Until you ned to make a minor change to the code and find out you have to redevelop a module from scratch because the people responsible for it optimized it until nobody but the original developer (who has since left the company) has a chance of understanding the code in a reasonable timeframe.
Of course this can be avoided through really thorough documentation, but few people are enthusiastic about documenting every step and then documenting the optimizations applied to it.
That would be a big PR problem for China, though. The message they'd send would be "don't give us access to any kind of technology or we'll do whatever we want with it". The end result might be sanctions like trade tarriffs. Those tarriffs would not neccessarily be good for China's trade partners (China is a big producer of everything) but they would probably hurt China more than the rest of the world (the rest of the wrld is bigger than China). In the end, it's not a smart move to piss off the whole planet like that.
I'd rather expect China aiding Lenovo in dragging out the court case until nobody cares anymore. That appears to be a legitimate and accepted legal tactic everwhere.
I can understand why the Pandora has a full-fledged Linux distribution running - it's simply a game-oriented ultraportable. But for a pure game console a trimmed-down Fedora seems like an odd choice for an operating system...
However, popular culture is very much based around entertainment. European Popular culture is not defined by Vivaldi, Bach or Schiller. It's defined by Britney Spears, John Carmack and (let's add some German flavor) Til Schweiger*. And Schweiger high-tailed it to Hollywood as soon as he had the chance, as any sensible high-class actor would do.
What do we randomly quote in our conversations? Monty Python (admittedly European, even if the Brits won't admit it), Matrix, Star Wars. Local movies not so much because there's rarely one worth remembering lines from. Which language is taking over our culture to the point where many (if not most) TV ads randomly use it? American English. To the point where we sometimes find it hard to express concepts in our goddamn mother language.
Popular culture expects that Europeans are familiar with the American political system, the school system, parts of the legal system... Sure, we have our own culture, but it's by no means independent from that of the USA.
* I could have said "Arnold Schwarzenegger", but Schweiger was actually a popular actor before he went to the States.
I can't imagine not doing so. We live in a globalized world and there better be some kind of advantage to it. I want a decent science fiction show. Turns out that the USA has the best SciFi shows; the best Europe currently has to offer is Torchwood and I'd rather not spend my time with that. So I watch American SciFi shows. When I want quirky comedy I watch something Japanese, as they are best at that.
Each country has their own strengths. I think that the USA do accumulate the best actors while Japanese voice actors are head and shoulders above their global competition. Screenplays are all over the place. Germany (where I come from)... well, we have a couple decent bands and I hear we're pretty good at special effects.
I could definitely never subsist on German popular culture alone... but then again Germany never was without foreign popular culture since the end of WWII. We've always been fairly reliant on American music and later TV series - to the point where not too long ago it was considered somewhat daring for a German band to sing in German and not in English.
IPRED has made the Pireate Party much more attractive. Somenone posted a link to their membership statistics page. Look at what happened after IPRED: A membership surge that doesn't look like it's over yet.
If the Pirate Party manages to become important enough to be considered for a government coalition you can bet that the other parties are going to re-evaluate their stance on filesharing. Getting into the government is more important to them than anything they might or might not believe in, so they'll consider a more filesharing-friendly stance.
In short: The handful of guys getting laws passed will win, but in Sweden that handful of guys might actually end up being on the filesharers' side.
"enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers" - Check
"manner unduly aggressive or opportunistic" - They told the companies up front they'd have to license the patent. The companies agreed. Then CSIRO asked the companies to please pay the agreed fees for a decade before suing. If that's "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" I have no idea what isn't.
"no intention to manufacture" - They are a research organisation intended to develop new technologies. Yes, you can do that even if you're not a privately-owned company. They develop new tech, license it to others and use the proceeds to fund the development of further new tech.
"no intention to market" - Again, they exist to develop new technology, not to market it. Actually, they do market it by letting companies license it.
Imagine ARM sued any of its licensees over failure to pay licensing fees.
"enforces its [IP] against one or more alleged infringers" - Check
"manner unduly aggressive or opportunistic" - Probably less than one decade of warnings so definitely check.
"no intention to manufacture" - ARM doesn't manufacture chips. Check.
"no intention to market" - ARM doesn't directly sell chips. Check.
Since ARM only licenses their IP instead of manufacturing their own chips ARM automatically becomes an IP troll if someone shafts them. Looks to me like there's some fault in your definition, most probably around the part where "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" always evaluates to true.
You didn't actually read anything past "patented", right? Neither is this about software nor did you have a working example of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing around when you were twelve (unless you are young enough to have been twelve after CSIRO developed the technology).
