> Did you miss the article on actually kernel-tweaking to make the damned thing faster?
You either did not RTFA, or misunderstood it. XFree86 was symptomatic for a problem in the kernel-scheduler. The heuristic to descriminate interactive processes from background-processes was flawed. X made it visible, because it is visible. Other processes where affected most likely, too.
They don't (or at least it depends what you mean with hardware rendered, as anything is hardware rendered).
Hardware 3D stuff is already there including network transparency through GLX and 2D alpha-transparency is provided by the XRender extension.
Network transparency just means, that you have to have the possibility of doing remote calls (in one way or another) without being actually aware of it. It doesn't mean, that all calls have to be done over the network. The network is transparent (in other words invisible) to the application. That is what abstraction is for.
The app makes a call "Draw text with 50% transparency at X,Y". The underlying system makes a local function call, which, depending on the current situation, might or might not translate in to marshalling of the call, transporting it over the net, unmarshalling at the client, who might or might not use the graphics hardware in drawing the text. Should the situation permit it, it could translate into a driver call, which draws the text directly by using the given hardware.
Did you mention the current situation in other Arabic nations? Currently, mostly governed by non-democratic leaderships, which are slightly pro-american (at least compared to the public opinion in their nations), which are supposed to be replaced democratic goverments by the shining example Iraq is expected to set.
Noticing the current discontent of the people with their current goverments, the wished for change might even come earlier than expected and a different way than expected.
Oh, and the Palestinian situtation will be much easier to solve, after removing the dictator, who spend a good fortune on their "freedom fighters" (Well, we would call them terrorists, but still it strengthened his support among them)
What will the Kurds do when Turkey will invade in northern Iraq, or how Turkey will react, when the Kurds should found an independent state.
One thing to add:
The dictatorship actually owning a fully functionally nuclear program, quite possibly two or three nuclear bombs, rockets with enough range to strike the U.S. and also distinguished member of the Axis of Evil.
Which features a starving and supressed people, partly fleeing to its neighbouring dictatorship, which most people in our situation would think people would flee from and a dictator, who is also not a very pleasent person, to say the least. A nation, whose corporation with the UN-inspectors culminated quite recently in kicking them out.
This esteemed nation is quite alive and kicking. Not that I suggest waging a war with it, but one has to wonder, what consequences a dictator has to draw in having WMDs.
Of course, it is a totally different situation than Iraq, but one has always has to keep an eye what kind of impression one might make.
Well, actually you got the reverse of MLK, Jr.s quote:
An individual who acts within the law despite his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the profit of taking advantage in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its possibilities, is in reality [fill logical consqequence here] the law"
> they derive most of their sense of moral superiority by their close association with opinions voiced by foreign leaders
And not possibly on sighting and evaluating the facts and opinions voiced, and coming to their own conclusions?
>They're too wacky and weird [...]
Is Dustin Hoffman also too "wacky and weird to appeal to the mainstream"? Sheryl Crow? Or Robert Redford? Then George Clooney certainly is.
Note, this doesn't make them any more right or wrong.
The problem is not, that US-Americans aren't buying their products anymore, but the distributors preemptively exerting self-censureship to avoid any possible repercussion of the public.
They are not able to profilerate their view as they could before as the US press avoids publishing un-public or "un-patriotic" opinions.
But that is not protected by the First Amendment. Still, isn't pluralism the basis for a working democracy?
Whether you consider the current situation as a good working system or not, depends on what your ideals are.
>but the protesters want to make it seem like they are the majority rather than a (shrinking) minority.
No, they want to be noticed. This is a little bit complicated, sitting at home, while the news sources are busy reporting on govermental press releases, interviewing military personal, sending live and directly from the front, and showing the bombing of Baghdad.
They hope, that likeminded people will follow their steps. I don't want to escelate the discussion about the justness of the various wars, but how many people were against the war in Viêtnam at first? How did that change?
>76% of Americans approve of the war
Well, there are psychological reasons for that. Most people have a bad feeling about demonstrating against a war, their soldiers are fighting in. Or do you see any specific reason that convinced them suddenly to wage a war?
> Or that Russia is currently owed at least $10 Billion by Iraq.
Big deal. Iraq has a total foreign deficit of $220 Billion. This deficit is mostly from its war against Iran, in which the U.S., U.K., Germany and France supported him and where Saddam gained all the weapons he is now not allowed to possess (and where he killed the 500,000 of his own people, George Bush is so eager at reminding at).
