Still, don't you honestly think the profit margin for most items sold nowadays is too high? I'm not affirming it is -- I would actually like to see evidence to support what you say (an actual report on how much it cost to fund the various phases that led to the availability of the final product), otherwise I can only take it as a mere assumption. I'm not demanding this kind of data from you, of course, nor am I seeking confrontation. I just think the GP post has some reason in what it says, and that you're trying to dismiss it with an argument that doesn't look too solid to me.
RFID isn't a boogyman. It's not a horrid violation of privacy. It's a less obtrusive bar-code whose worse abuses will be quickly checked by a cottage industry of chip-detectors and scanproof wallets.
Call me paranoid, but I can see some sort of PATRIOT Act forbidding RFID chip detectors and scanproof wallets in the horizon now.
If the Gays and Lesbians truly are after civil rights and are not simply out to subvert the meaning of a word that millions of Americans hold sacred then why not just pick some other word for their civil unions? (my emphasis)
Heck, I didn't know a religion could detain the ownership of a word's meaning. Perhaps that has changed since I was born, too.
It isn't a violation unless the copyright holders say it is, and since they're the ones that have (presumably) failed to release the source code, I doubt they have a huge problem with it.
Agree, but still you can't advertise something as Opne Source if the code is not in fact available.
[...] They are effectively ruling that Microsoft cannot hold a patent on software they created. [...]
The FAT filesystem itself is not "software", it is a specification. You only talk about "software" when you think of an implementation of FAT, like those found in Windows and the Linux kernel.
Well, there's a good reason why Wikipedia articles usually have hyperlinks to related web pages. You can have a look at these if you bother to check whether the article is accurate.
(...) No doubt there will be a few who suggest the many-eyes approach will fix all the world's evils... it won't, it will let a developer who can be bothered to sift through the thousands/millions of lines of code necessary to fix the bug - this is a dedicated programmer and deserves credit for that... the world is not full of a large number of dedicated intelligent programmers who have time to do this for all, or even a small fraction of code they encounter (...)
It's not about actively doing it, it's about having the possibility to do so should 1) the need arise and 2) the person in question have the appropriate skills/willingness.
It's good to have possibilities. It's good to have choices. A free society is about choices (as you most likely have already heard countless times on Slashdot).
We can't reasonably expect every single Open Source to hunt for bugs, but we hope there are at least a few doing it in every fairly large open source project.
Don't get me wrong: Enlightenment is certainly a powerful and capable windowing system, and there have been some fairly original looks/themes released for it, but, to me at least (he says, carefully circumventing the Troll under the bridge) it's not a GUI that a new user coming from the Windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome world can immediately begin using. Or configuring.
[snip]
This boils down to a very simple thing: one of the great problems of most free/open source software is the lack of *good defaults*. The only way we can make Joe Sixpacks adopt Linux as their desktop is to make sure it will Just Work(TM) for the first time they switch their computer on, without having to tweak any settings at all (while, of course, allowing power users to do so if they want to).
Perhaps Enlightenment is not a very flagrant example of this (I don't really think it is meant to compete with Gnome/KDE, it's just quite an innovative WM for those who have the time, willingness and know-how to try it), but nevertheless I feel I see this over and over again every time I try out some new piece of FOSS.
What about a worm that would automatically talk girls into stripping for it via IM and deliver the video streams to its creator? It could also come with an advanced pattern-matching algorithm to only pick the streams from the really hot chicks and send the rest over to/dev/null.
I have a question I always ask at speeches, and have asked for the last several years. I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand.
I don't think many people would admit {up,down}loading movies off the net, since it's an illegal activity under the DMCA and alike crap.
While KDE has Esperanto support, it is a bit disappoiting to see that the fonts shipped by most distros (especially the Bitstream Vera ones) still don't offer a decent coverage of characters not belonging to ISO-8859-1 (including the Esperanto accented characters).
I know most people usually overcome this by installing the Microsoft fonts, but shouldn't there be good *free* alternatives to them? In the year 2004, i18n is still a big problem of free/open source software.