Also, CSIRO disclosed its patent during the standardisation process and told everyone they'd expect licensing fees. Everyone agreed to use the tech and pay for it. It's not like they snuck it into the standard.
Please read at least TFS and a couple posts before replying.
Being that CSIRO belongs to the Australian government, I seriously doubt they expect IBM to buy them out or attempt to. They might have decided that IBM is too expensive a target to take on, however. (On the other hand, Lenovo is not known for having an army of ferocious lawyers so they'd be a regular target.)
I think the "some people actually licensed the patent" theory might have merit. Or CSIRO simply doesn't have the money to take on all of them at once.
Whether or not you believer that child pornography is used by the politicians to manipulate the masses, the parent is right about the wrong thing being persecuted. While one could argue the those who look at CP might hve a higher disposition towards exploiting children (and I have yet to see a scientific study that actually proves it - even ideas that sound obvious might be wrong), going after and demonizing those people is neither going to effectively protect children from being molested, nor is it going to keep the producers from making and selling the stuff. In both cases I (like the parent) point to drugs, where the same thing does absolutely nothing.
Especially bad is that people even remotely suspect of having such pictures on their computer are immediately dehumanized by the media while the same is not true for the producers. When was the last time you've seen the media do a big story about a man who produced CP? And when was the last time yo've seen the same for a CP "consumer"? Whatever the prosecutors do, the media couldn't care less about the manufacturers. They are merely a number to be used with the phrase "child pornography ring". But God help you if someone suspects you have a picture of a naked underage girl on your mobile - literally. Because anything short of divine intervention won't help against the massive loss of reputation the media are going to inflict on you.
I don't see why supporting a subsystem until it is fully replaced by another drags down development.
The problem is that GNOME can end up supporting the current system, its predecessor and the predecessor's predecessor. I remember trying to install GnuCash under Portage/OS X: The dependencies included three or four different documentation systems, one of which in turn depended on teTeX, making the unwanted documentation stuff well over one gigabyte in size. Granted, I could restart portage with USE="-doc", but I still ended up installing packages that I knew superseded each other.
Evolutionary development is all nice but occasionally it's a good idea to set a milestone at which all components are to have migrated away from legacy technology. Otherwise you'll end up carrying around old cruft until the heat death of the universe.
Ah. I applied "active cooling" to "desktop" and not "Intel 5400" (although I admittedly assumed that "5400" is a C2D model name).
As for the 486: I know, I had one, too (with a heatsink, though). But I think the computer as a whole did have a fan - again, I thought the GGP referred to his whole machine.
Wear tinfoil hat is the only safeguard against unexpected memory degradation.
Haven't you heard? Cosmic rays are more powerful than the LHC and that's already powerful enough to create black holes. The cosmic rays create tiny black holes in your brain, which eat up the neurons. That's what causes Alzheimer's in the long run.
The big problem is that tinfoil was designed against mind control rays, which are much less energetic. Cosmic rays punch right through as it's neither think no dense enough. One centimeter of lead, however, will keep your head reasonably safe. You could hollow out a motorcycle helmet and put the stuff in there and people couldn't even tell that you have the health advantage over them!
My desktop has an Intel 5400 chipset and requires ECC memory - it has a lot of interested requirements including active cooling.
Don't virtually all non-embedded systems require active cooling? I've never seen a desktop system that runs entirely without fans, a watercooling rig etc. Not after the Amiga, anyway.
Following that logic, everybody who does not unconditionally love something must absolutely hate it as any form of criticism equals hate. For instance, I really like OS X but since I think that Stacks have been implemented suboptimally I would have to hate it.
The world is not binary and it's possible to be critical of something without spewing slurs.
Christians have been locked up and killed for this message by Jews, Romans, Catholics, Communists and Muslims. This is where such a law will undoubtedly lead.
No, that's the wonderful part. Since loking up and cilling can be construed as extreme forms of criticism, nobody will do that anymore. Because, you know, irrational extremists really care about the UN Human Rights Council.
The funny thing is that this would help everyone involved (even the users might appreciate the link and one click to remove the ad isn't too disruptive) but it's unlikely the industry is going to like it.
Now here's an idea: A website that has a searchable database of artists with reasons why you should or shouldn't buy their music. That site would aggregate public statements like those found on the website mentioned in TFA as well as gather stats where the artists release their music, who produced it etc. Users can then log in and assign scores to certain things (like "records with an RIAA member" or "produced by Phil Spector"), which ultimately leads to the website issuing warnings or recommendations about certain albums when queried. For non-registeres users it simply delivers the facts.
Then again, the site would probably immediately get sued as they might prevent record sales, which is a criminal offense in the eyes of the record industry.