I'm wondering, how much he ows the U.S goverment for this.
> Money is fluid, and interchangable. But also limited. The change of the reserves from US-Dollar to Euro would make the Euro more scarce and the Dollar more abundant, devaluating the Dollar. Whether that is good or bad (economy wise) is beyond my knowledge. Ask some economist about it.
> U.S. Defense spending is less, as a percentage of GDP, than it was in the 70s and 80s
I dearly hope so. The Soviet-Union ceased to exist.
Yeah, like the Arabic Alliance, or the the largest part of Europe. Germany and France supported the last Gulf War. (And paid a large deal of the costs). This time, they do not. Last time, there was a majority in the UN Security Council. This time, there was not.
According to he BBC almost 70% of the British people are opposed to a war without UN backing.
And I may be wrong, but "record rebellion against the government in a House of Commons vote" (BBC) does not sound like very strong support for the action.
Re:"Bush's War" at ends with "The War On Terror"
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
> When any in the EU dare to speak against France and Germany's wishes, they are immediately branded as child-like and not worth being in the EU.
In the EU, every nation has veto-power. The move was unwished for, because France wanted to discuss a common stance. After that, France took its own stand.
> We saw that with the sit down and shut up attitude of Chirac to the Eastern Bloc nations.
Ok. It is not possible, that those goverments shut possibly up, because they have no public support on that matter? Because France pressured them? Why didn't then the other Security Council members changed their minds after being pressured? Does France and Germany has more economical and political power?
> Especially ones where the most common political statement is "Death to America."
Yeah, that's what Hussein or all the people in the party are shouting: "Death to America". IRC, his words were "I don't have anything against the American people, but when they come in our country, we will fight them on our soil." Not that you have to give a lot on these words, but when you are "citeing", you should.
> We know that inspectors are not allowed to meet with Iraqi scientists in a neutral setting.
Well, actually in the last week, the first Iraqi scientists have been questioned in a different country, without sending tapes back to the regime.
> The Czechs have been saying for quite a while that the leader of the 9-11 attackers met repeatedly with Iraqi intelligence agents.
No, they said once. And it was objected by the CIA, shortely after. Then it was never mentioned by both agencies again. Of course, you are free to construct your own theory on that matter, why this should be another reason to wage a war.
> I do have a problem with homicidal maniacs who have killed large portions of their own population having access to WMDs.
Well, Saddam is certainly not homicidal. And he killed his people with weapons delivered by the US, France and Germany, to fight Iran. No outcry came from the US goverment that time. No news item on CNN. Curiously, it currently makes more news today, than the day it actually happened. What was the goverment stance on such a man like him? "He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch" (FDR about Somoza) The US goverment stance towards Saddam was a similar one the other nations have today. Removing him creates most likey more instability and pain than keeping him.
> If it isn't working, maybe it's time to scrap the whole concept and start over. Maybe with one that has a few less veto powers
Maybe one, where only the US has a veto power? Not to mention that, the war was not sanctioned because of a veto, but because there was no majority for it. Scrap democracy, when it is against your opinion. Way to go.
Re:"Bush's War" at ends with "The War On Terror"
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Um, you are aware, that Japan and Germany had democracies (in the case of Japan a parliamentary monarchy) before the World War? Both countries where relatively prosperous nations before and after the war.
And do you know, what effort the allied forces and especially the US goverment put into rebuilding these nations after the war? You are aware, that Japan and Germany both faced another threat, the Soviet-Union, which united the people of both countries with the US?
Not to mention, that both Germany and Japan attacked first and the people where aware of the consequences that would have. OTOH, the reasons for the current war are not as clear as those where in WWII or at least in the previous Gulf War. At least in the eyes of most parts of the world, as represented by their Foreign Minister in the Security Council, and including General Schwartzkopf.
A minor correction: Mpeg Audio 1 Layer 3 is a encoding scheme, not a compression algorithm. It may tightly coupled with the compression scheme, but it is not bound by it. From the MPEG 1 Audio FAQ
It does not standardize the encoder, but rather standardizes the type of information that an encoder has to produce and write to an MPEG-1 conformant bitstream as well as the way in which the decoder has to parse, decompress, and resynthesize this information in order to regain the encoded sound.
That is, why the quality differed (differs?) greatly between various encoders (Fraunhofer, Xing, LAME,...).
