No you don't. Interoperability is the ability to work together with other software. Microsoft software builds on it's interoperability with other programs. These are all microsoft programs and there is no free standard. But it is interoperability.
I get what the OP is trying to say, but the linux stuff can usually be knitted together with some scripts and what not. It's pretty easy to manipulate outputs and most solutions that rely on large quantities of data that needs to be passed around simply store it in a database somewhere. You know the format, so it's not that hard to access...
You are mistaken in thinking that just because they are cheap these Indian developers are somehow not any good. The reason that they are cheap is that they are from a developing country, but that doesn't mean that their education sucked or anything. There are probably many very good software developers in India and I wouldn't be surprised if they got payed quite a lot compared to other professions in India.
Problem is not that they know the users have choice. The problem is that you don't have a choice. You can't run a windows system without internet explorer. Heck, you can't even install security updates without running explorer. That's a much bigger problem than whatever sort of contempt u may perceive.
eWeek is not the best source to be quoting from really (they get mentioned on slashdot lotsa times and it's almost all the time because of some FOSS bashing). But in any case, as other people have mentioned, they actually decided against fixing this because it is: 1) not really a bug in mozilla but in windows 2) nonstandard behaviour to block this in a windows app.
Specifically, if you work with whitelisting you will probably break other external applications that use this scheme of external protocols to launch. Therefore they didn't. Anyho, microsoft apparently finally got off off their buts and fixed it in SP2 so it's really a non-issue.
This incident is good for my these "running free software on top of propietary is just as bad as not running it"
That the requests were 'random' doesn't necessarily mean there was no sort of statistical connection between them. There are many kinds of 'random' to choose from...
And you off course are not using a propietary codec to play quicktime? You can't play AAC cause the only ones out there are protected by their DRM that we poor linux users can't open (without cracking it I mean) and everything else is just stuff they use, they don't really work on it. (with the notable exception being PDF)
Apple is just as propietary a company as microsoft is, they are only quicker to incorporate some open source stuff if it doesn't compete with any of their own propietary formats.
Actually, AFAIK they used to but for the newer cards there's some sort of NDA you're supposed to sign and I, for one, would never sign an NDA except if I had absolutely no other choice. In any way, one could argue about what can go in a "visible source" driver when you have agreed to an NDA on the workings of that very driver.
You have a good point. However, one could point out that there is currently not really a vendor out there who makes free drivers and neither is there one that really gives developers access to the relevant API's so they can write them. So the companies have the choice, but we don't.
Anyway, I think that's the reason why most people rail against closed source drivers. We want to be given the choice, but unfortunately we never are.
I realize this is flamebait I'm replying to but I really can't help myself. First of all, the allusion in the title is certainly not stealing. It has been done hundreds of times before in all areas around the world and while it is probably more polite to ask for permission first I don't see how it is wrong. The reason the author in question objects to the use of the title has probably much more to do with his political views than anything else, although he denies it.
The pamphlet you post a link to is really full of ridiculously small inconsistencies and ignorant statements. Space, however, prevents me from listing more of the many gross lies, half-truths and distortions in this document. (wink wink)
You misread the original post. This person never stated that he had trouble taking that test. He specifically said the hardest test he had ever taken was <insert weird acronym here>.
This person even agreed with you when he said that that guy was "particularly brilliant". If you're going to work in the software world without even being able to read an interpret a <100 line slashdot post correctly, how do you expect that people will allow you to work in >100.000 lines of code programmes?
That's what I believe. This has gotten ridiculous. I'm so sick of trying to have a rational conversation about *todays* Israel and it's racist policies, and being called an anti-semite. This type of law would be used to silence valid criticism of the racist state of Israel just as surely as people label such things today.
I've heard countless people talk about israel's racist policies right here in lovely belgium, which has the same restrictions as germany and france. And those people haven't been thrown in jail. People may try to misuse these laws, but any reasonable democracy should have the means to bar them from doing just that.