Care to give examples for that lost music? Videos, maybe, but the music itself?
Well, not exactly lost, but Google and YouTube can help make one aware of a band one previously didn't know about. For example, I often hear "new" songs (that are most likely older than me) on the radio. If I like one I try to remember a certain line, let's say "Come on, let's go for the guitar king". I then google that like to find the song's title and interpret and validate my result by looking up the music video on YouTube.
Now that I know a good song's interpret and title I can look for further videos by the band (scoping out whether the band as a whole is worth my attention) and also look up the band on Wikipedia to learn about their discography and whether they have any policies I strongly (dis-)agree with. If I find the band to be reasonable and the music to be of generally good quality this might translate into an album sale.
If I don't find anything about the band? I assume they're a manufactured one-hit wonder and the album contains one good song and twenty minutes of filler. I don't pay musicians I don't know about; the record industry has alienated me enough to prefer not buying music over funding an RIAA lapdog. (Actually, any artist with an RIAA/IFPI member label has severely diminished chances of seeing a single dime from me. Sorry, but the corps have made music more about economic warfare than about art.)
What if I couldn't use Google, YouTube and Wikipedia to gather comprehensive information about a band? I simply wouldn't buy music at all. I'd rather see the industry die than risking the chance of giving money to Sony. That bridge has been thoroughly burned by them.
True. The last browser war was about substance (standards compatibility); this one is merely about being faster. Wow, that sure is going to take the web forward. I mean, speed is nice but could we please get widespread support for things like CSS3, MNG (aPNG works in theory but is unsupported by virtually every graphics editor) or even XHTML (I'm looking at you, IE)?
It really depends on what you want, though. If you're looking for that album Hank the Knife and the Jets released back in the Seventies it's somewhat unlikely that Usenet will help you much. SoulSeek, on the other hand, might help you as it's a specialized music sharing app and tends to have obscure stuff like that. Likewise, the eDonkey network (generally useless as it is) has lots of old stuff that other networks don't carry anymore.
It always depends on your profile. I'm fairly certain that Usenet wouldn't do much for me as I tend to go for old obscure stuff (I've seen quoted miniscule retention times of 200 days - that virtually guarantees everything I'm interested in is long gone).
"Operating systems". That's a plural. Okay, there was always Darwin but that's essentially OS X lite. And various BSDs but they don't count. And probably lots of other operating systems for PowerPC. But those weren't opportunities. My point is entirely valid. These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
Gesundheit.
Until you ned to make a minor change to the code and find out you have to redevelop a module from scratch because the people responsible for it optimized it until nobody but the original developer (who has since left the company) has a chance of understanding the code in a reasonable timeframe.
Of course this can be avoided through really thorough documentation, but few people are enthusiastic about documenting every step and then documenting the optimizations applied to it.
That would be a big PR problem for China, though. The message they'd send would be "don't give us access to any kind of technology or we'll do whatever we want with it". The end result might be sanctions like trade tarriffs. Those tarriffs would not neccessarily be good for China's trade partners (China is a big producer of everything) but they would probably hurt China more than the rest of the world (the rest of the wrld is bigger than China). In the end, it's not a smart move to piss off the whole planet like that.
I'd rather expect China aiding Lenovo in dragging out the court case until nobody cares anymore. That appears to be a legitimate and accepted legal tactic everwhere.
I can understand why the Pandora has a full-fledged Linux distribution running - it's simply a game-oriented ultraportable. But for a pure game console a trimmed-down Fedora seems like an odd choice for an operating system...
However, popular culture is very much based around entertainment. European Popular culture is not defined by Vivaldi, Bach or Schiller. It's defined by Britney Spears, John Carmack and (let's add some German flavor) Til Schweiger*. And Schweiger high-tailed it to Hollywood as soon as he had the chance, as any sensible high-class actor would do.
What do we randomly quote in our conversations? Monty Python (admittedly European, even if the Brits won't admit it), Matrix, Star Wars. Local movies not so much because there's rarely one worth remembering lines from. Which language is taking over our culture to the point where many (if not most) TV ads randomly use it? American English. To the point where we sometimes find it hard to express concepts in our goddamn mother language.
Popular culture expects that Europeans are familiar with the American political system, the school system, parts of the legal system... Sure, we have our own culture, but it's by no means independent from that of the USA.
* I could have said "Arnold Schwarzenegger", but Schweiger was actually a popular actor before he went to the States.
I can't imagine not doing so. We live in a globalized world and there better be some kind of advantage to it. I want a decent science fiction show. Turns out that the USA has the best SciFi shows; the best Europe currently has to offer is Torchwood and I'd rather not spend my time with that. So I watch American SciFi shows. When I want quirky comedy I watch something Japanese, as they are best at that.
