For those interested in a modern intro to the man
on
Charles Darwin Online
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· Score: 4, Informative
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (ISBN 0393059812) is a great recent (and concise) biography that picks up on his return from the Beagle adventure and takes the reader on an interesting journey past dangling duck's feet, barnacle gonads, and earthworm poop. And the publications, of course.
Sadly, since estimates of the opinions/beliefs of the US population usually hit around 40% "young earthers" and 45% "guided by the great spirit in the sky," this may be of interest to only a relatively small segment of the population...
If this is the first one to be found in Europe, could this mean they were built due to Egyptian conquering or were they maybe the first ones?
The Egyptial pyramids developed, over time, from mastabas and step pyramids, eventually to be abandoned as nice looking but rather impracticle tombs. Other civilizations independently developed similar structures.
Pyramids are bog-simple to make, being just stepped courses of stone, so it's not too surprising that they appear as monumental architecture in several early cultures. They don't require columns, lintels, or arches. Just big rocks.
If somebody finds a groin vault that's dated 5000 BCE, that would be news.
There are no missing links because there are no links.
That concept echos back to the Great Chain of Being, an Aristotelian concept that pre-dates the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and which continues to be a favorite today among those for whom the concept of "a billion years ago" equates to that vague, amorphous period of "sometime before last Thursday."
The specimen under consideration may very well be neither a direct decendent of any currently characterized species nor a direct ancestor of any (including of our own). Differentiating closely releated species is tough (see lumpers and splitters) and there is no answer key in the back of the book.
The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation.
Natianiel Bowditch (as best as I can recall the quote)
Among many other reasons for retaining fixed aids to navigation, the GPS system uses the WGS-84 datum. Many charts, in particular many harbor charts, still use local datam references.
Check with the former Commanding Officer and Navigator of the USS LaMoure County for their opinion regarding over-reliance on GPS positions with respect to local chart datums.
Visual and radar piloting have the benefit of being independent of the local coordinate system. Visual aids to navigation, in particular, may seem to be "obsolete" but they are wonderfully helpful in real world piloting situations.
Been there, done that, didn't get relieved for cause.
I downloaded and installed the 7-day free trial a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Google purchased the service and dropped the price of an annual subscription to a more reasonable level.
If they could have kept my DSL pipe full (or even occasionally full) when pulling down the image data I probably would have sprung for the subscription but the service was just unacceptably slow.
They do recommend that users have a broadband connection, so presumably the throughput will improve someday. However, if you're thinking about trying the service, do use enough of the free trial period to find out if it's fast enough for you.
The question it rasises is how much other stuff is in windows that has IP violations?
I've managed to get out of the IT/Windows side of things and more into embedded development, but, once upon a time...
I do recall that there used to be an admin kit that could be installed with NT 4 (yeah, this goes back a ways) that included a "better" command line interface and some typical tools like vi.
For some now-forgotten reason I "stringed" the vi executable and on the inside it was vim.
Much to my surprise (not) the "About" box listed only MS developers and MS version info -- not a word about the vim project.
So no, it's not the first or only time that MS has "embraced" foreign code without proper attribution.
Somewhere in the attic I still have the ancient Digital Group Z-80 system that I put together in 1979: 4.5 MHz Z-80 (Overclocked!) with 18 K static RAM (two 8K cards plus 2K on the CPU card) that cost as a solder-it-yourself kit about US$2000 in 1979. According to this site that equates to a bit over $5000 today. Dang!
It did come with a version of the original Lunar Lander, though...
A lot of things SCO does reminds me of a child's behaviour, and this is one of them. Kids often dwell on things that please them, and act as if problems don't exist.
That's odd. Seems to describe the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well.
Given that there are specialized apps that (at least for the forseeable future) are only available to run under Windows -- business-specific apps, specialized tools like HDL synthesis and device programmers, schematic capture/board layout (gEDA is getting there but it needs to interoperate with existing tools), etc. (fill in your own examples from your industry) -- it's difficult to completely break with Windows.
And given that if someone wants to use Linux but also needs to run Windows then whichever single-boot OS they start with, they will need to go though the partition / format / install / boot / curse / redo loop.
