively quickly if they gave it as much attention as they do to who's playing against whom on Monday Night Football.
Once you pick up one programming language the rest are easy. Yes, they may have some initial difficulty in learing all the pointer stuff in C, but really, do ya think it's rocket science? In fact, I'd rate programming as an easier task than most other "professional" engineering skills. Why? Because you can do it on relatively inexpensive equipment in your home at your leisure. Not like a car mechanic where if you want to have any experience with cars other than your make and model then you're pretty much out of luck. Or a rocket scientist who is pretty much out of luck unless they work for the government or big industry. Since you require big resources with other engineering jobs you necessarily have to work at a company or in the government and can't gain experience at home (practically, for the same type of investment needed for programming). No company is going to hire you for an engineering job unless you already know it professionally by gaining an engineering degree at a respectable college. I can't really gain the knowledge and experience for designing and manufacturing.18 micron CPU's and get a job at Intel by practicing at home, now can I?
Saying that programming is difficult for the average Joe is like saying an accountant's job is difficult. It's not. It's just adding and subtracting numbers and keeping stuff in the right accounts. Now if you go into the more professional areas and are talking about a corporate tax accountant they yes, that is difficult and deserves the respect they get. But I suppose the entry level accountant is much like the entry level programmer at any programming shop. Sure, to get the professional job they probably went to college for a few years, but the real, practicle knowledge and experience they probably could have picked up at home within six months as a hobby.
The courts will not create an otherwise-unjustified double standard between the behemoth and the little guy when the only difference between them is that one is a behemoth and one is a little guy.
Sure they would. They do all the time for "behemoths" that happen to have monopolies. There are all kinds of restrictions placed on companies that hold monopolies that would otherwise be illegal for the courts to restrict smaller companies in the same way.
Look at it this way. Microsoft knows with no uncertain doubt that in the area in which they hold a monopoly (PC operating systems primarily in business but also in home consumers) their isn't a chance in hell that individuals in companies are going to replace their Windows PCs with Linux, iMac, BEOS, or other "alternative" OSes. If you are going to take that route it's usually an all-or-nothing deal where the whole company has to switch over, which is a incentive not to switch in the first place. Hence, Microsoft is in the unique position where they know they don't really have to expend the resources necessary to totally fix the issues, meaning the underlying architecture issues, in their products that have security flaws. All they have to do is show an outward appearance of doing something to not make it look so blatent. Put up a web page with point fixes. They should really scrap ActiveX and redesign the whole thing. They spent too much effort on tying their other products (MS Office, Internet Explorer) into their monopoly product instead of worrying about the security implications. Because the security issues all revolve around how they tried to leverage other products based on their monopoly they should be treated differently than other software developers.
Ohh, I'd support this -- the deletion of the Amazon slashbox and informing Amazon.com why it was done. Maybe we could have a poll on Slashdot whether this should be done?
I think a lot of people will disagree with you that the '1-click' patent is a minor issue. I certainly do. It's idiotic to actually believe it's morally right to be able to patent software. Copyright, well that's argueable. Patent? Be serious. To actually sue another company for infringement is even more despicable.
But SNA would take business away from Microsoft's SNA Server product. I believe there's also a Linux-SNA project but it seems to have moved, and the new site is not responding yet.
I don't think that WINE is a Linux-only project, is it? Currently it's definately x86 only, but it's my understanding that it runs under multiple x86 Unix-like OSes. In fact, from the WINE about web page:
Wine works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
Hence, that the WINE project is aimed at providing binary compatability on Unix like OSes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solars, is not comparable to the FreeBSD kernel programmers providing binary compatability for Linux programs. Your point is meaningless.
I think you're wrong here, depending on your definition of the term USER. Anyone can take a GPL program and enhance it to their needs and not release the changes to the community, as long as they do not try to distribute their code or sell it. On the other hand, if you are not a USER (my definition) and are a company or developer or integrator who wants to modify code and then sell your changes or services to the community then you must release the source changes. I think this is fair. USERs are free to modify the code all they want, but if they want to try to profit from their changes by selling services or support then they must release the source. If they don't want to try to profit from their changes, what possible reason could there by for not releasing source changes?
for i in `ls patch-2.2.*.gz | sort -t . -g -k 3`; do zcat $i | patch -p0 done
Just have all the patch-2.2.x.gz files in/usr/src that you need to take you from your current version to whatever version you want. I even tested this from 2.2.0 through 2.2.13 and it worked fine. Moving linux to linux-2.2.13, untarring linux-2.2.13.tar.gz, and then running diff --unified --recursive linux linux-2.2.13 shows:
Nothing! See, told ya it isn't rocket science. I'd frankly be a little worried if there were any differences...