Each country has their own strengths. I think that the USA do accumulate the best actors while Japanese voice actors are head and shoulders above their global competition. Screenplays are all over the place. Germany (where I come from)... well, we have a couple decent bands and I hear we're pretty good at special effects.
I could definitely never subsist on German popular culture alone... but then again Germany never was without foreign popular culture since the end of WWII. We've always been fairly reliant on American music and later TV series - to the point where not too long ago it was considered somewhat daring for a German band to sing in German and not in English.
IPRED has made the Pireate Party much more attractive. Somenone posted a link to their membership statistics page. Look at what happened after IPRED: A membership surge that doesn't look like it's over yet.
If the Pirate Party manages to become important enough to be considered for a government coalition you can bet that the other parties are going to re-evaluate their stance on filesharing. Getting into the government is more important to them than anything they might or might not believe in, so they'll consider a more filesharing-friendly stance.
In short: The handful of guys getting laws passed will win, but in Sweden that handful of guys might actually end up being on the filesharers' side.
"enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers" - Check
"manner unduly aggressive or opportunistic" - They told the companies up front they'd have to license the patent. The companies agreed. Then CSIRO asked the companies to please pay the agreed fees for a decade before suing. If that's "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" I have no idea what isn't.
"no intention to manufacture" - They are a research organisation intended to develop new technologies. Yes, you can do that even if you're not a privately-owned company. They develop new tech, license it to others and use the proceeds to fund the development of further new tech.
"no intention to market" - Again, they exist to develop new technology, not to market it. Actually, they do market it by letting companies license it.
Imagine ARM sued any of its licensees over failure to pay licensing fees.
"enforces its [IP] against one or more alleged infringers" - Check
"manner unduly aggressive or opportunistic" - Probably less than one decade of warnings so definitely check.
"no intention to manufacture" - ARM doesn't manufacture chips. Check.
"no intention to market" - ARM doesn't directly sell chips. Check.
Since ARM only licenses their IP instead of manufacturing their own chips ARM automatically becomes an IP troll if someone shafts them. Looks to me like there's some fault in your definition, most probably around the part where "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" always evaluates to true.
You didn't actually read anything past "patented", right? Neither is this about software nor did you have a working example of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing around when you were twelve (unless you are young enough to have been twelve after CSIRO developed the technology).
Also, CSIRO disclosed its patent during the standardisation process and told everyone they'd expect licensing fees. Everyone agreed to use the tech and pay for it. It's not like they snuck it into the standard.
Please read at least TFS and a couple posts before replying.
Yeah, they had one back in 1995. It was pretty nice. They then recycled the brand name for Linux workstations with experimental hardware, though.
Being that CSIRO belongs to the Australian government, I seriously doubt they expect IBM to buy them out or attempt to. They might have decided that IBM is too expensive a target to take on, however. (On the other hand, Lenovo is not known for having an army of ferocious lawyers so they'd be a regular target.)
I think the "some people actually licensed the patent" theory might have merit. Or CSIRO simply doesn't have the money to take on all of them at once.
Whether or not you believer that child pornography is used by the politicians to manipulate the masses, the parent is right about the wrong thing being persecuted. While one could argue the those who look at CP might hve a higher disposition towards exploiting children (and I have yet to see a scientific study that actually proves it - even ideas that sound obvious might be wrong), going after and demonizing those people is neither going to effectively protect children from being molested, nor is it going to keep the producers from making and selling the stuff. In both cases I (like the parent) point to drugs, where the same thing does absolutely nothing.
Especially bad is that people even remotely suspect of having such pictures on their computer are immediately dehumanized by the media while the same is not true for the producers. When was the last time you've seen the media do a big story about a man who produced CP? And when was the last time yo've seen the same for a CP "consumer"? Whatever the prosecutors do, the media couldn't care less about the manufacturers. They are merely a number to be used with the phrase "child pornography ring". But God help you if someone suspects you have a picture of a naked underage girl on your mobile - literally. Because anything short of divine intervention won't help against the massive loss of reputation the media are going to inflict on you.
The problem is that GNOME can end up supporting the current system, its predecessor and the predecessor's predecessor. I remember trying to install GnuCash under Portage/OS X: The dependencies included three or four different documentation systems, one of which in turn depended on teTeX, making the unwanted documentation stuff well over one gigabyte in size. Granted, I could restart portage with USE="-doc", but I still ended up installing packages that I knew superseded each other.