P.S.: ecochard, mi estas nova esperantisto. Cxu vi estas interesigxa pri retbabili esperante kun mi, por ke mi povas la lingvon ekzerci? Be warned, my Esperanto still sucks a lot, though:)
What does that have to do with the firewall? AFAIK, a firewall isn't supposed to limit the number of connections, just allow/disallow them at all on a per-application basis.
I can understand the point of limiting outbound connections -- I just hope it can be turned off, and that turning it off is not deliberately made hard (burying it in the system registry, anyone?).
It's really questionable whether cops should be allowed to "bypass" laws for their convenience (even at times when such convenience is not required). It's the whole "who's going to watch the watchmen" thing all over... makes me remember the cop in the movie called The Cube.
We assume they would be using radio communication, or that they'd bother with a high-power laser. What if their communication is completely different. Like, something we haven't even considered to be a possibility yet, even in SciFi.. In a transmission media we don't even realize, we may be receiving communications from them, but we simply don't have the equipment to hear it.
According to current scientific knowledge, in order to transmit information across space, any life form has to forcibly make use of one of the four forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, and strong/weak nuclear forces). This simple assumption simplifies the problem a whole lot:
The nuclear forces are not suitable for communication because they have an extremely small radius of action. That alone leaves us with gravity and electromagnetism (light is associated with the latter) as the only two options.
Although the concept of gravitational forces used as a communication channel looks promising, it presents a small problem: transmissions would imply moving big masses to the right spots in space so as to produce a gravitational field corresponding to the desired message (and I'm not even thinking how such messages could be decoded by us). Unless the aliens have discovered a way to change the curvature of space-time without moving masses around, this does not seem too practical.
Also take into account that, even though the gravitational force does propagate to great distances, it is the weakest of the four, so it doesn't look like a good candidate for the job. We can't even make a map of the universe around us just by going out into space and "sensing" the gravitational field (in fact the way we do this is by observing the relative positions of stars in the sky).
That leaves us with the electromagnetic force, which is both relatively strong and has a large range of action. In terms of electromagnetism, the difficulty is guessing what range of the spectrum the aliens use as their comms channel. There really is no way to guess -- all we can do is scanning as much of the spectrum we can for the longest possible span of time. I don't know if current efforts are the best we can do, but we definitely seem to be going in the right direction.
Any comments on this? This is the first time I've thought about the subject.
It is possible that the structure of the genetic code itself is an artificial creation of an advanced race.
It's an interesting theory indeed, but it leads to the question "How did alien life forms appear, then? Are they the product of the evolution of simple cells spread over the universe by a meta-alien intelligence?"
In order to look for an "alternative" form of life, you must first define it. Is it based on sylicium instead of carbon? Does it breathe nitrogen instead of oxygen? Does it need methane instead of water?
You must answer questions like these (don't mind my stupid examples) before you can actually look for said life forms. Otherwise you simply don't know what to look for.:)
Obviously, there is a big problem in deciding which alternative seems the most plausible.
Well, I think that would not be too much of a problem if all software were designed with customizability in mind. In other words, software shouldn't be designed only with the "average user" in mind.
Not everyone is a fucking programmer. If you don't like it and won't use it, shut the fuck up. You're obviously not the target audience, you don't fucking matter.
The point is Microsoft should please programmers as well as desktop users by allowing the eye-candy to be turned off. Features (or their absence) do not have to be compulsory. It's all about giving the users (not the Redmond engineers; not the hardware industry lobbyists) the power to decide how they want to do computing, and that's what Microsoft insistently denies their users in every new OS they release.
I mean, fuck- Britons live in Orwell's 1984 made flesh.
Have you actually read 1984 in order to make such a risky remark?
I have, and at least IMHO 1984 is much worse than anything we have now anywhere in the world. But rest not - judging by the current threats on civil liberties, it likely won't take long till we have Miniluv and all the other stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Do monkeys spank the human?
Only in Soviet Russia.
Phone sanitizers, you insensitive clod! :-)
Still, don't you honestly think the profit margin for most items sold nowadays is too high? I'm not affirming it is -- I would actually like to see evidence to support what you say (an actual report on how much it cost to fund the various phases that led to the availability of the final product), otherwise I can only take it as a mere assumption. I'm not demanding this kind of data from you, of course, nor am I seeking confrontation. I just think the GP post has some reason in what it says, and that you're trying to dismiss it with an argument that doesn't look too solid to me.