Um, that's what patches are for. You know, patch-2.2.13.bz2. If you're going to be compiling kernels it's assumed that you know how to apply a patch. It's not rocket science.
I'd think that it would have localized attenuation or gain so that the heat of a car does not blind the system of a person standing near the car. At least that's what I would try to have the system do.
About the reverse collision thing, I don't think that >= 3MpH is all that fast. Anything less than that can probably be absorbed by the rear bumper without much if any damage.
Re:Quick answers - no actually YOU are wrong
on
OpenBSD 2.6 released
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· Score: 1
Even Windows has "BSD sockets." I don't think this refers to requireing a BSD OS.
May be you read more into my message than is there, or may be I didn't make myself clear, which is more likely. I know that you can run VMware on a SCSI only system. But, I also know that you can't run it on raw partitions. You have to create a file on your Linux partition that acts like the Windows hard drive. Yes, I would like all the raw power of U2W to be available to guest OSes. Making a dual boot system defeats the purpose of having VMware, so that point is moot.
As I currently understand it, I can't use a partition on my SCSI drive as a raw partition under Windows.
Without downloading it and taking a look myself, I'd guess that you have old kernel headers that don't include the x86 vm stuff. By chance, can you run dosemu either? I'd guess not. Did you link/usr/include/linux and/usr/include/asm to/usr/src/linux/include/linux and/usr/src/linux/include/asm by chance?
Or, the vm stuff in 2.3.x changed enough so that freemware won't compile without changes...
You can't get a patent on a program, only an algorithm, which I don't think is right BTW.
I believe VMware does have a patent on some of their ideas, but as mentioned earlier if it's the same as what is used in FreeMWare, then the FreeMWare guys could just use the technique used in MERGE, as that's been around years before VMware even existed. It's even possible that VMware's patent could get invalidated due to prior art if they took FreeMWare to court and FreeMWare brought up the MERGE prior art thing. I don't know the exact technique used in VMware or if it's a "copy" of the MERGE prior art though, so you'd have to look into it yourself if you're interested.
1) You're assuming with your "instruction set tyranny" that there is only one true and best way to architect a CPU. You seem to be implying that it would be better if there was only one instruction set.
2) There are an almost incomprehensible number of computer programs out there current under closed licenses. The only way you could not be implying that there should only be one instruction set is if you truely believed that should all source code ever written be released with an open license that it would be trivial for everyone to port all programs to all currently existing architectures. This is to include mainframe apps, video games with special processors, and other esoteric programs that run on specialized hardware, often with significant assembly language portions. I don't think this is realistic or necessarily desireable (to have all programs "ported" to one instruction set, which would be the minimum to obtain the goal that I want. The ideal would be to have all programs ported to all instruction sets.).
I instead argue that it would be very desireable and realistically feasible to create a morphing CPU that could run programs from various different hardware architectures on one CPU at the same time. Sure, we would still have to write emulators for the rest of the hardware in specialized systems, but at least we would have the core CPU executing native instructions without the required CPU emulation. This is my arguement for the need of a CPU capable of dynamic instruction sets.
Transmeta seems to be the only company that I'm aware of that is creating or working on hardware that may be capable of this. If they are not, then too bad, it would have been nice. But I don't see anything wrong with hoping that they are.
And yes, open sourcing all existing computer software would be a Good Thing, but that doesn't solve the problem of running programs that were designed to be run on other hardware platforms at all. Especially when a significant amount of that source code is in assembler.
Slashdot Mirror
See Empeg.com and stop complaining.
For one good use of a MP3 capable watch what about people who exercise by running or jogging? Seems like a watch would be much better than something you clip on your belt (which many people don't wear when jogging anyway).
Whine Whine Whine...
