There's probably a few commercial applications knocking around that still haven't been ported to Linux - but they'll almost certainly be the sort of application where if you were to run it on anything other than a fully-supported, paid-up platform (which OpenSolaris never was), you'd need mental help.
and that practical limit to cellphone lenses & sensors is probably around 3MP)
Practical limit assuming they start to fit half-decent lenses and don't go for megapixels over image quality. On their own, megapixels mean damn-all. A tiny 3MP sensor (which is what you'll find in a cellphone) will record a significantly noisier image than 1MP sensor of the same size. Furthermore, the grubby cheap & nasty couple of element plastic lenses in a phone will never touch even a fairly basic compact camera.
Frankly, my first digital camera (which was all of 2MP, IIRC) was able to produce much better images than any cellphone I've seen.
Thank you. A well reason, intelligent argument. That was all I wanted to hear.
IMV it should be illegal for someone to sell you a product and retroactively change how you're able to use it, but the law hasn't really caught up with technology in that regard.
The ARM was good enough for office work 23 years ago. That was the whole point of the processor - to provide a suitable CPU as the basis for Acorn's replacement for the ageing BBC Computer line.
Acorn, along with most others producing non-x86 computers in the late 80's/early 90s, failed. But it transpired that there was rather a large market for a relatively fast general purpose CPU which doesn't consume a great deal of power and is relatively easy to code for. The spin-off company that developed the CPU did reasonably well and most of the development since then has focused on relatively modest speed increments compared to the x86.
If you consider how cars were built prior to the introduction of airbags, that's not terribly far from what was actually there. The steering column is a big, thick chunk of metal and it WILL kill you if your head hits it at high speed.
Anyone with half a brain knew full well it was there, but it still didn't help to reduce deaths.
While I'm sure many will welcome you taking Sony to task, do you mind if I ask exactly how a $10 voucher against your next purchase of a Sony product will help you run Linux on your PS3?
You haven't really discussed how you went about your approaches in any real detail, so excuse me if I give you a few pointers:
1. HR departments (particularly in big companies) are mostly there to keep outsiders out. They seldom accept speculative applications and forward them to the relevant department - yet at any given point in time, many departments within organisations are thinking "We could do with someone else here to help deal with XXX, but we need to get around to writing the job spec, get hiring authority sorted out, contact agents/advertise and ask HR to accept CVs with the following qualifications....". If you can find companies in that kind of position and speak to the person who's thinking that, you'll bypass much of the HR bullsh*t. For some odd reason, this process can actually be easier than going in the "accepted" way of writing to HR and a hell of a lot more productive.
2. Regardless of whether you're applying speculatively or for an advertised post, NEVER send out a standard CV/covering letter. I promise you no matter how much effort you put in they stand out a mile. Figure out what the company is looking for (and if you can't figure this out, why do you want to work there?) and write covering letter/tweak CV to suit.
3. Avoid agencies. This is my own personal experience, take it with as much salt as you feel it requires. But most employment agencies charge a small fortune, no employer wants to pay that if they can avoid it. Particularly not when they're taking on a graduate, who may or may not be any good in the real world. At the end of the day, the agent is being paid by the employer and they don't really care if you get the job or not, just so long as the person who gets the job is someone who they put forward. You'll waste hours talking to these people on the phone who insist they can find you work, that your best bet is to ask them to market you, that they're the solution to all the world's problems. It's complete fiction, but they're telling you what you want to hear.
4. Keep active in both your job hunting and (if it goes on a long time) something relevant to the job. Any potential employer will view how seriously you're taking a job hunt as a guide to how seriously you would take the job - if you have been scratching your bum since the last interview 3 weeks ago, they'll assume you'll do the same thing when they're paying you.
But, at least, I can choose to use an OS that doesn't rub it in my face. So Ubuntu, burn.
Which OS will that be, then? The GNU utilities are all heading in that direction, so we can safely assume that most Linux distros will follow in time. OS X uses base-10 arithmetic in displaying disk space in the UI (though df -H gives capacity in base 10, and -h in base 2). Windows XP uses base 2 but IIRC Windows Vista and later displays in base 10.
I'm not sure about the BSD family of Unixes, so you might be OK there...
Selling someone computers is a little less reckless than actually building the gas chamber.
If they censor results, search engines are doing China’s dirty work for it.
I'm not sure if I'm following on from a Godwin, but hey.... you've got to remember this was 70 years ago and computing wasn't nearly as mature as it is today.
