Do you mean the actions of Apple were done intentionally and maliciously; or that the link was meant to attack Apple?
I meant neither. I was making no comment on the actions of Apple themselves; and the summary quite clearly states "this isn't even a case of 'embrace and extend'", so it isn't malicious either.
Someone points out that Apple made a mistake. Straight away, a half-dozen readers jump in and say "but they probably only did it by mistake! You're just using this as an opportunity to bash Apple!". However, at that point, no-one had criticised Apple for anything other than negligence or ignorance: a crime which is so commonplace in the commercial IT world it is entirely unremarkable.
So, my point was - why all these denials without any accusation? Does Steve Jobs really have that many Slashdot accounts?:)
Just about every single comment so far has been berating other commenters for "Apple bashing" and automatically assuming that this was done intentionally and maliciously.
> the average woman has a better multitasking > capability than the average man.
Are there any sources for this, or are you using some folk knowledge with no evidence behind it? I did a fairly length search of PubMed for evidence even tangentially related to human multitasking and could find nothing on it.
The filing cabinet/desk metaphor is really good for explaining the difference between HD storage and RAM. And, even better, it can be logically extended to... processors, cache and virtual memory:
Imagine you have more than one desk that you can sit and work at, but there is only one of you (one CPU, extensible for multi-CPU systems). So whenever you want to change to another task you have to write the CPU registers and suchlike to memory (ie, write down what you were thinking on a post-it note) and move to a different desk, where you can read what you were doing last and get on with it.
Hence we have multi-tasking systems which repeatedly "swap desks". If there aren't enough desks (RAM) to store all the working tasks, then one of the desks has to be cleared into a special folder and filed away in a cabinet. This cabinet is marked "virtual memory" and accessing it in future is obviously a lot slower than just reading a post-it note stuck to a desk.
This all conjecture, of course, as I've never had a lay person to test this extended analogy on.
if he releases it under GPL there will be issues with his open sourcing the project but not all of the dependencies as required by the GPL.
But he's not omitting to release all of the dependencies --- the OP explicitly says that there are no (external) dependencies. There were, in the past, but not any longer. It's the current version that is being released under GPL, not something that it grew out of four years ago.
The previous version was under a different licence (or maybe none at all, if it never left the company), but licence changes don't act retrospectively.
Releasing the entire history (including the bits that cannot be compiled any longer) is the only right thing to do. Repositories maintain all sorts of useful metadata which should not be discarded just because the revisions they refer to no longer compile.
Sometimes you just gotta wonder whether the IT industry (if such a thing can be said to exist) has any pride in its work at all. I think I'll just stick to the outskirts and reading the horror stories!
Ok.. And, my question was based on the stance I replied to--why do I have to be, or why should I be 'nice'?
You don't have to be anything. As you stated, you could just as well be not nice (and plenty people are).
The rest of us want you to be nice, for our sakes. This may not affect you at all.
What is nice? Does nice == good? Were does it fit in the 'survival of the fittest' theory? The only reason to be 'nice' is to get ahead, to survive longer? How bleak... What is a conscience then? A mere survival mechanism?
You think these ultimate questions --- which have been pondered in some form or another since time immemorial --- will be solved on Slashdot on a Friday night?
Science seems to require a lot of faith. It must take a lot of faith to be an atheist...
Science and atheism are very different things. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are not implying they are the same in the above statement.
Science requires very little faith. Faith in the tools we build for observation; faith in our ability to record data accurately; faith in a universe with some degree of causality. As these are all (apart from the first, maybe) things which people take for granted anyway, science requires little more faith than is required to cross the road unscathed. (We can see and hear that there are no cars coming; we hope that this means we won't get flattened by a silent and invisible truck.)
As for atheism, what do you need faith in to not believe something?
Where in evolutionary theory does it tell me that I have to or even necessarily should be 'nice' to anyone?
If any of the following questions make sense, you can expect an answer to your own question shortly:
Where does it say in the Special Theory of Relativity that Sunday should be taken as the Sabbath?
Where does it say in Hook's Law that you should honour your mother and father?
Where does it say in Amdahl's Law that you should turn the other cheek?
Where does it say in De Morgan's Law that you should forgive your transgressors?
If you're still furrowing your brow over this one, the answer is nowhere. They are laws describing how we see the natural world, and have nothing to do with human morality whatsoever.
I mean, there are a lot of hobbyist coders out there that don't use revision control software, for whatever reason. There are also, it would appear from previous Slashdot stories, a great many (big name) companies out there that don't use revision control software.
I have never heard of anyone being forbidden to use revision control. And, for something that actually gets deployed (as your code presumably does), no bug-tracking facilities seems equally staggering.
Has your boss given you any indication why he doesn't like these (what I would regard as necessary) tools of the software engineering business? To follow up on what another poster mentioned, is he also against accounting software/books for keeping a tally of income and outlay? Does everything go through petty cash and little scraps of paper with IOUs printed on them?
You post is the rantings of a bigot who hates Christians.
Come back and say that when Christianity has a monopoly on absurd creation stories.