I would agree with you in most of your points, but would point out that most higher courts are different. At least the US Supreme Court is primarily concerned with the meaning of the law, and it's original purpose. That's the impression and understanding I have. Perhaps this is also considered in lower court of appeals, but perhaps not.
Of course it does little good to only have one court, or a few courts if you count the courts of appeal, considering the original purpose of a law. Yes, many cases are appealed and get overturned, but I'd think that a much larger percentage are not. This has a direct impact on the behaviour of citizens and shapes the way in which society functions.
I don't know where to take this line of thought from here, but felt that it meritted mentioning...
Clearly some kind of legal framework is necessary. If I've got a great idea but can't
protect it in law, M$ wins. As soon as a "deep pockets" high tech business gets a whiff of it, they can
immediately direct more resources to it than I ever could. Very few first-to-market battles will be won by the little
guy in the years to come.
That's illogical. If you can't protect it in law because there was no protection for ideas then it would follow that MS could not protect it in law either, nor would they be able to protect any of their other, original, ideas. I doubt MS would be as powerful to begin with if they didn't have the protection of law and everyone was sharing Windows 98 CD's like they share Linux CD's. Since they wouldn't have received the revenue for those sales, because not many original sales would have been made, they wouldn't have been some big powerful corporation that could "immediately direct more resources to it than I ever could."
You bought directly into the concept that ideas should be considered property but only tear down one side of that concept in your arguement against tearing down the concept of IP. This sounds like a tactic that MS would use to convice people to support their efforts against software "piracy."
It sounds like you need a paradigm shift in order to understand the other side of the argument...
I don't think that was the point at all. I think the point was that even though a table of contents may not have been obvious and was novel it should not have been patented if that occured to the inventor. Could you imagine if everyone had to pay a patent use fee for every book that had a table of contents? Don't you think the original holders would have tried to extend the coverage of this ficticious patent to all summaries or table of contents no matter their form, such as directories or index.html or any such similar concept? This would have been horrible, and it would have significantly stifled innovation and the progress of science (technology). Sure, patents have a limited time they are enforceable, but if the original inventors got that first patent you can be sure they would have patented every other form of a table of contents and would still hold patents for the whole concept in use today.
Are you suggesting that the wheel should have been patented and that no one should have been able to use it unless they payed the original inventor? Unbelievable!
What would be wrong with allowing it but firmly stating that it (non-Windows access) was not supported in any way?
NUTSCRAPE really sucks, the screen writing is slow and
glitchy, and it is constantly flashing the entire screen
That's probably because you didn't have enough financial resources to purchase a decent video card that could support greater than 8 bit depth, limiting you to 256 colors. What you were probably seeing was probably a "colormap flash" because nutscrape, as you call it, was configured to use a private colormap so that images could be viewed at least somewhat acceptably.
A true Linux user would have had enough knowledge and experience to figure this out. That's probably why the average Linux user is more financially stable than non-Linux users. Knowledge and experience pays.
Yes, this is perfectly true, but it would allow DCCA (or whoever the appropriate entity is) to sue Xing for not protecting the information given to them as required by the license. I don't believe it would apply to the people who read and reverse-engineered Xing's unprotected CSS implementation.
"A trade secret law, however, does not offer protection against discovery by fair and honest means, such as by independent invention, accidental disclosure, or by so-called reverse engineering, that is by starting with the known product and working backward to divine the process which aided in its development or manufacture."
Xing accidentally disclosed the trade secret by not properly securing it. The cat's out of the bag. True DCCA may be able to sue Xing for allowing it to happen, but do you really think that Xing intentionally made those mistakes? Besides the courts can't really stuff the trade secret back into the bag and make everyone forget what they know. They are screwed (DCCA). If they wanted real protection they should have used a real encryption protocol and patented it. That would have given them what, 17 years, of protection where they had a real legal basis for bringing suit against those that illegally used it. NOT that I support software patents at all, but that gives you an idea of how idiotic I think DCCA is.
I know Diamond Slicer's post was supposed to be funny, but damnit some of the stuff he said makes sense (and others don't).
.com that is annoying and stupid.
I am a geek - and all geeks are superior to other types of humans.
No, this is a bigoted and hateful statement. I would put it as we are superior in the things that count in this day and age than any other group of humans. Or, put another way, information technology is the most important, highest growth, sector of the economy, which few can argue with.