MPEG is stream based. The file is devided into frames, each having its own header. Those headers are necessary in order to discover a frame and to identify the type of the frame in the data-stream.
Maybe you should not construct your world-view from PR-releases from the US goverment, or CNN news. (AFAIK, not even they are stating such thing, only suggerating it. Otherwise, feel free to delusion me with a link)
Others take a different view, 2. The European goverments supporting the US-American move do not have the support of the public opinion on that matter. Especially, not in the "new Europe". Denmarks goverment can acutally be added to that list too,. According to these polls, the strongest support is to be found in the UK, with 67% opposing a war without UN backing. The list is tailed by Germany (87%) and the "new Europe" (some ~70% opposing it even with UN backing)
Japan is in a similar position. The goverment is backing the US position, but has not the public support for it. Prime Minister Koizumi has his own opinion on that matter.
You mean, some goverments representing a different stand on foreign policy than the majority of their people (and even some members of the goverment)?
Compromises are always more difficult to find than dictating a certain policy. Still the EU exists (it hasn't been called EC since the 90s) and has agreements on building planes and rockets. (The whole EU is a construct based on found agreements) . Upcoming are a joint military force for UN mandated missions and a joint military R&D.
Granted, it would be a little more complicated, to convince the EU to switch off Galileo (or to create it, for that matter), or to wage a war. It is left to your unterstanding of democracy, wether you find that bad or good.
>In any event, the treaty is a potential stumbling block for this plan, and I was hoping to bring that to attention.
You are right, that the treaty limits the flexibility of creating a new legislation.
But the Berne convention sets the barrier quite low and already discriminates between the creators rights and commercial exploitation rights.
Lastly, the Berne Convention is, like any treaty, open to negotiation. It is not set in stone. When the other nations find their artists rights well protected, and are consulted on that matter, they won't complain.
The critical part about Lessigs plan is, that those pieces aren't commercially exploited. IRC, some European countries already have deviating laws for books. In those countries, a book has to be published a minimal amount in a certain time, otherwise the publishing rights are forfeited. I don't know about the U.S.
Not necessarily. Please let me emphasise your words:
As part of the treaty, a persons right of copyright may not be put in jeopardy even by small formalities. It is one of the problems that arise from the European conception that an artist has a 'moral right' to the work they've produced.
In other words, the artists copyright may not put in jeopardy, but when he passes his rights to a second party (e.g. Disney, Time-Warner, Sony, whatever), he already has willfully relinquished some of his rights in favour of said second party.
No one says, that the new owners rights to a piece of work have to be of the same quality as the original author had.
can send with only 1mW in contrast to 100mW (WiFi)?
chips are consuming considerably less energy than WiFi?
chips are as small as 3mm^2 in 130nm process?
scales fairly good up to 32 networks whereas 802.11b has only 4 non-intefering channels.
lets most embedded devices transfer their complete memory (persistant and volatile) in less than a second to one another?
is more resistant to interference because of FHSS?
bridges the necessary distance? My mobile has only to communicate with my headset, or PDA, or WDA or whatever, which are most from about 2m away from each other, head to bottom.
class 1 devices can communicate up to 100m (e.g. my laptop)?
has various application protocols are already specified, ranging from infrared remote-control over headsets to network-access, whereas WiFi provides network-access.
These are mostly consequences from having inferior bandwidth and inferior range.
To the more-is-better people, you don't have to buy it. Buy yourself a nice PDA with WLAN and watch how it sucks power.
> for example would you want recycled plastic of dubious heritage showing up in plastic sode pop bottles?
Um, in countries, where there is an existing enforced recycling system (for example, most of Northern and Central Europe), the plastic in soda bottles is standardised. It's PET (polyethylen), IRC. Actually, plastics are one of the easiest things to recycle, far easier than, say glas. The possible harmful additives are already outlawed, since people are drinking from such a bottle.
IRC, the plastics are shreddered and dissovled in various solvents. One solvent for each kind of plastic. Then the plastic is extracted from its solvent and you receive a practically pure resin.
Not to mention that recycling processes can be improved as production processes are improved. This is especially true, when the product is designed and produced with recycling in mind. And AFAIK, this hasn't happend a lot in the past.
Isn't it quite obvious? Windows 2000 is kept wrapped up in NDAs. This makes it nearly impossible to "check out Windows 2000 scheduling algos" for the most of us.