If some bright vendor were able to sell a system/notebook that, out of the box, would dual boot, they'd probably make a bundle. Buy a box with just Linux for $x, or with XP for $x + $100, or with both for the same $x + 100?
Ignorance is not a defense in any kind of law. If there's copyright infringing code that you're using, you're liable, period.
Bzzt... Copyright, maybe (although white-room development may be a defense). Patents, no.
It is possible for me to know whether I'm doing line-for-line copying (or derivative work, or...) but it's not possible for me to examine and judge every claim for every software patent.
Aside from a great deal of speculation about correlations between Egyptian records, tales of the Peoples of the Sea, and a selective reading of the Dialogues, the only "data" the author points to are the satellite images which may be the remains of rectangular structures. Nothing in situ to indicate dating.
As there is almost certainly evidence of Bronze Age settlements practically anywhere one cares to dig along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, this article is roughly the equivalent of speculating that an unattributed burial in a 6th century Wessex tomb must necessarily be the remains of Arthur.
(I hate coming in so late to the discussion, but...)
One solution to this is to use something other than the Linux installer to handle the dual boot capability. I've been running Fedora Core 1 on an HP notebook PC for months with no problems (at least as far as the PC goes; the weeds in the front lawn are killing me).
The trick seems to be to install GRUB in the Linux partition without a chain in the MBR and use an "XP friendly" boot-time selector to choose which to boot into.
I used Partition Manager to handle the drive repartition and the included Boot Manager to handle the boot menu.
Works great. Not too expensive.
I think it can also direct-boot into Fedora (bypassing GRUB) but I haven't fooled with that capabilty, on the "if it ain't broke" principle.
As an alternative to the flood of Ethereal posts, I'd recommend that the OP also take a look at CommView.
I gave it a try after having been completely unsuccessful in getting a Windoze binary of Ethereal to run on my home PC. Crashes, lockups, the usual Windows issues. Probably a combination of the dreaded DLL-hell and the particular embedded Ethernet chip on that motherboard.
But I wanted to watch outgoing packets (suspected a spyware app was running), looked around for an alternative, and gave CommView a try. Worked the first time, no crashes, nice interface, yada yada yada.
There are "personal" and "enterprise" editions (priced accordingly) as well as an evaluation download.
It's not Free Software (not even free-as-in-speach) and it runs on Windows, so I'm sure it's responsible for the fires in Canneto di Caronia in Sicily among other abominations -- but if you need this kind of tool in a Windows environment, check it out.
I would be very interested to know which functions those are. Could you elaborate on that for a minute?
Well, one quick example that I use quite often is the ability to easily have text on a line that mixes left justified, centered, and/or right justified elements. Very handy for titles, headers, and footers. No "tables" or "text boxes" or messing about with tab settings, just a simple meta-key combination.
It's not (easily) do-able in MS Word or in OOo.
Now, I don't know that would justify the purchase price by itself but it's part of the reason why there are still people (like myself) who would, for example, prefer to be productive and buy our own copies of WP rather than use the copy of MS Word provided by The Company and be pissed off at the lameness of the app.
When I want the page to look the way I want and not how some ^%#$^%*!$ paper clip thinks I want, there still isn't anything out on the market better than WordPerfect.
According to the GPL, if IBM redistributes a GPL program, then section 7 of the GPL implies that IBM licenses its patents that cover that program to anybody who receives that program.
True. But that doesn't hold harmless a hypothetical third party (e.g., "me") who inadvertently incorporates an obvious-to-anybody-except-a-patent-examiner algorithm that IBM, for example, holds the patent rights to.
The GPL would require that IBM provide patent relief for code that it writes and incorporates into a GPL distribution. I don't think that permission would leak over into code written by somebody else that may contain other patented algorithms that, arguably, IBM may not have wished to license.
That should hold even if both pieces of code were in, e.g., a Linux distro available for download from IBM if a reasonable claim could be made that the offending code was included without the patent holder's knowledge or permission.
If IBM try to turn against the free/open source community then this court filing would turn into a weapon against them. IBM are saying to the judge, "we're 100% behind Linux and the GPL". It would be very hard for them to now turn against the free/open source movement.