IBM knew full well what they were doing and at the time, the argument "if we don't do it someone else will" simply didn't hold water - there wasn't anyone else who had the technology to provide the kind of data processing equipment the Nazis wanted.
ICBW, but I was under the impression the glasses were just two polarised sheets of plastic and the image displayed on the TV was two overlaid polarised images. There's no shutter on the glasses to sync.
Has anyone ever done that? Come to think of it, since MP3 discards audio outside of human hearing ranges, would it even work? I suppose that since (usually by limiting to 9600bps or so) you can get a fax machine to work on a VoIP line, this could work as well though.
Not sure about the commodore, but the BBC frequently used a rate of about 2400bps - and since when was audio tape a suitable medium to store audio outside of human hearing ranges?
Next one, prior art: [...] Basically the argument is: somebody else did that before. It's a very, very tricky argument to get right. Extremely tricky, and it is the most common argument bandied about in the free software community. And if you see it in the primary defence against a patent, you should cringe because it is an extremely unsafe way of doing things.'
The reason why prior art is difficult to get right is explained in TFA: a patent consists of a number of (likely very long and complicated) interdependent claims which are likely to be interpreted quite narrowly. In order to work, a prior art defence has to exist for each and every one of those claims in the same interpretation as that intended when the patent was granted. So you have to go through the entire patent from beginning to end, look at each claim and think "Is there prior art for this? Is the prior art exactly the same idea or is it just roughly the same sort of thing? If the latter, that's a Very Bad Thing for the defence".
However, it's quite common for the patent to hinge on a handful of claims and if you can prove that you don't do just one of the independent claims, you're free.
> As nice as the world might be if food was free and software had no patents, that isn't the world we live in.
Remember that software patents are basically non-existant in Europe..
Not strictly true. Certainly the UK patent office (and I believe some others) have been merrily awarding software patents for some time. Though I don't know of any infringement lawsuits.
Most countries have laws which state pretty clearly that goods and services must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold. In the UK you'd have the Sale of Goods Act, not sure what you'd have elsewhere.
This has been used on occasion by people who want a refund for a piece of software which didn't live up to the hype - though AFAIK the company selling the software has caved before it's reached court. My guess is that while they don't really want to refund, they're even more averse to the idea of establishing case law that proves that such disclaimers are worthless.
Doesn't really help in a business environment - few adblockers allow you to deploy and manage them centrally. Frankly, it would make more sense to block ads at the firewall.
Actually, now I think of it, that's a damn good idea. It'd mess up the page layout for a lot of things but if you served up a blank JPEG of the relevant size that shouldn't matter too much...
In this context, "Proposed" means someone's set up an online petition to ask the government to do something.
Seeing as there's a government-sponsored website where you can set up petitions asking for literally anything, this doesn't really mean a great deal. Some petitions which have been submitted include:
I have no idea why some people nee to open every email they get. The subject contains nothing to do with work, and is obvious spam, yet they still open those emails. I have seen more malware from email that is totally avoidable. Do not open the email. Also people are amazed to find out the preview is the same as opening the email message.
That preview feature is fantastically popular. You have approximately zero chance of getting people to stop using it - and if you use policies to disable it (do GPOs for Outlook let you do that?) you'll have an angry mob with pitchforks at your door.
And why exactly is your gateway email server letting malware through?
It would be nice if employees are but through some kind of "this is what not to do on a computer" training.
What, "there's this great big list of useful features you really like but you shouldn't use them because they're a security risk"?
Which means the result needs to be an inquiry from Information Security and a measured punishment from HR. "Infosec found that you violated charter 4.b of our computer usage policy, 'clicking the monkey'. You have only one more demerit before termination. Please review our computer usage policies again. Here's a pamphlet."
This is the common reply on/., and while it might work in highly regulated industries, there are lots of industries which aren't highly regulated and the opinion that "dealing with IT security issues is squarely the IT department's problem" goes right to the top.
Arguably they're right. All we're doing by saying "discipline or fire people who won't follow the policies we propose" is making it Somebody Else's Problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There's probably a few commercial applications knocking around that still haven't been ported to Linux - but they'll almost certainly be the sort of application where if you were to run it on anything other than a fully-supported, paid-up platform (which OpenSolaris never was), you'd need mental help.
and that practical limit to cellphone lenses & sensors is probably around 3MP)
Practical limit assuming they start to fit half-decent lenses and don't go for megapixels over image quality. On their own, megapixels mean damn-all. A tiny 3MP sensor (which is what you'll find in a cellphone) will record a significantly noisier image than 1MP sensor of the same size. Furthermore, the grubby cheap & nasty couple of element plastic lenses in a phone will never touch even a fairly basic compact camera.