Wether that is good or bad for Windows 2000 is not even implied with a single word.
This is not a summary, but a list of his item-titles and misses the purpose and meaning of the article.
Well, all those points are true. It is like the list of 10 Reasons not to Develop a Newsreader, or How To Optimise: "Don't do it". This list doesn't mean that one shouldn't do it. But probably you shouldn't do it. At least in the majority of the cases.
All those important issues are probably most often ignored or underestimated. It is a good advice at his fellow developers to keep this list in mind, before they start on their (probable) odyssee.
And my opinion in point ten, he makes already clear that such a reminder is necessary.
Over 100 persistent-state worlds are in development, many by small independent shops with limited resources
AFAIK, the most important part is, that they aren't as energy consuming as current LCDs, because of: > [OLEDS] don't require a backlight (as like normal LEDs, they produce their own light.)
LCDs are filtering the unwanted wavelengths, which are previously quite costly produced by the backlight.
And, as people with a digital camera should know, using the LCD drains a lot of energy from the battery.
> [...] In small samples, sure, no problem. > For a huge data file, forget it. [...]
> I do think that XML has its place, but a "human readable" config format is not it.
Aren't those two statements slightly contradictory?
> Imagine you were looking to fix the "george" attribute for any element in something like your example: The advantage of being a text-file: sed s/george=blah/george=foo/ Actually not my preferred way, I'd use the same approach I'd use in English, German, or C++ a text editor with search and replace-capability.
> All the extra structure that the XML file has is stored in a non-transparent way
Well, its structure is as non-transparently stored as in C. All those curly brackets. Formatting code in C (or similar languanges) is not required. But without it, it is too compressed and not readable. Hell, I can have a fight over correct formatting in C files every day.
XML offers even more structural means than an INI-file.
A hierarchy flattened in an INI-file
[foo] a=b
[foo/bar]
c=d
[foo/sna]
f=u
A hierarchy in an XML-file
<foo a=b>
<bar c=d>
<sna f=u> </foo>
Is there more hidden extra structure? Then you are more knowledgable in XML than I am. And certainly breaking the boundaries of what is possible with an INI-file.
> Yes, I have a personal dislike for XML. This is based on my own experience of working with it
Now I'm begining to see, you were forced to wield through masses of data, stored on request on some hip manager in XML.
Damn... actually I hoped no one would come up with such one. I thought I request one in Java, one in C and one in C++:).
Actually, in a XML-sense, it wouldn't even be a validating parser, as a validating parser would check for a required font field itself. But I'm getting picky here.
What I wanted to point out with that rhetorical question was, that XML is more widely spread and standardised.
Slashdot Mirror
> Did you miss the article on actually kernel-tweaking to make the damned thing faster?
You either did not RTFA, or misunderstood it. XFree86 was symptomatic for a problem in the kernel-scheduler. The heuristic to descriminate interactive processes from background-processes was flawed. X made it visible, because it is visible.
Other processes where affected most likely, too.
They don't (or at least it depends what you mean with hardware rendered, as anything is hardware rendered).
Hardware 3D stuff is already there including network transparency through GLX
and 2D alpha-transparency is provided by the XRender extension.
Network transparency just means, that you have to have the possibility of doing remote calls (in one way or another) without being actually aware of it. It doesn't mean, that all calls have to be done over the network. The network is transparent (in other words invisible) to the application. That is what abstraction is for.
The app makes a call "Draw text with 50% transparency at X,Y". The underlying system makes a local function call, which, depending on the current situation, might or might not translate in to marshalling of the call, transporting it over the net, unmarshalling at the client, who might or might not use the graphics hardware in drawing the text.
Should the situation permit it, it could translate into a driver call, which draws the text directly by using the given hardware.
Did you mention the current situation in other Arabic nations? Currently, mostly governed by non-democratic leaderships, which are slightly pro-american (at least compared to the public opinion in their nations), which are supposed to be replaced democratic goverments by the shining example Iraq is expected to set.
Noticing the current discontent of the people with their current goverments, the wished for change might even come earlier than expected and a different way than expected.
Oh, and the Palestinian situtation will be much easier to solve, after removing the dictator, who spend a good fortune on their "freedom fighters" (Well, we would call them terrorists, but still it strengthened his support among them)
What will the Kurds do when Turkey will invade in northern Iraq, or how Turkey will react, when the Kurds should found an independent state.