Not at all. The GPL is a license to distribute copyrighted works but this isn't a paper-rock-scissors thing.
I may write code today to which I hold the copyright and may chose to distribute the code under the GPL. However, that doesn't mean that the code is then unencumbered by a patent held by someone else.
If, in the future, FOSS significantly threatens IBM's revenue stream then it may indeed be in their best interests to use their patent portfolio to quash competing products, irrespective of the validity of, or their continued recognition of, the GPL.
I'm not a fan of Office, but that is just a dumb argument. How exactly do you expect any program to edit files from a later version without problems? Do you think the programmers know the additional features they need to support before they even write them?
Well, WordPerfect has managed to keep the same file format since release 6. Indeed, the "save as" tag is "File Type WordPerfect 6/7/8/9/10/11".
Later versions have usability improvements (e.g., better export to PDF files) but the document itself stays the same.
One might imagine that the difficulties that Word experiences with older versions using documents created with newer versions is intentional. Once our principal customer upgrades to the latest MS Office then the whole company quickly follows -- and it grows from there.
Nope. The fact the probably 99% of the world's population is not well-versed in computer science is what allows MS to dominate. You just aren't going to get 50 year olds to sit the fuck down, search out a Linux distro and set it up, forget use it. It's not happening now, it's not happening ever.
Errmm... Remember, today's 50-yr old codgers are many of the same ones who got a start playing with Godbout S-100 kits and the like in the late 70s. Link for those of you too young to remember hand-translating assembler mneumonics to write Z80 device drivers.
And, as a bona fide 50+ fossil, I've had a lot of fun searching out and installing Linux distros. Even to the point of sprinkling a few Knoppix disks around the office to dazzle the unwashed masses with how fun (and easy) running Linux can be. (I don't mention things like Slackware until they're hooked...)
Slashdot Mirror
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (ISBN 0393059812) is a great recent (and concise) biography that picks up on his return from the Beagle adventure and takes the reader on an interesting journey past dangling duck's feet, barnacle gonads, and earthworm poop. And the publications, of course.
...
Sadly, since estimates of the opinions/beliefs of the US population usually hit around 40% "young earthers" and 45% "guided by the great spirit in the sky," this may be of interest to only a relatively small segment of the population
The Egyptial pyramids developed, over time, from mastabas and step pyramids, eventually to be abandoned as nice looking but rather impracticle tombs. Other civilizations independently developed similar structures.
Pyramids are bog-simple to make, being just stepped courses of stone, so it's not too surprising that they appear as monumental architecture in several early cultures. They don't require columns, lintels, or arches. Just big rocks.
If somebody finds a groin vault that's dated 5000 BCE, that would be news.
There are no missing links because there are no links.
That concept echos back to the Great Chain of Being, an Aristotelian concept that pre-dates the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and which continues to be a favorite today among those for whom the concept of "a billion years ago" equates to that vague, amorphous period of "sometime before last Thursday."
The specimen under consideration may very well be neither a direct decendent of any currently characterized species nor a direct ancestor of any (including of our own). Differentiating closely releated species is tough (see lumpers and splitters) and there is no answer key in the back of the book.
Ummm... offworld colonies! Replicants! Yay!
Still waiting for the "basic pleasure model"
If the exercise Hurricane Pam is to Hurricane Katrina as Cyberstorm is to an actual cyber attack, then we're in deep doodoo. No smiley.
Alas, I've lately been overly slack in my meta-mods and moderation and thus have no mod points to award.
Nevertheless, well done!
Think nosehairs on CSI.
EEuuww... Dude! I was trying to eat lunch.
The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation.
Natianiel Bowditch (as best as I can recall the quote)
Among many other reasons for retaining fixed aids to navigation, the GPS system uses the WGS-84 datum. Many charts, in particular many harbor charts, still use local datam references.
Check with the former Commanding Officer and Navigator of the USS LaMoure County for their opinion regarding over-reliance on GPS positions with respect to local chart datums.
Visual and radar piloting have the benefit of being independent of the local coordinate system. Visual aids to navigation, in particular, may seem to be "obsolete" but they are wonderfully helpful in real world piloting situations.
Been there, done that, didn't get relieved for cause.