Frankly, my first digital camera (which was all of 2MP, IIRC) was able to produce much better images than any cellphone I've seen.
Considering your average camera phone lens can barely resolve a barcode, I'm not quite sure what the point of HD shooting would be.
Thank you. A well reason, intelligent argument. That was all I wanted to hear.
IMV it should be illegal for someone to sell you a product and retroactively change how you're able to use it, but the law hasn't really caught up with technology in that regard.
The ARM was good enough for office work 23 years ago. That was the whole point of the processor - to provide a suitable CPU as the basis for Acorn's replacement for the ageing BBC Computer line.
Acorn, along with most others producing non-x86 computers in the late 80's/early 90s, failed. But it transpired that there was rather a large market for a relatively fast general purpose CPU which doesn't consume a great deal of power and is relatively easy to code for. The spin-off company that developed the CPU did reasonably well and most of the development since then has focused on relatively modest speed increments compared to the x86.
If you consider how cars were built prior to the introduction of airbags, that's not terribly far from what was actually there. The steering column is a big, thick chunk of metal and it WILL kill you if your head hits it at high speed.
Anyone with half a brain knew full well it was there, but it still didn't help to reduce deaths.
Something sounds awfully fishy about this. If it's real, that's not exactly a day I'd want to release something like this.
Not to me. It's exactly the kind of thing Sony would do and IME, most corporate April Fools gags aren't that subtle.
While I'm sure many will welcome you taking Sony to task, do you mind if I ask exactly how a $10 voucher against your next purchase of a Sony product will help you run Linux on your PS3?
You haven't really discussed how you went about your approaches in any real detail, so excuse me if I give you a few pointers:
1. HR departments (particularly in big companies) are mostly there to keep outsiders out. They seldom accept speculative applications and forward them to the relevant department - yet at any given point in time, many departments within organisations are thinking "We could do with someone else here to help deal with XXX, but we need to get around to writing the job spec, get hiring authority sorted out, contact agents/advertise and ask HR to accept CVs with the following qualifications....". If you can find companies in that kind of position and speak to the person who's thinking that, you'll bypass much of the HR bullsh*t. For some odd reason, this process can actually be easier than going in the "accepted" way of writing to HR and a hell of a lot more productive.
2. Regardless of whether you're applying speculatively or for an advertised post, NEVER send out a standard CV/covering letter. I promise you no matter how much effort you put in they stand out a mile. Figure out what the company is looking for (and if you can't figure this out, why do you want to work there?) and write covering letter/tweak CV to suit.
3. Avoid agencies. This is my own personal experience, take it with as much salt as you feel it requires. But most employment agencies charge a small fortune, no employer wants to pay that if they can avoid it. Particularly not when they're taking on a graduate, who may or may not be any good in the real world. At the end of the day, the agent is being paid by the employer and they don't really care if you get the job or not, just so long as the person who gets the job is someone who they put forward. You'll waste hours talking to these people on the phone who insist they can find you work, that your best bet is to ask them to market you, that they're the solution to all the world's problems. It's complete fiction, but they're telling you what you want to hear.
4. Keep active in both your job hunting and (if it goes on a long time) something relevant to the job. Any potential employer will view how seriously you're taking a job hunt as a guide to how seriously you would take the job - if you have been scratching your bum since the last interview 3 weeks ago, they'll assume you'll do the same thing when they're paying you.
But, at least, I can choose to use an OS that doesn't rub it in my face. So Ubuntu, burn.
Which OS will that be, then? The GNU utilities are all heading in that direction, so we can safely assume that most Linux distros will follow in time. OS X uses base-10 arithmetic in displaying disk space in the UI (though df -H gives capacity in base 10, and -h in base 2). Windows XP uses base 2 but IIRC Windows Vista and later displays in base 10.
I'm not sure about the BSD family of Unixes, so you might be OK there...
IIRC the Grauniad is losing money hand over fist. Believe me, if this works they'll be next on the bandwagon.
Selling someone computers is a little less reckless than actually building the gas chamber.
If they censor results, search engines are doing China’s dirty work for it.
I'm not sure if I'm following on from a Godwin, but hey.... you've got to remember this was 70 years ago and computing wasn't nearly as mature as it is today.
IBM knew full well what they were doing and at the time, the argument "if we don't do it someone else will" simply didn't hold water - there wasn't anyone else who had the technology to provide the kind of data processing equipment the Nazis wanted.
