I have to inform you of my outrage on the LZW time compression algorithm! It was awarded a patent, but it's clearly a word-for-word copy of the General Theory of Relativity, especially the part about time dilation at high speeds!
Obviously, the USPTO doesn't care about prior art. Even when the author of the prior art was a patent clerk himself!
1) Basic system configuration. There's no reason why all the distros can't decide on a standard configuration system for hardware detection / modules / network settings / X11 config / etc. This would allow KDE/Gnome interfaces to be developed and used across all distros.
They have. It's the text editor/text file combo.
But if you want fill in the blank style configuration... Well, you'll have to craft a parser for each configuration file. Either that or change the configuration parser of the software. (Guess which is easier.)
Also, there is danger in not having human-editable (meaning, simple text) configuration files... How do you fix a broken X11 configuration, if the only app that can edit it runs on X11?
3.) More professional developers Simply put, the F/OSS of greatest quality is usually developed by people who are being paid to meet needs. There are plenty of viable business models and market opportunities. Hobby projects won't cut it. If you want F/OSS to succeed, you need to do your part in the marketplace.
The problem is... Professional developers are paid to scratch someone else's itch. Hobby developers are often trying to scrach their own itch. But... Hobby developers are not being pushed to meet someone else's requirements. Then again, it might be because all the good ones have been hired up and have no free time to do anything outside work.
Actually, I'd say most Chinese are capitalists. They just love material wealth. This is based on what I have observed in my own family, and around the world in the near-universal Chinatowns. Another example is the founder of Yahoo, the youngest millionaire yet - he's Chinese, and started off very poor.
In '1984', they gradually made it impossible to think of the government in a bad way by sweeping away words, changing connontations and words with two opposing meanings when applied to different objects.
Don't be silly. The integration issues are between OS X and stubborn IT personnel. (Either stubborn, lazy or stupid, it doesn't make a difference, it just shows that they're not good)
Plan 9 in particular uses WORM media for long term storage and as a form of versioning - it uses magnetic rotating disk platters for level-2 caching and volatile RAM for level-1 caching.
From http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html: "The file server has three levels of storage. The central server in our installation has about 100 megabytes of memory buffers, 27 gigabytes of magnetic disks, and 350 gigabytes of bulk storage in a write-once-read-many (WORM) jukebox. The disk is a cache for the WORM and the memory is a cache for the disk; each is much faster, and sees about an order of magnitude more traffic, than the level it caches. The addressable data in the file system can be larger than the size of the magnetic disks, because they are only a cache; our main file server has about 40 gigabytes of active storage.
The most unusual feature of the file server comes from its use of a WORM device for stable storage. Every morning at 5 o'clock, a dump of the file system occurs automatically. The file system is frozen and all blocks modified since the last dump are queued to be written to the WORM. Once the blocks are queued, service is restored and the read-only root of the dumped file system appears in a hierarchy of all dumps ever taken, named by its date. For example, the directory/n/dump/1995/0315 is the root directory of an image of the file system as it appeared in the early morning of March 15, 1995. It takes a few minutes to queue the blocks, but the process to copy blocks to the WORM, which runs in the background, may take hours.
There are two ways the dump file system is used. The first is by the users themselves, who can browse the dump file system directly or attach pieces of it to their name space. For example, to track down a bug, it is straightforward to try the compiler from three months ago or to link a program with yesterday's library. With daily snapshots of all files, it is easy to find when a particular change was made or what changes were made on a particular date. People feel free to make large speculative changes to files in the knowledge that they can be backed out with a single copy command. There is no backup system as such; instead, because the dump is in the file name space, backup problems can be solved with standard tools such as cp, ls, grep, and diff.
The other (very rare) use is complete system backup. In the event of disaster, the active file system can be initialized from any dump by clearing the disk cache and setting the root of the active file system to be a copy of the dumped root. Although easy to do, this is not to be taken lightly: besides losing any change made after the date of the dump, this recovery method results in a very slow system. The cache must be reloaded from WORM, which is much slower than magnetic disks. The file system takes a few days to reload the working set and regain its full performance.
Access permissions of files in the dump are the same as they were when the dump was made. Normal utilities have normal permissions in the dump without any special arrangement. The dump file system is read-only, though, which means that files in the dump cannot be written regardless of their permission bits; in fact, since directories are part of the read-only structure, even the permissions cannot be changed.
Once a file is written to WORM, it cannot be removed, so our users never see ``please clean up your files'' messages and there is no df command. We regard the WORM jukebox as an unlimited resource. The only issue is how long it will take to fill. Our WORM has served a community of about 50 users for five years and has absorbed daily dumps, consuming a total of 65% of the storage in the jukebox. In that time, the manufacturer has improved the technology, doubling the capacity of the individual disks. If we were to upgrade to the new media, we would have more free space than in the original empty jukebox. Technology has created storage faster than we can use it. "
The GPL cannot possibly become more business friendly.