"Paul Krill, Infoworld" seems to specialize in breathless, high-anxiety stories about rather ordinary events.
InfoWorld
PC World
I downloaded and installed the 7-day free trial a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Google purchased the service and dropped the price of an annual subscription to a more reasonable level.
If they could have kept my DSL pipe full (or even occasionally full) when pulling down the image data I probably would have sprung for the subscription but the service was just unacceptably slow.
They do recommend that users have a broadband connection, so presumably the throughput will improve someday. However, if you're thinking about trying the service, do use enough of the free trial period to find out if it's fast enough for you.
The question it rasises is how much other stuff is in windows that has IP violations?
I've managed to get out of the IT/Windows side of things and more into embedded development, but, once upon a time...
I do recall that there used to be an admin kit that could be installed with NT 4 (yeah, this goes back a ways) that included a "better" command line interface and some typical tools like vi.
For some now-forgotten reason I "stringed" the vi executable and on the inside it was vim.
Much to my surprise (not) the "About" box listed only MS developers and MS version info -- not a word about the vim project.
So no, it's not the first or only time that MS has "embraced" foreign code without proper attribution.
#pragma OldFart
Somewhere in the attic I still have the ancient Digital Group Z-80 system that I put together in 1979: 4.5 MHz Z-80 (Overclocked!) with 18 K static RAM (two 8K cards plus 2K on the CPU card) that cost as a solder-it-yourself kit about US$2000 in 1979. According to this site that equates to a bit over $5000 today. Dang!
It did come with a version of the original Lunar Lander, though...
What about the Glade toolkit? Granted, it's not "Visual Basic" but it does help take care of the donkey work in getting the user interface setup.
Damn, and me without mod points. Consider yourself the recipient of a virtual +1 funny...
A lot of things SCO does reminds me of a child's behaviour, and this is one of them. Kids often dwell on things that please them, and act as if problems don't exist.
That's odd. Seems to describe the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well.
Given that there are specialized apps that (at least for the forseeable future) are only available to run under Windows -- business-specific apps, specialized tools like HDL synthesis and device programmers, schematic capture/board layout (gEDA is getting there but it needs to interoperate with existing tools), etc. (fill in your own examples from your industry) -- it's difficult to completely break with Windows.
And given that if someone wants to use Linux but also needs to run Windows then whichever single-boot OS they start with, they will need to go though the partition / format / install / boot / curse / redo loop.
If some bright vendor were able to sell a system/notebook that, out of the box, would dual boot, they'd probably make a bundle. Buy a box with just Linux for $x, or with XP for $x + $100, or with both for the same $x + 100?
Training wheels.
Ignorance is not a defense in any kind of law. If there's copyright infringing code that you're using, you're liable, period.
...) but it's not possible for me to examine and judge every claim for every software patent.
Bzzt... Copyright, maybe (although white-room development may be a defense). Patents, no.
It is possible for me to know whether I'm doing line-for-line copying (or derivative work, or
The original Antiquity article is here.
Aside from a great deal of speculation about correlations between Egyptian records, tales of the Peoples of the Sea, and a selective reading of the Dialogues, the only "data" the author points to are the satellite images which may be the remains of rectangular structures. Nothing in situ to indicate dating.
As there is almost certainly evidence of Bronze Age settlements practically anywhere one cares to dig along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, this article is roughly the equivalent of speculating that an unattributed burial in a 6th century Wessex tomb must necessarily be the remains of Arthur.
(I hate coming in so late to the discussion, but...)
One solution to this is to use something other than the Linux installer to handle the dual boot capability. I've been running Fedora Core 1 on an HP notebook PC for months with no problems (at least as far as the PC goes; the weeds in the front lawn are killing me).
The trick seems to be to install GRUB in the Linux partition without a chain in the MBR and use an "XP friendly" boot-time selector to choose which to boot into.
I used Partition Manager to handle the drive repartition and the included Boot Manager to handle the boot menu.
Works great. Not too expensive.
I think it can also direct-boot into Fedora (bypassing GRUB) but I haven't fooled with that capabilty, on the "if it ain't broke" principle.
As an alternative to the flood of Ethereal posts, I'd recommend that the OP also take a look at CommView.