Schools should teach what the majority of people in the district want taught.
No, schools should teach reality, that same reality which is the case in America, China and Mars. The phenomena of genetic mutation and speciation don't cease to exist because you stick your fingers in your ears and burble loudly.
There should be freedom to discuss anything in the classroom. I find it absurd that liberal groups want to give academic freedom to ideas they believe in, but will deprive others of the right to speak their mind.
"Liberal groups"? Who are these anonymous, ever-present, conspiratorial "liberal groups" that are hell-bent on destroying your fun^W^W^Wteaching science in science classrooms?
Prove to me there is no God.
I don't have to, any more than I have to prove to you there is no tooth fairy, no Grim Reaper, that Buffy isn't real and that Cthulhu isn't really dead but dreaming deep under the ocean. You assert that something exists, you come up with the proof.
People have believed in God since the start of time. What makes scientists today so much more certain than scientists of 100 years ago?
Cos, you know, science progresses. That's what it does; that's what it's meant to do. I'd be extremely troubled if scientists today knew less than 100 years ago.
I'm fed up and sick to the back teeth of reading the words "for-profit" and "company" in the same sentence, especially when they are used to (attempt to) justify antisocial business practices.
I can't find any definition of the word "company" which wouldn't imply that its aim is not profit; that would be a "charity". Thus, "for-profit company" is a tautology.
Why does being in business mean someone's ethics have to be flung out the window? My work does the occasional freebie for local community projects, we do discounts for charities and the like. Being in business does not imply being an arse.
Ok, I understand, it's not ready yet. You don't have to keep telling me every two paragraphs how stuff that's in R&D won't be available to buy this Christmas. Jeez.
"I don't want my girlfriend to be able to change my preferences."
Then really you need password-protected preferences settings, not RFID recognition. The device doesn't detect the user's identity, but the serial number of an electronic tag. Your watch or necklace or whatever is easy to steal, so this is less secure than typing in a PIN on a remote to change prefs.
As the patent says, the preferences are stored local to the machine, not on the RFID tag. The tag only contains a serial number (cos that's cheap and cheerful). This thing provides no inherent security features.
"I don't want visitors (kids and/or family) to be able to select my "super ultra hardcore porn channel"."
See above about difference between identity of person and identity of tag. Also, tags are easy to scan and clone. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility to make a PDA pretend to be someone else's RFID tag. Once the software becomes available any schmo could do it.
The way I read it, the system describes a way to control your preferences. Thus, you can turn features on and off for yourself, but a new, unconfigured user would have access to everything. You can decide that you don't want your kids watching your porn channel, but it's their preferences that the information is stored in; they can easily change it (and back again) if they want.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant neither. I was making no comment on the actions of Apple themselves; and the summary quite clearly states "this isn't even a case of 'embrace and extend'", so it isn't malicious either.
Someone points out that Apple made a mistake. Straight away, a half-dozen readers jump in and say "but they probably only did it by mistake! You're just using this as an opportunity to bash Apple!". However, at that point, no-one had criticised Apple for anything other than negligence or ignorance: a crime which is so commonplace in the commercial IT world it is entirely unremarkable.
So, my point was - why all these denials without any accusation? Does Steve Jobs really have that many Slashdot accounts? :)
Just about every single comment so far has been berating other commenters for "Apple bashing" and automatically assuming that this was done intentionally and maliciously.
Methinks they prostest *too much*...
> the average woman has a better multitasking
> capability than the average man.
Are there any sources for this, or are you using some folk knowledge with no evidence behind it? I did a fairly length search of PubMed for evidence even tangentially related to human multitasking and could find nothing on it.
How do you know this?
The filing cabinet/desk metaphor is really good for explaining the difference between HD storage and RAM. And, even better, it can be logically extended to... processors, cache and virtual memory:
Imagine you have more than one desk that you can sit and work at, but there is only one of you (one CPU, extensible for multi-CPU systems). So whenever you want to change to another task you have to write the CPU registers and suchlike to memory (ie, write down what you were thinking on a post-it note) and move to a different desk, where you can read what you were doing last and get on with it.
Hence we have multi-tasking systems which repeatedly "swap desks". If there aren't enough desks (RAM) to store all the working tasks, then one of the desks has to be cleared into a special folder and filed away in a cabinet. This cabinet is marked "virtual memory" and accessing it in future is obviously a lot slower than just reading a post-it note stuck to a desk.
This all conjecture, of course, as I've never had a lay person to test this extended analogy on.
Drunks [whitehouse.gov]kill more USians a year than all war/terror since Nam
Please move that space from the inside to the outside of the link text, so the spacing looks right. Thanks :)
Well, I agree. For the love of all that is right and proper, who ever thought going to work in a swimsuit and leather jacket was practical?!
But he's not omitting to release all of the dependencies --- the OP explicitly says that there are no (external) dependencies. There were, in the past, but not any longer. It's the current version that is being released under GPL, not something that it grew out of four years ago.
The previous version was under a different licence (or maybe none at all, if it never left the company), but licence changes don't act retrospectively.