One thing to add:
The dictatorship actually owning a fully functionally nuclear program, quite possibly two or three nuclear bombs, rockets with enough range to strike the U.S. and also distinguished member of the Axis of Evil.
Which features a starving and supressed people, partly fleeing to its neighbouring dictatorship, which most people in our situation would think people would flee from and a dictator, who is also not a very pleasent person, to say the least.
A nation, whose corporation with the UN-inspectors culminated quite recently in kicking them out.
This esteemed nation is quite alive and kicking.
Not that I suggest waging a war with it, but one has to wonder, what consequences a dictator has to draw in having WMDs.
Of course, it is a totally different situation than Iraq, but one has always has to keep an eye what kind of impression one might make.
The rest is left up to the reader.
> they derive most of their sense of moral superiority by their close association with opinions voiced by foreign leaders
And not possibly on sighting and evaluating the facts and opinions voiced, and coming to their own conclusions?
>They're too wacky and weird [...]
Is Dustin Hoffman also too "wacky and weird to appeal to the mainstream"? Sheryl Crow? Or Robert Redford? Then George Clooney certainly is.
Note, this doesn't make them any more right or wrong.
The problem is not, that US-Americans aren't buying their products anymore, but the distributors preemptively exerting self-censureship to avoid any possible repercussion of the public.
They are not able to profilerate their view as they could before as the US press avoids publishing un-public or "un-patriotic" opinions.
But that is not protected by the First Amendment.
Still, isn't pluralism the basis for a working democracy?
Whether you consider the current situation as a good working system or not, depends on what your ideals are.
>but the protesters want to make it seem like they are the majority rather than a (shrinking) minority.
No, they want to be noticed. This is a little bit complicated, sitting at home, while the news sources are busy reporting on govermental press releases, interviewing military personal, sending live and directly from the front, and showing the bombing of Baghdad.
They hope, that likeminded people will follow their steps.
I don't want to escelate the discussion about the justness of the various wars, but how many people were against the war in Viêtnam at first? How did that change?
>76% of Americans approve of the war
Well, there are psychological reasons for that.
Most people have a bad feeling about demonstrating against a war, their soldiers are fighting in.
Or do you see any specific reason that convinced them suddenly to wage a war?
> Or that Russia is currently owed at least $10 Billion by Iraq.
Big deal. Iraq has a total foreign deficit of $220 Billion. This deficit is mostly from its war against Iran, in which the U.S., U.K., Germany and France supported him and where Saddam gained all the weapons he is now not allowed to possess (and where he killed the 500,000 of his own people, George Bush is so eager at reminding at).
I'm wondering, how much he ows the U.S goverment for this.
> Money is fluid, and interchangable.
But also limited. The change of the reserves from US-Dollar to Euro would make the Euro more scarce and the Dollar more abundant, devaluating the Dollar. Whether that is good or bad (economy wise) is beyond my knowledge. Ask some economist about it.
> U.S. Defense spending is less, as a percentage of GDP, than it was in the 70s and 80s
I dearly hope so. The Soviet-Union ceased to exist.
Yeah, like the Arabic Alliance, or the the largest part of Europe.
Germany and France supported the last Gulf War. (And paid a large deal of the costs). This time, they do not.
Last time, there was a majority in the UN Security Council. This time, there was not.
According to he BBC almost 70% of the British people are opposed to a war without UN backing.
And I may be wrong, but "record rebellion against the government in a House of Commons vote" (BBC) does not sound like very strong support for the action.
> When any in the EU dare to speak against France and Germany's wishes, they are immediately branded as child-like and not worth being in the EU.
In the EU, every nation has veto-power. The move was unwished for, because France wanted to discuss a common stance. After that, France took its own stand.
> We saw that with the sit down and shut up attitude of Chirac to the Eastern Bloc nations.
Ok. It is not possible, that those goverments shut possibly up, because they have no public support on that matter? Because France pressured them? Why didn't then the other Security Council members changed their minds after being pressured?
Does France and Germany has more economical and political power?
> Especially ones where the most common political statement is "Death to America."
Yeah, that's what Hussein or all the people in the party are shouting: "Death to America".
IRC, his words were "I don't have anything against the American people, but when they come in our country, we will fight them on our soil."
Not that you have to give a lot on these words, but when you are "citeing", you should.
> We know that inspectors are not allowed to meet with Iraqi scientists in a neutral setting.