Why? Because the GPL was designed to abolish closed-source software and the general concept of software as a trade secret.
But if you want business friendly, go look at BSD.
Perhaps he's most interested in the viral feature of the GPL... But I don't see how the GPL can be modified to be more business friendly while still retaining this feature.
Quite obvious... The belief that copyright is needed for the ability to (re)distribute.
The GPL gives you the right to redistribute, but not copyright.
The DMCA is another story though. If a company uses copy-protection on GPL material, it could be possible for the company to sue on the grounds that the copy-protection was circumvented, even though the GPL (not specifically though) allows it.
Wireless displays. With a nice mount to draw power from, when docked, of course.
Internal gyroscopes will tell it when to flip into portrait mode.
But I somehow doubt it. Apple usually comes up with mind-boggling designs. Come now, which one of you predicted the LCD iMac would be attached to a swivel arm connected to a dome base?
2,279,474,440,000 litres/acre 148 800 297 Pascals per Newton US gallons 6,021,734,370,000,000 ((US gallon per hectare) per (Pascal per Newton)) per acre
Let's invent more compound measures, shall we?
1 ((the speed of light per ((((Newton per Pascal) per Joule) per year) per fortnight)) per (mach 1)) = 3.36285379 x 10^19 kilograms
Also, I am getting annoyed at the use of copyright as a verb - especially since it is being used in an almost oxymoronic manner...
'You can't copy that! That's copyrighted work!'
What it really means is that the work is not in the public domain, furthermore, it means that you don't have copyright for that piece of work.
So, I think it might make more sense to say something like 'copyrighted exclusively' - meaning, the right to copy is restricted to select individuals.
But copyright isn't the end-all, so it seems. The GPL seems to be handing out the right to copy works licensed under it - but not full copyright, it seems.
- Mac OS X come with Project Builder for Free, allowing me to Program and all my stuff without buying many costly licenses from Microsoft.
Not anymore - now it's Xcode. Didn't your Mac-fan friends tell you? In any case - the point is still valid. OS X has good, free developer tools from Apple. Windows... Well, the official developer tools cost a lot more than the OS itself.
- Mac OS X is Part Open-Source under GPL, so you can participate in the Development by contributing to the Darwin Projects
Common myth. Darwin is not licensed under the GPL, and not compatible with GPL either. The various Darwin forks of other projects are licensed like the originals.
- Everything displayed in a Windows in Mac OS X can be saved as a PDF.
While the display language may be PDF - only printable documents can be saved as PDFs for the time being.
The parent is probably overrated - I can't tell. But it is full of little mistakes.
That's not true! It has an "Application Programming" Interface, or API for short! It allows users like me to write little programs to simplify chores, like putting pretty pictures onto the screen!
The whole NT series installs from a curses-like interface. (Note, a full NT kernel is booted)
The 9x series installs from what appears to be a stripped down Windows 3.1.
As for me: I installed Gentoo. Meaning, manual invokation from the command line for many steps. (But I would have hated to have manually fetched and compiled the base system, I'm not looking for LFS.) Can't say I'm missing that much either.
Some comparisons:
All Linux distros install from a proper Linux environment - some even install from a proper XF86 environment. And some have a fully-functional LiveCD.
Mac OS X is installed from a app-reduced OS X environment.
The GCF between most OS's support for FSes is FAT32.
Filesystems are all designed differently.
FAT was designed to be a simple FS for a simple OS. ext2 was designed to be a high-performance inode-oriented FS that would be future-proof. HFS+ was designed to be a high-performance path-oriented FS that would support HFS features and any future extensions. NTFS was designed to provide a really future-proof and featureful FS for any OS, not just Windows. (Too bad Windows doesn't exploit all its capabilities)
Mod parent down - this is not any more insightful than telling everyone to use Xlib because it is the greatest common factor between GTK+ and Qt.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right... It must have been a different obscene measure.
While it doesn't do 'library of congress' as a data unit, or '100 gigapixel picture', you can still do things like '100 * 10^9 * 4 / 4TB'.
God measured in cubits.
Also, 581 kph = 116.5050712 microparsecs per century.
I have to inform you of my outrage on the LZW time compression algorithm! It was awarded a patent, but it's clearly a word-for-word copy of the General Theory of Relativity, especially the part about time dilation at high speeds!
Obviously, the USPTO doesn't care about prior art. Even when the author of the prior art was a patent clerk himself!
They have. It's the text editor/text file combo.