...In spite of this, you will still have whackos that will believe it. And if you take away their freedom of speech, those nutjobs will act out in violence. If anything, it's therapeutic for them to vent their anger and hate with words, rather than beating people and blowing shit up. Which, incidently, happens to be the method by which the US and Israel make their anger and hate known.
So if I get the above right you're stating that because the US has freedom of speech wackos are allowed to run amok and kill people around the world. Are you trying to prove my point for me or what? BTW, the therapeutic argument holds no sense. I could for instance refer you to the KKK. Just for therapeutic reasons, riiiight.
Further down you state that these laws are supposedly to protect peoples' feelings. They are there to prevent this from happening again. By making it illegal to deny the holocaust you prevent people from spreading this propaganda in the first place. Although free speech is a basic right in all democratic nations, some things threaten the basics of democracy itself. It is this criterion and only this that any government has to justify their limits on freedom of speech. With this I don't mean to say you should dictate what people in other countries say though. They have their way of dealing with history, we have our own. In no way would the european commission ever try to force a foreign nation to accept its views of what is right (in contrary to that other big power block).
The problem with all the americans in this discussion seems to be that you people take every rule to the extreme whilst forgetting that sometimes you just need to use your common sense. I will not and shall not allow my democracy to perish for the motherfucking THIRD time because some idiot was allowed to say they didn't break it the other 2 times.
NP-Complete problems are by definition problems that can't be solved in polynomial time(at least not by a Turing machine?). However, most problems that are considered NP-Complete are not mathematically proven to be so. Some are though, and the thing with NP-Complete problems is that you can always translate one NP-Complete problem to another NP-Complete problem.
So in practice, NP-complete problems can be solved (you can solve just about anything by just trying every single solution) but for very big instances you will need several times the age of the universe etc.
Several other posters in this thread seem to be mistaken about what the term actually means, but they were being so vague I thought I'd write this up.:)
RTFA: it had a stored program. Furthermore as another poster mentioned, calculators are also computers. The distinguishing difference with this machine is the word "programmable". The Z3 was the first programmable computer (that worked). It might have been a glorified calculator, but you could write a program for it, load it in et voila: output.
I think we should question the veracity of TFA. It really reads as a bad april one joke to me. Does any bank seriously think they will stop counterfeits with this? For institutions whose business relies very strongly on their knowledge of information technology, that would be pretty clueless. But maybe it's just me.
Firstly, The SCO lawsuit doesn't have much to do with the GPL license. Whatever company, which releases whatever program could be sued by another company that says they wrongfully included code from them. If the code in question were under a BSD-style license the same lawsuit would still be possible. The GPL does give a developer quite some leverage to protect his code from wrongfully being included in other programs, but this has nothing to do with the SCO lawsuit since the only thing SCO claims is that IBM put their name on code that SCO wrote.
Secondly, if sun would GPL the java code, it could not get into lawsuits by linking to the code. OTHER companies could get in trouble if they link non-GPL'd programs with this code. That would simply not happen. One could argue that the JVM is an integral part of every java program but then again, any machine level in your computer could then be seen as an integral part of every program, so by that logic you'd have to GPL every program that runs on a GPL OS. So in truth, this would not be a problem.
Belgium. We're actually lobbying the government to take it down by having computers branded as "life essentials" but it's not really taking. Oh, and internet stores pay taxes too around here.
Mine cost lots more. But the difference is, after 2 years it's still just as fast as "fast" machines being sold right now. This one ages really nice. Oh yeah, and there's the tax thing which kinda varies from country to country... (21% included in the price here)
The point is that this DRM scheme is not going to do anything. Sometimes people copy a couple of cd's for their friends. Under this scheme this would not be impossible.
"Criminals" on the other hand, who copy large batches of cds to sell, will invariably know the workaround.
So who is this scheme going to keep from copying cds? The answer is nobody and it's basically another stupid idea from some marketing freak at the major record labels.