I run Linux. (Distro is kept secret for fear of alienating geek voters)
Now, this is a little silly also. A true geek would not mind at all telling the distroS they've used. For me it was SLS (?), Slackware (?), RedHat 5.2, Debian 2.0, RedHat 6.1, Corel (beta) and Debian (potato). Sometime in the future I'd like to try out Caldera, SuSe, and a few of the lesser known distro's.
I can code C,C++,Pascal,Basic,Visual Basic, HTML and have a rudimentary (very poor) knowledge of Perl.
Take out the Visual Basic but add in 80x86 assembly, 390 assembly, strong knowledge of perl, basic knolwedge of java, smalltalk, tcl, SQL, and of course all the shells. There's probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting but havn't used in years so I don't consider them to count.
If elected:
I will destroy Windows - and open the WinNT source.
Don't solve the end result problems but the root problem. Work with Congress to pass laws forbidding the kinds of things that Microsoft did to legerage their monopoly. Remember, it's not illegal or particularly unethical to have a monopoly, only to use it in an unethical way.
I will destroy etoys.com amazon.com and any other
That's kind of vauge. I'd by executive order revoke all patents for programs or algorithms. What are they going to do, impeach and remove me from office because I won't enforce a law that I believe is unconstitutional? I'd also implement stiff fines for companies that knowingly submit frivolous patents and fire any patent inspector that does not do their job throughly. I'd rather have patent applications sit for 10 years to be reviewed than grant one patent that should never be granted.
I'd also work with Congress and craft new laws that deliniate the boundaries between the Internet and how the copyright and trademark laws apply. Most of this work would be in describing areas in which the copyright and trademark laws do NOT apply, as the assumption is that they do apply everywhere in every situation.
I will let DeCSS go to the stars (tell DVD guys to go to hell)
This would fall under the frivolous lawsuit if you ask me, and I would increase the fines for frivolous suits in proportion to how much they are seeking and the general (paper) worth of Internet stocks.
I will make the stupids slaves. (This should attract voters.)
This is unneeded. They are already slaves in their own way.
Note: The above presentation assumes that only smart people vote. Sadly (I am in Minnesota USA) that is not the case - our gov is Jesse "The Body" Ventura (an ex-pro wrestler whos iq ranges from 1 to 5). While literacy tests and like should not be reinstituted how about making a geeks vote count for 2.
Well, I wouldn't agree with that, but I could see instituting another layer of representatives or delegates so that the average Joe who doesn't know find that his vote counts even less. Just like there are checks and balances in the government, there needs to be checks and balances in the populance to protect against stupidity. How about allowing geeks to veto any president no matter how many popular or electoral votes they received? Let the people pick their president, but don't let them make stupid choices.
Yes, I vote... but rarely does the canidate of choice get elected.
Me too.
Yes but we are talking about security flaws are we not? We are not talking about a bug in the software that makes the OS crash once a day. That is a inconvienance.
Take for example an ISP that uses Microsoft software in order to store it's customers credit card information. It's not loss of life or limb, but plenty of people would be pissed off if someone broke into the computer, stole the credit card information, and charged long distance calls to the other side of the world on end-user cards. Pissed people would be the end users themselves, the ISP, and the credit card companies (because they would have to deal with the customers and spend time and money to straigten things out). Should Microsoft be held responsible if this should happen? I'd find it hard to easily argue this in court, but I can think of several points given certain circumstances.
Say that there was a history of security flaws in Microsoft software over time (there is). Say that Microsoft always came out with a fix sooner or later (they do), but the underlying architecture seems to be the root cause of the issue (it does). Say that the only reason that Microsoft designed their systems the way they did was so that they could try to leverage their monopoly in the business PC OS market into their application program and internet commerce markets (who knows, but it seems plausible). If this could be proved then I think Microsoft should be held liable for not designing their software securely solely because it assisted in illegally using their monopoly to leverage and tie other products.
How many people even know how to program?
.18 micron CPU's and get a job at Intel by practicing at home, now can I?
Why do people make programming seem so damn difficult. It's not. I don't know how to fix my car if it breaks down. I don't know the rules of the game for hockey. I don't know how to play golf. I don't know half of the teams in the NFL. Are any of these things difficult? I thought not. It all depends on where you apply yourself. I'd be amazed to find anyone that could program, was a car mechanic, new the rules to every sports game, payed extra for the satellite sports channels so the watched every basketball game ever played, and still had time for their family.