ICBW, but I was under the impression the glasses were just two polarised sheets of plastic and the image displayed on the TV was two overlaid polarised images. There's no shutter on the glasses to sync.
Wasn't that Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men?
Has anyone ever done that? Come to think of it, since MP3 discards audio outside of human hearing ranges, would it even work? I suppose that since (usually by limiting to 9600bps or so) you can get a fax machine to work on a VoIP line, this could work as well though.
Not sure about the commodore, but the BBC frequently used a rate of about 2400bps - and since when was audio tape a suitable medium to store audio outside of human hearing ranges?
However many of the offending patents are US patents. They are not enforceable here anyway.
But they are enforceable if you want to sell a product based on them in the US.
You could have at least read the summary:
Next one, prior art: [...] Basically the argument is: somebody else did that before. It's a very, very tricky argument to get right. Extremely tricky, and it is the most common argument bandied about in the free software community. And if you see it in the primary defence against a patent, you should cringe because it is an extremely unsafe way of doing things.'
The reason why prior art is difficult to get right is explained in TFA: a patent consists of a number of (likely very long and complicated) interdependent claims which are likely to be interpreted quite narrowly. In order to work, a prior art defence has to exist for each and every one of those claims in the same interpretation as that intended when the patent was granted. So you have to go through the entire patent from beginning to end, look at each claim and think "Is there prior art for this? Is the prior art exactly the same idea or is it just roughly the same sort of thing? If the latter, that's a Very Bad Thing for the defence".
However, it's quite common for the patent to hinge on a handful of claims and if you can prove that you don't do just one of the independent claims, you're free.
> As nice as the world might be if food was free and software had no patents, that isn't the world we live in.
Remember that software patents are basically non-existant in Europe..
Not strictly true. Certainly the UK patent office (and I believe some others) have been merrily awarding software patents for some time. Though I don't know of any infringement lawsuits.
You don't remember the days of limited storage, do you? Those 2 extra bytes times 100000 records * 20 date fields was 1/10 of your drive back then.
Now get off my lawn!
Why on Earth would you store each digit of the year in its own byte?
Most countries have laws which state pretty clearly that goods and services must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold. In the UK you'd have the Sale of Goods Act, not sure what you'd have elsewhere.
This has been used on occasion by people who want a refund for a piece of software which didn't live up to the hype - though AFAIK the company selling the software has caved before it's reached court. My guess is that while they don't really want to refund, they're even more averse to the idea of establishing case law that proves that such disclaimers are worthless.
Doesn't really help in a business environment - few adblockers allow you to deploy and manage them centrally. Frankly, it would make more sense to block ads at the firewall.
Actually, now I think of it, that's a damn good idea. It'd mess up the page layout for a lot of things but if you served up a blank JPEG of the relevant size that shouldn't matter too much...
In this context, "Proposed" means someone's set up an online petition to ask the government to do something.
Seeing as there's a government-sponsored website where you can set up petitions asking for literally anything, this doesn't really mean a great deal. Some petitions which have been submitted include:
Force TV newsreaders to wear their underpants on their head.
Stop treating Charles Darwin with any form of respect
Introduce suitability tests for all supporters of Tottenham Hotspur who want to work with children
They're not saying "Turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
They're saying "OK, from now on school starts at 10:00am. Make sure you're here then.".
I have no idea why some people nee to open every email they get. The subject contains nothing to do with work, and is obvious spam, yet they still open those emails. I have seen more malware from email that is totally avoidable. Do not open the email. Also people are amazed to find out the preview is the same as opening the email message.
That preview feature is fantastically popular. You have approximately zero chance of getting people to stop using it - and if you use policies to disable it (do GPOs for Outlook let you do that?) you'll have an angry mob with pitchforks at your door.
And why exactly is your gateway email server letting malware through?
It would be nice if employees are but through some kind of "this is what not to do on a computer" training.
What, "there's this great big list of useful features you really like but you shouldn't use them because they're a security risk"?
Which means the result needs to be an inquiry from Information Security and a measured punishment from HR. "Infosec found that you violated charter 4.b of our computer usage policy, 'clicking the monkey'. You have only one more demerit before termination. Please review our computer usage policies again. Here's a pamphlet."
This is the common reply on /., and while it might work in highly regulated industries, there are lots of industries which aren't highly regulated and the opinion that "dealing with IT security issues is squarely the IT department's problem" goes right to the top.
Arguably they're right. All we're doing by saying "discipline or fire people who won't follow the policies we propose" is making it Somebody Else's Problem.