Re:You've some good points...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The system only does that when it runs out of unused buffers though. This means that at the time a program has to be killed all of your ram is officially used by processes.
I think the OP is probably right. I have 512 megs of ram and using my full suite of apps (let's say something like firefox, thunderbird, a seti process, xmms, irssi in an rxvt and maybe some other xterms etc) I'm using about 200 megs of ram (not counting unused pages). So there was no real need for me to have swap since it never, ever gets used (I've never actually tried to fill all the 500 megs up to the full). So on a desktop system, you rarely have enough bloat to actually need swap.
That being said, I don't understand why a swapping system would be slower than a swapless system, except maybe on bootup when you have one extra partition to load.
My government is throwing away enough of my money already thank you very much.
And microsoft is off course completely wrong about the money thing. A government needs independent contractors to produce task specific software for them. When a government buys software from a company, I don't want them buying a "license to use", that's a waste of tax dollars, cause they'll be at the mercy of the contractor. And after 5 years, when that specific contractor decides to discontinue support, the government has no other recourse than to "upgrade". Even though in many cases it is completely unnecessary.
With free software now, the government has a chance to foster competition amongst different, smaller companies. The government can contract different companies to support different parts of their infrastructure. This could all lead to more, smaller companies instead of one behemoth. That is what free software is about. And if you know anything about economics, that's the whole point of the free market principle.
Well in this industry it doesn't really matter that much. Since the chip industry is already very capital intensive and research into new technologies is kinda expensive, this is one area where patents might actually work well. It doesn't seem to me they are patenting purely ideas (like one would with software) but rather a technology, which took much more time and money than simply the idea, to develop. It is just this kind of application that patents aim to protect.
In any case, the patent is most likely not valid. The wording of a patent should be clear and readable. It seams to me like this is a faulty granted patent and if Intel doesn't settle the court will most likely throw it out.
Slashdot Mirror
No you don't. Interoperability is the ability to work together with other software. Microsoft software builds on it's interoperability with other programs. These are all microsoft programs and there is no free standard. But it is interoperability.
I get what the OP is trying to say, but the linux stuff can usually be knitted together with some scripts and what not. It's pretty easy to manipulate outputs and most solutions that rely on large quantities of data that needs to be passed around simply store it in a database somewhere. You know the format, so it's not that hard to access...
You are mistaken in thinking that just because they are cheap these Indian developers are somehow not any good. The reason that they are cheap is that they are from a developing country, but that doesn't mean that their education sucked or anything. There are probably many very good software developers in India and I wouldn't be surprised if they got payed quite a lot compared to other professions in India.
Problem is not that they know the users have choice. The problem is that you don't have a choice. You can't run a windows system without internet explorer. Heck, you can't even install security updates without running explorer. That's a much bigger problem than whatever sort of contempt u may perceive.
eWeek is not the best source to be quoting from really (they get mentioned on slashdot lotsa times and it's almost all the time because of some FOSS bashing). But in any case, as other people have mentioned, they actually decided against fixing this because it is:
1) not really a bug in mozilla but in windows
2) nonstandard behaviour to block this in a windows app.
Specifically, if you work with whitelisting you will probably break other external applications that use this scheme of external protocols to launch. Therefore they didn't. Anyho, microsoft apparently finally got off off their buts and fixed it in SP2 so it's really a non-issue.
This incident is good for my these "running free software on top of propietary is just as bad as not running it"
(let the flamewar begin)
And maybe you shouldn't be so damn scared of other people all the time. (and learn to spell)
That the requests were 'random' doesn't necessarily mean there was no sort of statistical connection between them. There are many kinds of 'random' to choose from...
And you off course are not using a propietary codec to play quicktime? You can't play AAC cause the only ones out there are protected by their DRM that we poor linux users can't open (without cracking it I mean) and everything else is just stuff they use, they don't really work on it. (with the notable exception being PDF)
Apple is just as propietary a company as microsoft is, they are only quicker to incorporate some open source stuff if it doesn't compete with any of their own propietary formats.