But if you want fill in the blank style configuration... Well, you'll have to craft a parser for each configuration file. Either that or change the configuration parser of the software. (Guess which is easier.)
Also, there is danger in not having human-editable (meaning, simple text) configuration files... How do you fix a broken X11 configuration, if the only app that can edit it runs on X11?
The problem is... Professional developers are paid to scratch someone else's itch. Hobby developers are often trying to scrach their own itch. But... Hobby developers are not being pushed to meet someone else's requirements. Then again, it might be because all the good ones have been hired up and have no free time to do anything outside work.
Actually, I'd say most Chinese are capitalists. They just love material wealth. This is based on what I have observed in my own family, and around the world in the near-universal Chinatowns. Another example is the founder of Yahoo, the youngest millionaire yet - he's Chinese, and started off very poor.
In '1984', they gradually made it impossible to think of the government in a bad way by sweeping away words, changing connontations and words with two opposing meanings when applied to different objects.
Don't be silly. The integration issues are between OS X and stubborn IT personnel. (Either stubborn, lazy or stupid, it doesn't make a difference, it just shows that they're not good)
Plan 9 in particular uses WORM media for long term storage and as a form of versioning - it uses magnetic rotating disk platters for level-2 caching and volatile RAM for level-1 caching.
:
/n/dump/1995/0315 is the root directory of an image of the file system as it appeared in the early morning of March 15, 1995. It takes a few minutes to queue the blocks, but the process to copy blocks to the WORM, which runs in the background, may take hours.
From http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
"The file server has three levels of storage. The central server in our installation has about 100 megabytes of memory buffers, 27 gigabytes of magnetic disks, and 350 gigabytes of bulk storage in a write-once-read-many (WORM) jukebox. The disk is a cache for the WORM and the memory is a cache for the disk; each is much faster, and sees about an order of magnitude more traffic, than the level it caches. The addressable data in the file system can be larger than the size of the magnetic disks, because they are only a cache; our main file server has about 40 gigabytes of active storage.
The most unusual feature of the file server comes from its use of a WORM device for stable storage. Every morning at 5 o'clock, a dump of the file system occurs automatically. The file system is frozen and all blocks modified since the last dump are queued to be written to the WORM. Once the blocks are queued, service is restored and the read-only root of the dumped file system appears in a hierarchy of all dumps ever taken, named by its date. For example, the directory
There are two ways the dump file system is used. The first is by the users themselves, who can browse the dump file system directly or attach pieces of it to their name space. For example, to track down a bug, it is straightforward to try the compiler from three months ago or to link a program with yesterday's library. With daily snapshots of all files, it is easy to find when a particular change was made or what changes were made on a particular date. People feel free to make large speculative changes to files in the knowledge that they can be backed out with a single copy command. There is no backup system as such; instead, because the dump is in the file name space, backup problems can be solved with standard tools such as cp, ls, grep, and diff.
The other (very rare) use is complete system backup. In the event of disaster, the active file system can be initialized from any dump by clearing the disk cache and setting the root of the active file system to be a copy of the dumped root. Although easy to do, this is not to be taken lightly: besides losing any change made after the date of the dump, this recovery method results in a very slow system. The cache must be reloaded from WORM, which is much slower than magnetic disks. The file system takes a few days to reload the working set and regain its full performance.
Access permissions of files in the dump are the same as they were when the dump was made. Normal utilities have normal permissions in the dump without any special arrangement. The dump file system is read-only, though, which means that files in the dump cannot be written regardless of their permission bits; in fact, since directories are part of the read-only structure, even the permissions cannot be changed.
Once a file is written to WORM, it cannot be removed, so our users never see ``please clean up your files'' messages and there is no df command. We regard the WORM jukebox as an unlimited resource. The only issue is how long it will take to fill. Our WORM has served a community of about 50 users for five years and has absorbed daily dumps, consuming a total of 65% of the storage in the jukebox. In that time, the manufacturer has improved the technology, doubling the capacity of the individual disks. If we were to upgrade to the new media, we would have more free space than in the original empty jukebox. Technology has created storage faster than we can use it. "
While true, I think this is only a temporary address, akin to the IPv4 169.254.*.* addresses. These are self-assigned. Whatever for, I have no idea...
Obviously, you can't be having your MAC address as part of your address, you'd rather have something simple like dead:beef::1.
When you do get to fire up Mozilla, you get to watch using libpr0n instead.
None of those end in an 'us' sound.
Linus -> Linii.
Digital Restrictions Management? That's not right either... I hardly get to select which restrictions are in effect on my computer...
Dehabilitating Restrictions on Me sounds better.
OSDL != OSDN
OSDN N OSDL = NULL
OSDL is where Linus works. OSDN includes Slashdot.