Arguing that programming is difficult is a crock. Sure, when all you had was C and assembly it was. COBOL was for business applications, which have little use in home environments. Now, you have things like Perl and Python that any guy on the street could learn relatively quickly if they gave it as much attention as they do to who's playing against whom on Monday Night Football.
Once you pick up one programming language the rest are easy. Yes, they may have some initial difficulty in learing all the pointer stuff in C, but really, do ya think it's rocket science? In fact, I'd rate programming as an easier task than most other "professional" engineering skills. Why? Because you can do it on relatively inexpensive equipment in your home at your leisure. Not like a car mechanic where if you want to have any experience with cars other than your make and model then you're pretty much out of luck. Or a rocket scientist who is pretty much out of luck unless they work for the government or big industry. Since you require big resources with other engineering jobs you necessarily have to work at a company or in the government and can't gain experience at home (practically, for the same type of investment needed for programming). No company is going to hire you for an engineering job unless you already know it professionally by gaining an engineering degree at a respectable college. I can't really gain the knowledge and experience for designing and manufacturing
Saying that programming is difficult for the average Joe is like saying an accountant's job is difficult. It's not. It's just adding and subtracting numbers and keeping stuff in the right accounts. Now if you go into the more professional areas and are talking about a corporate tax accountant they yes, that is difficult and deserves the respect they get. But I suppose the entry level accountant is much like the entry level programmer at any programming shop. Sure, to get the professional job they probably went to college for a few years, but the real, practicle knowledge and experience they probably could have picked up at home within six months as a hobby.
The courts will not create an otherwise-unjustified double standard between the
behemoth and the little guy when the only difference between them is that one is a behemoth and one is a little guy.
Sure they would. They do all the time for "behemoths" that happen to have monopolies. There are all kinds of restrictions placed on companies that hold monopolies that would otherwise be illegal for the courts to restrict smaller companies in the same way.
Look at it this way. Microsoft knows with no uncertain doubt that in the area in which they hold a monopoly (PC operating systems primarily in business but also in home consumers) their isn't a chance in hell that individuals in companies are going to replace their Windows PCs with Linux, iMac, BEOS, or other "alternative" OSes. If you are going to take that route it's usually an all-or-nothing deal where the whole company has to switch over, which is a incentive not to switch in the first place. Hence, Microsoft is in the unique position where they know they don't really have to expend the resources necessary to totally fix the issues, meaning the underlying architecture issues, in their products that have security flaws. All they have to do is show an outward appearance of doing something to not make it look so blatent. Put up a web page with point fixes. They should really scrap ActiveX and redesign the whole thing. They spent too much effort on tying their other products (MS Office, Internet Explorer) into their monopoly product instead of worrying about the security implications. Because the security issues all revolve around how they tried to leverage other products based on their monopoly they should be treated differently than other software developers.
Ohh, I'd support this -- the deletion of the Amazon slashbox and informing Amazon.com why it was done. Maybe we could have a poll on Slashdot whether this should be done?
I think a lot of people will disagree with you that the '1-click' patent is a minor issue. I certainly do. It's idiotic to actually believe it's morally right to be able to patent software. Copyright, well that's argueable. Patent? Be serious. To actually sue another company for infringement is even more despicable.
But SNA would take business away from Microsoft's SNA Server product. I believe there's also a Linux-SNA project but it seems to have moved, and the new site is not responding yet.
I don't think that WINE is a Linux-only project, is it? Currently it's definately x86 only, but it's my understanding that it runs under multiple x86 Unix-like OSes. In fact, from the WINE about web page:
Wine works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
Hence, that the WINE project is aimed at providing binary compatability on Unix like OSes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solars, is not comparable to the FreeBSD kernel programmers providing binary compatability for Linux programs. Your point is meaningless.