I could have sworn ATI did.
Actually, AFAIK they used to but for the newer cards there's some sort of NDA you're supposed to sign and I, for one, would never sign an NDA except if I had absolutely no other choice. In any way, one could argue about what can go in a "visible source" driver when you have agreed to an NDA on the workings of that very driver.
You have a good point. However, one could point out that there is currently not really a vendor out there who makes free drivers and neither is there one that really gives developers access to the relevant API's so they can write them. So the companies have the choice, but we don't.
Anyway, I think that's the reason why most people rail against closed source drivers. We want to be given the choice, but unfortunately we never are.
I realize this is flamebait I'm replying to but I really can't help myself. First of all, the allusion in the title is certainly not stealing. It has been done hundreds of times before in all areas around the world and while it is probably more polite to ask for permission first I don't see how it is wrong. The reason the author in question objects to the use of the title has probably much more to do with his political views than anything else, although he denies it.
The pamphlet you post a link to is really full of ridiculously small inconsistencies and ignorant statements. Space, however, prevents me from listing more of the many gross lies, half-truths and distortions in this document. (wink wink)
I thought 555-xxxxxx was only for movies? Could somebody post the real format anyway?
You misread the original post. This person never stated that he had trouble taking that test. He specifically said the hardest test he had ever taken was <insert weird acronym here>.
This person even agreed with you when he said that that guy was "particularly brilliant". If you're going to work in the software world without even being able to read an interpret a <100 line slashdot post correctly, how do you expect that people will allow you to work in >100.000 lines of code programmes?
The OP was referring to the operating system windows, not to the GUI paradigm "windows". The most efficient one is IMHO mac os X but that's just me.
That's what I believe. This has gotten ridiculous. I'm so sick of trying to have a rational conversation about *todays* Israel and it's racist policies, and being called an anti-semite. This type of law would be used to silence valid criticism of the racist state of Israel just as surely as people label such things today.
I've heard countless people talk about israel's racist policies right here in lovely belgium, which has the same restrictions as germany and france. And those people haven't been thrown in jail. People may try to misuse these laws, but any reasonable democracy should have the means to bar them from doing just that.
So if I get the above right you're stating that because the US has freedom of speech wackos are allowed to run amok and kill people around the world. Are you trying to prove my point for me or what? BTW, the therapeutic argument holds no sense. I could for instance refer you to the KKK. Just for therapeutic reasons, riiiight.
Further down you state that these laws are supposedly to protect peoples' feelings. They are there to prevent this from happening again. By making it illegal to deny the holocaust you prevent people from spreading this propaganda in the first place. Although free speech is a basic right in all democratic nations, some things threaten the basics of democracy itself. It is this criterion and only this that any government has to justify their limits on freedom of speech. With this I don't mean to say you should dictate what people in other countries say though. They have their way of dealing with history, we have our own. In no way would the european commission ever try to force a foreign nation to accept its views of what is right (in contrary to that other big power block).
The problem with all the americans in this discussion seems to be that you people take every rule to the extreme whilst forgetting that sometimes you just need to use your common sense. I will not and shall not allow my democracy to perish for the motherfucking THIRD time because some idiot was allowed to say they didn't break it the other 2 times.
NP-Complete problems are by definition problems that can't be solved in polynomial time(at least not by a Turing machine?). However, most problems that are considered NP-Complete are not mathematically proven to be so. Some are though, and the thing with NP-Complete problems is that you can always translate one NP-Complete problem to another NP-Complete problem.
:)
So in practice, NP-complete problems can be solved (you can solve just about anything by just trying every single solution) but for very big instances you will need several times the age of the universe etc.
Several other posters in this thread seem to be mistaken about what the term actually means, but they were being so vague I thought I'd write this up.
RTFA: it had a stored program. Furthermore as another poster mentioned, calculators are also computers. The distinguishing difference with this machine is the word "programmable". The Z3 was the first programmable computer (that worked). It might have been a glorified calculator, but you could write a program for it, load it in et voila: output.