Evolutionary development is all nice but occasionally it's a good idea to set a milestone at which all components are to have migrated away from legacy technology. Otherwise you'll end up carrying around old cruft until the heat death of the universe.
Ah. I applied "active cooling" to "desktop" and not "Intel 5400" (although I admittedly assumed that "5400" is a C2D model name).
As for the 486: I know, I had one, too (with a heatsink, though). But I think the computer as a whole did have a fan - again, I thought the GGP referred to his whole machine.
Haven't you heard? Cosmic rays are more powerful than the LHC and that's already powerful enough to create black holes. The cosmic rays create tiny black holes in your brain, which eat up the neurons. That's what causes Alzheimer's in the long run.
The big problem is that tinfoil was designed against mind control rays, which are much less energetic. Cosmic rays punch right through as it's neither think no dense enough. One centimeter of lead, however, will keep your head reasonably safe. You could hollow out a motorcycle helmet and put the stuff in there and people couldn't even tell that you have the health advantage over them!
Don't virtually all non-embedded systems require active cooling? I've never seen a desktop system that runs entirely without fans, a watercooling rig etc. Not after the Amiga, anyway.
Following that logic, everybody who does not unconditionally love something must absolutely hate it as any form of criticism equals hate. For instance, I really like OS X but since I think that Stacks have been implemented suboptimally I would have to hate it.
The world is not binary and it's possible to be critical of something without spewing slurs.
No, that's the wonderful part. Since loking up and cilling can be construed as extreme forms of criticism, nobody will do that anymore. Because, you know, irrational extremists really care about the UN Human Rights Council.
The funny thing is that this would help everyone involved (even the users might appreciate the link and one click to remove the ad isn't too disruptive) but it's unlikely the industry is going to like it.
Now here's an idea: A website that has a searchable database of artists with reasons why you should or shouldn't buy their music. That site would aggregate public statements like those found on the website mentioned in TFA as well as gather stats where the artists release their music, who produced it etc. Users can then log in and assign scores to certain things (like "records with an RIAA member" or "produced by Phil Spector"), which ultimately leads to the website issuing warnings or recommendations about certain albums when queried. For non-registeres users it simply delivers the facts.
Then again, the site would probably immediately get sued as they might prevent record sales, which is a criminal offense in the eyes of the record industry.
Well, not exactly lost, but Google and YouTube can help make one aware of a band one previously didn't know about. For example, I often hear "new" songs (that are most likely older than me) on the radio. If I like one I try to remember a certain line, let's say "Come on, let's go for the guitar king". I then google that like to find the song's title and interpret and validate my result by looking up the music video on YouTube.
Now that I know a good song's interpret and title I can look for further videos by the band (scoping out whether the band as a whole is worth my attention) and also look up the band on Wikipedia to learn about their discography and whether they have any policies I strongly (dis-)agree with. If I find the band to be reasonable and the music to be of generally good quality this might translate into an album sale.
If I don't find anything about the band? I assume they're a manufactured one-hit wonder and the album contains one good song and twenty minutes of filler. I don't pay musicians I don't know about; the record industry has alienated me enough to prefer not buying music over funding an RIAA lapdog. (Actually, any artist with an RIAA/IFPI member label has severely diminished chances of seeing a single dime from me. Sorry, but the corps have made music more about economic warfare than about art.)
What if I couldn't use Google, YouTube and Wikipedia to gather comprehensive information about a band? I simply wouldn't buy music at all. I'd rather see the industry die than risking the chance of giving money to Sony. That bridge has been thoroughly burned by them.
True. The last browser war was about substance (standards compatibility); this one is merely about being faster. Wow, that sure is going to take the web forward. I mean, speed is nice but could we please get widespread support for things like CSS3, MNG (aPNG works in theory but is unsupported by virtually every graphics editor) or even XHTML (I'm looking at you, IE)?
Hence they're bigger.
It really depends on what you want, though. If you're looking for that album Hank the Knife and the Jets released back in the Seventies it's somewhat unlikely that Usenet will help you much. SoulSeek, on the other hand, might help you as it's a specialized music sharing app and tends to have obscure stuff like that. Likewise, the eDonkey network (generally useless as it is) has lots of old stuff that other networks don't carry anymore.
It always depends on your profile. I'm fairly certain that Usenet wouldn't do much for me as I tend to go for old obscure stuff (I've seen quoted miniscule retention times of 200 days - that virtually guarantees everything I'm interested in is long gone).
"Operating systems". That's a plural. Okay, there was always Darwin but that's essentially OS X lite. And various BSDs but they don't count. And probably lots of other operating systems for PowerPC. But those weren't opportunities. My point is entirely valid. These aren't the droids you're looking for.