Releasing the entire history (including the bits that cannot be compiled any longer) is the only right thing to do. Repositories maintain all sorts of useful metadata which should not be discarded just because the revisions they refer to no longer compile.
And what makes sure the trains are on time?
Black Books was written by Dylan Moran (ie, the book shop owner from the series).
You've just been re-reading the Brilliant Paula Bean haven't you? :)
Sometimes you just gotta wonder whether the IT industry (if such a thing can be said to exist) has any pride in its work at all. I think I'll just stick to the outskirts and reading the horror stories!
Didn't you get the memo? - perl is self-documenting.
You don't have to be anything. As you stated, you could just as well be not nice (and plenty people are).
The rest of us want you to be nice, for our sakes. This may not affect you at all.
You think these ultimate questions --- which have been pondered in some form or another since time immemorial --- will be solved on Slashdot on a Friday night?
Science and atheism are very different things. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are not implying they are the same in the above statement.
Science requires very little faith. Faith in the tools we build for observation; faith in our ability to record data accurately; faith in a universe with some degree of causality. As these are all (apart from the first, maybe) things which people take for granted anyway, science requires little more faith than is required to cross the road unscathed. (We can see and hear that there are no cars coming; we hope that this means we won't get flattened by a silent and invisible truck.)
As for atheism, what do you need faith in to not believe something?
I saw that and thought for a moment I'd happened upon an off-topic thread about regular expressions.
If any of the following questions make sense, you can expect an answer to your own question shortly:
If you're still furrowing your brow over this one, the answer is nowhere. They are laws describing how we see the natural world, and have nothing to do with human morality whatsoever.
What's that when converted to the storage capacity unit du jour, the Library of Congress (or LoC). How many LoCs is 100 million emails?
I think we deserve to be told how many Library of Congresses that takes up!
Really shocked.
I mean, there are a lot of hobbyist coders out there that don't use revision control software, for whatever reason. There are also, it would appear from previous Slashdot stories, a great many (big name) companies out there that don't use revision control software.
I have never heard of anyone being forbidden to use revision control. And, for something that actually gets deployed (as your code presumably does), no bug-tracking facilities seems equally staggering.
Has your boss given you any indication why he doesn't like these (what I would regard as necessary) tools of the software engineering business? To follow up on what another poster mentioned, is he also against accounting software/books for keeping a tally of income and outlay? Does everything go through petty cash and little scraps of paper with IOUs printed on them?
How on earth can this possibly work out?
Come back and say that when Christianity has a monopoly on absurd creation stories.
No, schools should teach reality, that same reality which is the case in America, China and Mars. The phenomena of genetic mutation and speciation don't cease to exist because you stick your fingers in your ears and burble loudly.
"Liberal groups"? Who are these anonymous, ever-present, conspiratorial "liberal groups" that are hell-bent on destroying your fun^W^W^Wteaching science in science classrooms?
I don't have to, any more than I have to prove to you there is no tooth fairy, no Grim Reaper, that Buffy isn't real and that Cthulhu isn't really dead but dreaming deep under the ocean. You assert that something exists, you come up with the proof.
Cos, you know, science progresses. That's what it does; that's what it's meant to do. I'd be extremely troubled if scientists today knew less than 100 years ago.
Oh no, you got burned by Slashdot's removal of the vital HTML tag name! So now we all sit and wonder, was it the blink tag, or was it the marquee?
I'm fed up and sick to the back teeth of reading the words "for-profit" and "company" in the same sentence, especially when they are used to (attempt to) justify antisocial business practices.
I can't find any definition of the word "company" which wouldn't imply that its aim is not profit; that would be a "charity". Thus, "for-profit company" is a tautology.
Why does being in business mean someone's ethics have to be flung out the window? My work does the occasional freebie for local community projects, we do discounts for charities and the like. Being in business does not imply being an arse.
Ok, I understand, it's not ready yet. You don't have to keep telling me every two paragraphs how stuff that's in R&D won't be available to buy this Christmas. Jeez.
I'm trying to work out Total Recall fits in to your new equation...
"gotten out of the business" != "gone out of business"
And if you believe that, I have a ten-letter acrostic (comes with free lifetime immortality) you may be interested in buying...
Then really you need password-protected preferences settings, not RFID recognition. The device doesn't detect the user's identity, but the serial number of an electronic tag. Your watch or necklace or whatever is easy to steal, so this is less secure than typing in a PIN on a remote to change prefs.
As the patent says, the preferences are stored local to the machine, not on the RFID tag. The tag only contains a serial number (cos that's cheap and cheerful). This thing provides no inherent security features.
See above about difference between identity of person and identity of tag. Also, tags are easy to scan and clone. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility to make a PDA pretend to be someone else's RFID tag. Once the software becomes available any schmo could do it.
The way I read it, the system describes a way to control your preferences. Thus, you can turn features on and off for yourself, but a new, unconfigured user would have access to everything. You can decide that you don't want your kids watching your porn channel, but it's their preferences that the information is stored in; they can easily change it (and back again) if they want.