I think we should question the veracity of TFA. It really reads as a bad april one joke to me. Does any bank seriously think they will stop counterfeits with this? For institutions whose business relies very strongly on their knowledge of information technology, that would be pretty clueless. But maybe it's just me.
ever tried to type ENABLE_DEBUG=1 without caps?
So yeah, there is still a use for the caps key. Writing those long names for shell vars.
BTW, plenty of languages (such as java) have keywords in all caps. Constants for instance are all caps. So no, caps is not dead.
You are dead wrong.
Firstly, The SCO lawsuit doesn't have much to do with the GPL license. Whatever company, which releases whatever program could be sued by another company that says they wrongfully included code from them. If the code in question were under a BSD-style license the same lawsuit would still be possible. The GPL does give a developer quite some leverage to protect his code from wrongfully being included in other programs, but this has nothing to do with the SCO lawsuit since the only thing SCO claims is that IBM put their name on code that SCO wrote.
Secondly, if sun would GPL the java code, it could not get into lawsuits by linking to the code. OTHER companies could get in trouble if they link non-GPL'd programs with this code. That would simply not happen. One could argue that the JVM is an integral part of every java program but then again, any machine level in your computer could then be seen as an integral part of every program, so by that logic you'd have to GPL every program that runs on a GPL OS. So in truth, this would not be a problem.
Belgium. We're actually lobbying the government to take it down by having computers branded as "life essentials" but it's not really taking. Oh, and internet stores pay taxes too around here.
Mine cost lots more. But the difference is, after 2 years it's still just as fast as "fast" machines being sold right now. This one ages really nice. Oh yeah, and there's the tax thing which kinda varies from country to country... (21% included in the price here)
The point is that this DRM scheme is not going to do anything. Sometimes people copy a couple of cd's for their friends. Under this scheme this would not be impossible.
"Criminals" on the other hand, who copy large batches of cds to sell, will invariably know the workaround.
So who is this scheme going to keep from copying cds? The answer is nobody and it's basically another stupid idea from some marketing freak at the major record labels.
The system only does that when it runs out of unused buffers though. This means that at the time a program has to be killed all of your ram is officially used by processes.
I think the OP is probably right. I have 512 megs of ram and using my full suite of apps (let's say something like firefox, thunderbird, a seti process, xmms, irssi in an rxvt and maybe some other xterms etc) I'm using about 200 megs of ram (not counting unused pages). So there was no real need for me to have swap since it never, ever gets used (I've never actually tried to fill all the 500 megs up to the full). So on a desktop system, you rarely have enough bloat to actually need swap.
That being said, I don't understand why a swapping system would be slower than a swapless system, except maybe on bootup when you have one extra partition to load.
My government is throwing away enough of my money already thank you very much. And microsoft is off course completely wrong about the money thing. A government needs independent contractors to produce task specific software for them. When a government buys software from a company, I don't want them buying a "license to use", that's a waste of tax dollars, cause they'll be at the mercy of the contractor. And after 5 years, when that specific contractor decides to discontinue support, the government has no other recourse than to "upgrade". Even though in many cases it is completely unnecessary. With free software now, the government has a chance to foster competition amongst different, smaller companies. The government can contract different companies to support different parts of their infrastructure. This could all lead to more, smaller companies instead of one behemoth. That is what free software is about. And if you know anything about economics, that's the whole point of the free market principle.
Well in this industry it doesn't really matter that much. Since the chip industry is already very capital intensive and research into new technologies is kinda expensive, this is one area where patents might actually work well. It doesn't seem to me they are patenting purely ideas (like one would with software) but rather a technology, which took much more time and money than simply the idea, to develop. It is just this kind of application that patents aim to protect.
In any case, the patent is most likely not valid. The wording of a patent should be clear and readable. It seams to me like this is a faulty granted patent and if Intel doesn't settle the court will most likely throw it out.