Well, actually in the last week, the first Iraqi scientists have been questioned in a different country, without sending tapes back to the regime.
> The Czechs have been saying for quite a while that the leader of the 9-11 attackers met repeatedly with Iraqi intelligence agents.
No, they said once. And it was objected by the CIA, shortely after.
Then it was never mentioned by both agencies again. Of course, you are free to construct your own theory on that matter, why this should be another reason to wage a war.
> I do have a problem with homicidal maniacs who have killed large portions of their own population having access to WMDs.
Well, Saddam is certainly not homicidal. And he killed his people with weapons delivered by the US, France and Germany, to fight Iran. No outcry came from the US goverment that time. No news item on CNN. Curiously, it currently makes more news today, than the day it actually happened.
What was the goverment stance on such a man like him?
"He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch" (FDR about Somoza)
The US goverment stance towards Saddam was a similar one the other nations have today. Removing him creates most likey more instability and pain than keeping him.
> If it isn't working, maybe it's time to scrap the whole concept and start over. Maybe with one that has a few less veto powers
Maybe one, where only the US has a veto power?
Not to mention that, the war was not sanctioned because of a veto, but because there was no majority for it.
Scrap democracy, when it is against your opinion. Way to go.
Um, you are aware, that Japan and Germany had democracies (in the case of Japan a parliamentary monarchy) before the World War? Both countries where relatively prosperous nations before and after the war.
And do you know, what effort the allied forces and especially the US goverment put into rebuilding these nations after the war?
You are aware, that Japan and Germany both faced another threat, the Soviet-Union, which united the people of both countries with the US?
Not to mention, that both Germany and Japan attacked first and the people where aware of the consequences that would have.
OTOH, the reasons for the current war are not as clear as those where in WWII or at least in the previous Gulf War. At least in the eyes of most parts of the world, as represented by their Foreign Minister in the Security Council, and including General Schwartzkopf.
From the MPEG 1 Audio FAQ
That is, why the quality differed (differs?) greatly between various encoders (Fraunhofer, Xing, LAME,
MPEG is stream based. The file is devided into frames, each having its own header. Those headers are necessary in order to discover a frame and to identify the type of the frame in the data-stream.
1 picture plus 1 broken nose?
Maybe you should not construct your world-view from PR-releases from the US goverment, or CNN news. (AFAIK, not even they are stating such thing, only suggerating it. Otherwise, feel free to delusion me with a link)
Others take a different view, 2.
The European goverments supporting the US-American move do not have the support of the public opinion on that matter. Especially, not in the "new Europe". Denmarks goverment can acutally be added to that list too,. According to these polls, the strongest support is to be found in the UK, with 67% opposing a war without UN backing. The list is tailed by Germany (87%) and the "new Europe" (some ~70% opposing it even with UN backing)
Japan is in a similar position. The goverment is backing the US position, but has not the public support for it. Prime Minister Koizumi has his own opinion on that matter.
You mean, some goverments representing a different stand on foreign policy than the majority of their people (and even some members of the goverment)?
Compromises are always more difficult to find than dictating a certain policy. Still the EU exists (it hasn't been called EC since the 90s) and has agreements on building planes and rockets. (The whole EU is a construct based on found agreements) . Upcoming are a joint military force for UN mandated missions and a joint military R&D.
Granted, it would be a little more complicated, to convince the EU to switch off Galileo (or to create it, for that matter), or to wage a war. It is left to your unterstanding of democracy, wether you find that bad or good.
How about just posting a link to the source (The GPL Analysis FAQ original [WORD])?
By this mean, you would also attribute the text to the creator.
>In any event, the treaty is a potential stumbling block for this plan, and I was hoping to bring that to attention.
You are right, that the treaty limits the flexibility of creating a new legislation.
But the Berne convention sets the barrier quite low and already discriminates between the creators rights and commercial exploitation rights.
Lastly, the Berne Convention is, like any treaty, open to negotiation. It is not set in stone. When the other nations find their artists rights well protected, and are consulted on that matter, they won't complain.
The critical part about Lessigs plan is, that those pieces aren't commercially exploited. IRC, some European countries already have deviating laws for books. In those countries, a book has to be published a minimal amount in a certain time, otherwise the publishing rights are forfeited. I don't know about the U.S.
In other words, the artists copyright may not put in jeopardy, but when he passes his rights to a second party (e.g. Disney, Time-Warner, Sony, whatever), he already has willfully relinquished some of his rights in favour of said second party.