After today's pro-Microsoft articles, its about time we got back to bashing!
I live in a different timezone, you insensitive clod!
RFID isn't a boogyman. It's not a horrid violation of privacy. It's a less obtrusive bar-code whose worse abuses will be quickly checked by a cottage industry of chip-detectors and scanproof wallets.
Call me paranoid, but I can see some sort of PATRIOT Act forbidding RFID chip detectors and scanproof wallets in the horizon now.
If the Gays and Lesbians truly are after civil rights and are not simply out to subvert the meaning of a word that millions of Americans hold sacred then why not just pick some other word for their civil unions? (my emphasis)
Heck, I didn't know a religion could detain the ownership of a word's meaning. Perhaps that has changed since I was born, too.
I think we need a very strong Earth orbit governance body with the US and Russia as permanent members (were we were the first up there).
Why not make all countries of the world permanent members, instead of Russia and the USA solely?
It isn't a violation unless the copyright holders say it is, and since they're the ones that have (presumably) failed to release the source code, I doubt they have a huge problem with it.
Agree, but still you can't advertise something as Opne Source if the code is not in fact available.
[...] They are effectively ruling that Microsoft cannot hold a patent on software they created. [...]
The FAT filesystem itself is not "software", it is a specification. You only talk about "software" when you think of an implementation of FAT, like those found in Windows and the Linux kernel.
Why steal when you can buy cheaply?
"Steal" is not the word you want.
Well, there's a good reason why Wikipedia articles usually have hyperlinks to related web pages. You can have a look at these if you bother to check whether the article is accurate.
(...) No doubt there will be a few who suggest the many-eyes approach will fix all the world's evils... it won't, it will let a developer who can be bothered to sift through the thousands/millions of lines of code necessary to fix the bug - this is a dedicated programmer and deserves credit for that... the world is not full of a large number of dedicated intelligent programmers who have time to do this for all, or even a small fraction of code they encounter (...)
It's not about actively doing it, it's about having the possibility to do so should 1) the need arise and 2) the person in question have the appropriate skills/willingness.
It's good to have possibilities. It's good to have choices. A free society is about choices (as you most likely have already heard countless times on Slashdot).
We can't reasonably expect every single Open Source to hunt for bugs, but we hope there are at least a few doing it in every fairly large open source project.
Don't get me wrong: Enlightenment is certainly a powerful and capable windowing system, and there have been some fairly original looks/themes released for it, but, to me at least (he says, carefully circumventing the Troll under the bridge) it's not a GUI that a new user coming from the Windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome world can immediately begin using. Or configuring.
[snip]
This boils down to a very simple thing: one of the great problems of most free/open source software is the lack of *good defaults*. The only way we can make Joe Sixpacks adopt Linux as their desktop is to make sure it will Just Work(TM) for the first time they switch their computer on, without having to tweak any settings at all (while, of course, allowing power users to do so if they want to).
Perhaps Enlightenment is not a very flagrant example of this (I don't really think it is meant to compete with Gnome/KDE, it's just quite an innovative WM for those who have the time, willingness and know-how to try it), but nevertheless I feel I see this over and over again every time I try out some new piece of FOSS.
What about a worm that would automatically talk girls into stripping for it via IM and deliver the video streams to its creator? It could also come with an advanced pattern-matching algorithm to only pick the streams from the really hot chicks and send the rest over to /dev/null.
Man, now that would be an invention.
I have a question I always ask at speeches, and have asked for the last several years. I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand.
I don't think many people would admit {up,down}loading movies off the net, since it's an illegal activity under the DMCA and alike crap.
While KDE has Esperanto support, it is a bit disappoiting to see that the fonts shipped by most distros (especially the Bitstream Vera ones) still don't offer a decent coverage of characters not belonging to ISO-8859-1 (including the Esperanto accented characters).
I know most people usually overcome this by installing the Microsoft fonts, but shouldn't there be good *free* alternatives to them? In the year 2004, i18n is still a big problem of free/open source software.