Tell Bush there are weapons of Mars destruction in Mass.
The GPL cannot possibly become more business friendly.
Why? Because the GPL was designed to abolish closed-source software and the general concept of software as a trade secret.
But if you want business friendly, go look at BSD.
Perhaps he's most interested in the viral feature of the GPL... But I don't see how the GPL can be modified to be more business friendly while still retaining this feature.
Mod parent up, Informative.
...
Mod grandparent down, Overrated.
(1) SCO Group != Santa Cruz Operation
(2) Santa Cruz Operation - UNIX = Tarantella
(3) Caldera + (Santa Cruz Operation - Tarantella) = Caldera
(4) Caldera - ? = SCO Group
(5) Canopy = SCO Group +
Yes, I know that (3) implies UNIX = 0.
The unknown in (4) is probably sanity.
Quite obvious... The belief that copyright is needed for the ability to (re)distribute.
The GPL gives you the right to redistribute, but not copyright.
The DMCA is another story though. If a company uses copy-protection on GPL material, it could be possible for the company to sue on the grounds that the copy-protection was circumvented, even though the GPL (not specifically though) allows it.
I think the next iMac trick will be...
Wireless displays. With a nice mount to draw power from, when docked, of course.
Internal gyroscopes will tell it when to flip into portrait mode.
But I somehow doubt it. Apple usually comes up with mind-boggling designs. Come now, which one of you predicted the LCD iMac would be attached to a swivel arm connected to a dome base?
0.00000376522681 AU
0.0000000000595389999 LY
2,279,474,440,000 litres/acre
148 800 297 Pascals per Newton US gallons
6,021,734,370,000,000 ((US gallon per hectare) per (Pascal per Newton)) per acre
Let's invent more compound measures, shall we?
1 ((the speed of light per ((((Newton per Pascal) per Joule) per year) per fortnight)) per (mach 1)) = 3.36285379 x 10^19 kilograms
FYI, it was the _four_ colour problem.
o re m
Quick summary:
What is the minimum number of colours one can use to colour a map, with no two adjacent sections sharing the same colour?
It was (supposedly) proven by a computer algorithm going through all possible configurations. (In the ~1800 range, I'm told)
Of course, some mathematicians summarily rejected this as proof. (It is experimental proof.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four%20color%20the
Not quite.... The Matrix is the descendant of SKY.NET, obviously a descendant of .NET.
Yes.
Also, I am getting annoyed at the use of copyright as a verb - especially since it is being used in an almost oxymoronic manner...
'You can't copy that! That's copyrighted work!'
What it really means is that the work is not in the public domain, furthermore, it means that you don't have copyright for that piece of work.
So, I think it might make more sense to say something like 'copyrighted exclusively' - meaning, the right to copy is restricted to select individuals.
But copyright isn't the end-all, so it seems. The GPL seems to be handing out the right to copy works licensed under it - but not full copyright, it seems.
Not anymore - now it's Xcode. Didn't your Mac-fan friends tell you? In any case - the point is still valid. OS X has good, free developer tools from Apple. Windows... Well, the official developer tools cost a lot more than the OS itself.
Common myth. Darwin is not licensed under the GPL, and not compatible with GPL either. The various Darwin forks of other projects are licensed like the originals.
While the display language may be PDF - only printable documents can be saved as PDFs for the time being.
The parent is probably overrated - I can't tell. But it is full of little mistakes.
That's not true! It has an "Application Programming" Interface, or API for short! It allows users like me to write little programs to simplify chores, like putting pretty pictures onto the screen!
---END IDIOT ZEALOT MODE---
The whole NT series installs from a curses-like interface. (Note, a full NT kernel is booted)
The 9x series installs from what appears to be a stripped down Windows 3.1.
As for me: I installed Gentoo. Meaning, manual invokation from the command line for many steps. (But I would have hated to have manually fetched and compiled the base system, I'm not looking for LFS.) Can't say I'm missing that much either.
Some comparisons:
All Linux distros install from a proper Linux environment - some even install from a proper XF86 environment. And some have a fully-functional LiveCD.
Mac OS X is installed from a app-reduced OS X environment.
The GCF between most OS's support for FSes is FAT32.
Filesystems are all designed differently.
FAT was designed to be a simple FS for a simple OS.
ext2 was designed to be a high-performance inode-oriented FS that would be future-proof.
HFS+ was designed to be a high-performance path-oriented FS that would support HFS features and any future extensions.
NTFS was designed to provide a really future-proof and featureful FS for any OS, not just Windows. (Too bad Windows doesn't exploit all its capabilities)
Mod parent down - this is not any more insightful than telling everyone to use Xlib because it is the greatest common factor between GTK+ and Qt.