I think you're wrong here, depending on your definition of the term USER. Anyone can take a GPL program and enhance it to their needs and not release the changes to the community, as long as they do not try to distribute their code or sell it. On the other hand, if you are not a USER (my definition) and are a company or developer or integrator who wants to modify code and then sell your changes or services to the community then you must release the source changes. I think this is fair. USERs are free to modify the code all they want, but if they want to try to profit from their changes by selling services or support then they must release the source. If they don't want to try to profit from their changes, what possible reason could there by for not releasing source changes?
for i in `ls patch-2.2.*.gz | sort -t . -g -k 3`; do
/usr/src that you need to take you from your current version to whatever version you want. I even tested this from 2.2.0 through 2.2.13 and it worked fine. Moving linux to linux-2.2.13, untarring linux-2.2.13.tar.gz, and then running diff --unified --recursive linux linux-2.2.13 shows:
zcat $i | patch -p0
done
Just have all the patch-2.2.x.gz files in
Nothing! See, told ya it isn't rocket science. I'd frankly be a little worried if there were any differences...
Um, that's what patches are for. You know, patch-2.2.13.bz2. If you're going to be compiling kernels it's assumed that you know how to apply a patch. It's not rocket science.
I'd think that it would have localized attenuation or gain so that the heat of a car does not blind the system of a person standing near the car. At least that's what I would try to have the system do.
About the reverse collision thing, I don't think that >= 3MpH is all that fast. Anything less than that can probably be absorbed by the rear bumper without much if any damage.
Even Windows has "BSD sockets." I don't think this refers to requireing a BSD OS.
May be you read more into my message than is there, or may be I didn't make myself clear, which is more likely. I know that you can run VMware on a SCSI only system. But, I also know that you can't run it on raw partitions. You have to create a file on your Linux partition that acts like the Windows hard drive. Yes, I would like all the raw power of U2W to be available to guest OSes. Making a dual boot system defeats the purpose of having VMware, so that point is moot.
As I currently understand it, I can't use a partition on my SCSI drive as a raw partition under Windows.
Without downloading it and taking a look myself, I'd guess that you have old kernel headers that don't include the x86 vm stuff. By chance, can you run dosemu either? I'd guess not. Did you link /usr/include/linux and /usr/include/asm to /usr/src/linux/include/linux and /usr/src/linux/include/asm by chance?
Or, the vm stuff in 2.3.x changed enough so that freemware won't compile without changes...
You can't get a patent on a program, only an algorithm, which I don't think is right BTW.
I believe VMware does have a patent on some of their ideas, but as mentioned earlier if it's the same as what is used in FreeMWare, then the FreeMWare guys could just use the technique used in MERGE, as that's been around years before VMware even existed. It's even possible that VMware's patent could get invalidated due to prior art if they took FreeMWare to court and FreeMWare brought up the MERGE prior art thing. I don't know the exact technique used in VMware or if it's a "copy" of the MERGE prior art though, so you'd have to look into it yourself if you're interested.
Two points:
1) You're assuming with your "instruction set tyranny" that there is only one true and best way to architect a CPU. You seem to be implying that it would be better if there was only one instruction set.
2) There are an almost incomprehensible number of computer programs out there current under closed licenses. The only way you could not be implying that there should only be one instruction set is if you truely believed that should all source code ever written be released with an open license that it would be trivial for everyone to port all programs to all currently existing architectures. This is to include mainframe apps, video games with special processors, and other esoteric programs that run on specialized hardware, often with significant assembly language portions. I don't think this is realistic or necessarily desireable (to have all programs "ported" to one instruction set, which would be the minimum to obtain the goal that I want. The ideal would be to have all programs ported to all instruction sets.).
I instead argue that it would be very desireable and realistically feasible to create a morphing CPU that could run programs from various different hardware architectures on one CPU at the same time. Sure, we would still have to write emulators for the rest of the hardware in specialized systems, but at least we would have the core CPU executing native instructions without the required CPU emulation. This is my arguement for the need of a CPU capable of dynamic instruction sets.
Transmeta seems to be the only company that I'm aware of that is creating or working on hardware that may be capable of this. If they are not, then too bad, it would have been nice. But I don't see anything wrong with hoping that they are.
And yes, open sourcing all existing computer software would be a Good Thing, but that doesn't solve the problem of running programs that were designed to be run on other hardware platforms at all. Especially when a significant amount of that source code is in assembler.
I didn't even "realize" all the "quotes" until you wrote your "informative" reply. Thanks, I'll make sure I "watch" that in the "future."