P.S.: ecochard, mi estas nova esperantisto. Cxu vi estas interesigxa pri retbabili esperante kun mi, por ke mi povas la lingvon ekzerci? Be warned, my Esperanto still sucks a lot, though :)
What does that have to do with the firewall? AFAIK, a firewall isn't supposed to limit the number of connections, just allow/disallow them at all on a per-application basis.
I can understand the point of limiting outbound connections -- I just hope it can be turned off, and that turning it off is not deliberately made hard (burying it in the system registry, anyone?).
It's really questionable whether cops should be allowed to "bypass" laws for their convenience (even at times when such convenience is not required). It's the whole "who's going to watch the watchmen" thing all over... makes me remember the cop in the movie called The Cube .
We assume they would be using radio communication, or that they'd bother with a high-power laser. What if their communication is completely different. Like, something we haven't even considered to be a possibility yet, even in SciFi.. In a transmission media we don't even realize, we may be receiving communications from them, but we simply don't have the equipment to hear it.
According to current scientific knowledge, in order to transmit information across space, any life form has to forcibly make use of one of the four forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, and strong/weak nuclear forces). This simple assumption simplifies the problem a whole lot:
The nuclear forces are not suitable for communication because they have an extremely small radius of action. That alone leaves us with gravity and electromagnetism (light is associated with the latter) as the only two options.
Although the concept of gravitational forces used as a communication channel looks promising, it presents a small problem: transmissions would imply moving big masses to the right spots in space so as to produce a gravitational field corresponding to the desired message (and I'm not even thinking how such messages could be decoded by us). Unless the aliens have discovered a way to change the curvature of space-time without moving masses around, this does not seem too practical.
Also take into account that, even though the gravitational force does propagate to great distances, it is the weakest of the four, so it doesn't look like a good candidate for the job. We can't even make a map of the universe around us just by going out into space and "sensing" the gravitational field (in fact the way we do this is by observing the relative positions of stars in the sky).
That leaves us with the electromagnetic force, which is both relatively strong and has a large range of action. In terms of electromagnetism, the difficulty is guessing what range of the spectrum the aliens use as their comms channel. There really is no way to guess -- all we can do is scanning as much of the spectrum we can for the longest possible span of time. I don't know if current efforts are the best we can do, but we definitely seem to be going in the right direction.
Any comments on this? This is the first time I've thought about the subject.
It is possible that the structure of the genetic code itself is an artificial creation of an advanced race.
It's an interesting theory indeed, but it leads to the question "How did alien life forms appear, then? Are they the product of the evolution of simple cells spread over the universe by a meta-alien intelligence?"
I guess you can see the recursive pattern. :)
In order to look for an "alternative" form of life, you must first define it. Is it based on sylicium instead of carbon? Does it breathe nitrogen instead of oxygen? Does it need methane instead of water?
You must answer questions like these (don't mind my stupid examples) before you can actually look for said life forms. Otherwise you simply don't know what to look for. :)
Obviously, there is a big problem in deciding which alternative seems the most plausible.
Well, I think that would not be too much of a problem if all software were designed with customizability in mind. In other words, software shouldn't be designed only with the "average user" in mind.
Mmm troll...
A sense of software esthetic is justifiable as a means to that ends -- not an end in itself.
It depends on whether you think programming is conceivable as an art or not.
There is also a big difference between using the English language to write a memo for your boss and using it to write a novel.
Not everyone is a fucking programmer. If you don't like it and won't use it, shut the fuck up. You're obviously not the target audience, you don't fucking matter.
The point is Microsoft should please programmers as well as desktop users by allowing the eye-candy to be turned off. Features (or their absence) do not have to be compulsory. It's all about giving the users (not the Redmond engineers; not the hardware industry lobbyists) the power to decide how they want to do computing, and that's what Microsoft insistently denies their users in every new OS they release.
I mean, fuck- Britons live in Orwell's 1984 made flesh.
Have you actually read 1984 in order to make such a risky remark?
I have, and at least IMHO 1984 is much worse than anything we have now anywhere in the world. But rest not - judging by the current threats on civil liberties, it likely won't take long till we have Miniluv and all the other stuff.