I gave it a try after having been completely unsuccessful in getting a Windoze binary of Ethereal to run on my home PC. Crashes, lockups, the usual Windows issues. Probably a combination of the dreaded DLL-hell and the particular embedded Ethernet chip on that motherboard.
But I wanted to watch outgoing packets (suspected a spyware app was running), looked around for an alternative, and gave CommView a try. Worked the first time, no crashes, nice interface, yada yada yada.
There are "personal" and "enterprise" editions (priced accordingly) as well as an evaluation download.
It's not Free Software (not even free-as-in-speach) and it runs on Windows, so I'm sure it's responsible for the fires in Canneto di Caronia in Sicily among other abominations -- but if you need this kind of tool in a Windows environment, check it out.
I would be very interested to know which functions those are. Could you elaborate on that for a minute?
Well, one quick example that I use quite often is the ability to easily have text on a line that mixes left justified, centered, and/or right justified elements. Very handy for titles, headers, and footers. No "tables" or "text boxes" or messing about with tab settings, just a simple meta-key combination.
It's not (easily) do-able in MS Word or in OOo.
Now, I don't know that would justify the purchase price by itself but it's part of the reason why there are still people (like myself) who would, for example, prefer to be productive and buy our own copies of WP rather than use the copy of MS Word provided by The Company and be pissed off at the lameness of the app.
When I want the page to look the way I want and not how some ^%#$^%*!$ paper clip thinks I want, there still isn't anything out on the market better than WordPerfect.
According to the GPL, if IBM redistributes a GPL program, then section 7 of the GPL implies that IBM licenses its patents that cover that program to anybody who receives that program.
True. But that doesn't hold harmless a hypothetical third party (e.g., "me") who inadvertently incorporates an obvious-to-anybody-except-a-patent-examiner algorithm that IBM, for example, holds the patent rights to.
The GPL would require that IBM provide patent relief for code that it writes and incorporates into a GPL distribution. I don't think that permission would leak over into code written by somebody else that may contain other patented algorithms that, arguably, IBM may not have wished to license.
That should hold even if both pieces of code were in, e.g., a Linux distro available for download from IBM if a reasonable claim could be made that the offending code was included without the patent holder's knowledge or permission.
If IBM try to turn against the free/open source community then this court filing would turn into a weapon against them. IBM are saying to the judge, "we're 100% behind Linux and the GPL". It would be very hard for them to now turn against the free/open source movement.
Not at all. The GPL is a license to distribute copyrighted works but this isn't a paper-rock-scissors thing.
I may write code today to which I hold the copyright and may chose to distribute the code under the GPL. However, that doesn't mean that the code is then unencumbered by a patent held by someone else.
If, in the future, FOSS significantly threatens IBM's revenue stream then it may indeed be in their best interests to use their patent portfolio to quash competing products, irrespective of the validity of, or their continued recognition of, the GPL.
I'm not a fan of Office, but that is just a dumb argument. How exactly do you expect any program to edit files from a later version without problems? Do you think the programmers know the additional features they need to support before they even write them?
Well, WordPerfect has managed to keep the same file format since release 6. Indeed, the "save as" tag is "File Type WordPerfect 6/7/8/9/10/11".
Later versions have usability improvements (e.g., better export to PDF files) but the document itself stays the same.
One might imagine that the difficulties that Word experiences with older versions using documents created with newer versions is intentional. Once our principal customer upgrades to the latest MS Office then the whole company quickly follows -- and it grows from there.
Nope. The fact the probably 99% of the world's population is not well-versed in computer science is what allows MS to dominate. You just aren't going to get 50 year olds to sit the fuck down, search out a Linux distro and set it up, forget use it. It's not happening now, it's not happening ever.
Errmm... Remember, today's 50-yr old codgers are many of the same ones who got a start playing with Godbout S-100 kits and the like in the late 70s. Link for those of you too young to remember hand-translating assembler mneumonics to write Z80 device drivers.
And, as a bona fide 50+ fossil, I've had a lot of fun searching out and installing Linux distros. Even to the point of sprinkling a few Knoppix disks around the office to dazzle the unwashed masses with how fun (and easy) running Linux can be. (I don't mention things like Slackware until they're hooked...)