No one says, that the new owners rights to a piece of work have to be of the same quality as the original author had.
> why would anyone choose BlueTooth?
Probably, because Bluetooth
can send with only 1mW in contrast to 100mW (WiFi)?
chips are consuming considerably less energy than WiFi?
chips are as small as 3mm^2 in 130nm process?
scales fairly good up to 32 networks whereas 802.11b has only 4 non-intefering channels.
lets most embedded devices transfer their complete memory (persistant and volatile) in less than a second to one another?
is more resistant to interference because of FHSS?
bridges the necessary distance? My mobile has only to communicate with my headset, or PDA, or WDA or whatever, which are most from about 2m away from each other, head to bottom.
class 1 devices can communicate up to 100m (e.g. my laptop)?
has various application protocols are already specified, ranging from infrared remote-control over headsets to network-access, whereas WiFi provides network-access.
These are mostly consequences from having inferior bandwidth and inferior range.
To the more-is-better people, you don't have to buy it. Buy yourself a nice PDA with WLAN and watch how it sucks power.
> for example would you want recycled plastic of dubious heritage showing up in plastic sode pop bottles?
Um, in countries, where there is an existing enforced recycling system (for example, most of Northern and Central Europe), the plastic in soda bottles is standardised. It's PET (polyethylen), IRC.
Actually, plastics are one of the easiest things to recycle, far easier than, say glas. The possible harmful additives are already outlawed, since people are drinking from such a bottle.
IRC, the plastics are shreddered and dissovled in various solvents. One solvent for each kind of plastic. Then the plastic is extracted from its solvent and you receive a practically pure resin.
Not to mention that recycling processes can be improved as production processes are improved. This is especially true, when the product is designed and produced with recycling in mind. And AFAIK, this hasn't happend a lot in the past.
>> check out Windows 2000 scheduling algos
> What's your point?
Isn't it quite obvious? Windows 2000 is kept wrapped up in NDAs. This makes it nearly impossible to "check out Windows 2000 scheduling algos" for the most of us.
Wether that is good or bad for Windows 2000 is not even implied with a single word.
Well, all those points are true.
It is like the list of 10 Reasons not to Develop a Newsreader, or How To Optimise: "Don't do it".
This list doesn't mean that one shouldn't do it. But probably you shouldn't do it. At least in the majority of the cases.
All those important issues are probably most often ignored or underestimated.
It is a good advice at his fellow developers to keep this list in mind, before they start on their (probable) odyssee.
And my opinion in point ten, he makes already clear that such a reminder is necessary.
AFAIK, the most important part is, that they aren't as energy consuming as current LCDs, because of:
> [OLEDS] don't require a backlight (as like normal LEDs, they produce their own light.)
LCDs are filtering the unwanted wavelengths, which are previously quite costly produced by the backlight.
And, as people with a digital camera should know, using the LCD drains a lot of energy from the battery.
> For a huge data file, forget it. [...]
> I do think that XML has its place, but a "human readable" config format is not it.
Aren't those two statements slightly contradictory?
> Imagine you were looking to fix the "george" attribute for any element in something like your example:
The advantage of being a text-file:
sed s/george=blah/george=foo/
Actually not my preferred way, I'd use the same approach I'd use in English, German, or C++ a text editor with search and replace-capability.
> All the extra structure that the XML file has is stored in a non-transparent way
Well, its structure is as non-transparently stored as in C. All those curly brackets.
Formatting code in C (or similar languanges) is not required. But without it, it is too compressed and not readable. Hell, I can have a fight over correct formatting in C files every day.
XML offers even more structural means than an INI-file.
A hierarchy flattened in an INI-fileA hierarchy in an XML-fileIs there more hidden extra structure? Then you are more knowledgable in XML than I am. And certainly breaking the boundaries of what is possible with an INI-file.
> Yes, I have a personal dislike for XML. This is based on my own experience of working with it
Now I'm begining to see, you were forced to wield through masses of data, stored on request on some hip manager in XML.
Damn... actually I hoped no one would come up with such one. I thought I request one in Java, one in C and one in C++ :).
Actually, in a XML-sense, it wouldn't even be a validating parser, as a validating parser would check for a required font field itself. But I'm getting picky here.
What I wanted to point out with that rhetorical question was, that XML is more widely spread and standardised.