scientists probably don't have a problem
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 1
Note that this theory depends on melting ice, not growing ice, which may be one reason scientists find the ice age scenario so hard to swallow.
Maybe George Bush would have trouble with the notion that melting ice caps can cause an ice age, but would would "scientists" find that "hard to swallow"?
A scientist shouldn't have a priori biases about such an assertion, and their attitudes towards this theory should be based on specific data and reasoning, not on a general discomfort with the notion that warming in a small part of the world can lead to cooling in the rest of the world.
(And to the Bushes, and all their fans, think of it this way: "When you take ice cubes out of your freezer and put them in your drink, your drink gets cold, too. So, it shouldn't surprise you that when ice comes out of the polar regions the rest of the world gets cold." As a scientific explanation for why melting polar ice caps can cause ice ages, that is, of course, completely bogus, but so are all the other theories Bush and his fossil fuel fan club have, so that shouldn't matter to them.)
You can do 10 years of C++ programming and learn very little. And someone else can do 2 years of C++ programming and be a much better programmer than you (and still "know less" C++ than you).
Some environments also tend to equalize skills. For applications programming in Visual C++, it doesn't make that much of a difference whether you have 2 years or 10 years of experience: the environment ensures a certain degree of uniformity of product. Java and C#, in fact, further equalize the playing field by removing most of the tricky stuff (memory management, error checking, etc.) from day-to-day programming, the stuff that traditionally required skill and expertise to deal with correctly.
By analogy, it probably doesn't make much of a difference to his product whether a MacDonald's short order cook has 2 years or 10 years experience: you get the same predictable mass-market stuff out of him. Yet, there are many restaurants where the difference between 2 years and 10 years experience for a cook are huge.
So, in short, your boss isn't obviously wrong or obviously right--it depends on the kind of work you are doing. If you are doing mainstream application development, I suspect your boss is largely right. (Keep in mind that unlike the MacDonald's short order cook, your standardized mass-market job can be outsourced to India, so maybe it's time to move into something more challenging.)
The purpose of the summary ratings is not to let you pick "the best" item, it is to draw your attention to the outliers. For example, if a game (or car or whatever) from a company you have never heard of receives a really high overall rating, you might take the time to look at it. And if a game (or car or whatever) that you just assumed was good and were going to buy based on its brand receives a really low rating, you might check the review and maybe investigate alternatives.
It depends on what you mean by "very high quality" and "solution".
First of all, Gigabit Ethernet is plenty fast for even the highest quality video, so technically, there is no problem.
You may be able to get some black box with video in on one end and Ethernet out on the other, but it's likely to be pretty expensive.
The generic solution is to do it with computers. You need a real-time video capture card, a server computer, a streaming video server that accepts video from the card, a client computer, and a video decoder (that may be as simple as a regular graphics card with TV output). If we are talking about "high quality" at TV resolutions, there are lots and lots of solutions available for that.
Just say "Although the file arrived undamaged, I'm afraid I couldn't read your attachment. You could perhaps send it again in PDF or plain text format."
If you want to be more specific, you can say "I can't get Microsoft Word for my machine and therefore can't your attachment. Could you please send it in PDF or plain text format?"
Long-winded talk of "monopolies" and "politics" are unlikely to be any more effective and will only make you look unprofessional to many people.
The fact VIA was openly distributing it under the GPL is good enough for me.
The question is whether VIA was "openly distributing" it, or whether it was just a VIA employee acting on his own (e.g., because he was mistaken in thinking that the OSS release had been approved when it had not been). Because the VIA employee doesn't own the software in question, he can't give you a GPL license to it and the license would not apply.
"the creators of such a software package should be allowed to change their mind at the last minute."
No, they shouldn't. There's a huge amount of contract law that says co.
My "should" didn't refer to the law, it referred to what I think ought to be proper etiquette in this case.
As for the the law, that question is not whether you can change your mind on contracts you have entered into, it is whether you have entered into a contract with VIA in the first place.
You have a license to use and distribute the software.
A license is a contract between the copyright holder and you. If the copyright holder didn' enter into the contract with you, then you don't have a license.
If a VIA employee posted it on an official website I would think that you can have a good expectation that this was properly authorized. It would be pretty hard for them to argue you knew this wasn't valid.
If a Macdonald's employee spills coffee all over you, you think that is "properly authorized" as well? Corporate employees make all sorts of mistakes. Believing that something has been authorized for an open source release when it has not is a pretty plausible mistake.
Of course, it does set an unsettling precedent if companies can change their mind on an OSS release. But courts are likely to be reasonable about that: if the company makes official press releases announcing the OSS release and starts recruiting OSS developers, they can't argue the release was accidental. If it was just a couple of web pages pointing to a download on a website for a day, they would probably be successful in arguing that it was accidental.
Merely the fact that the software had a GPL copyright on it and happened to be available somehow doesn't mean that you can redistribute it. Until a piece of software has been intentionally released by its owner under the GPL, it is not covered by the GPL.
Furthermore, one of the most likely reason VIA pulled this is that they don't have the right to distribute it (patents, other people's copyrights, etc.). Then, even if you acquired a copy under the GPL, you couldn't use it because the GPL would be invalid.
Also, the person posting it may not have been authorized to do so by the copyright holder (the company itself). That would also mean that you don't, in fact, have the right to use it under the GPL because the GPL is an agreement between you and the copyright holder (VIA), and VIA has not entered into that agreement with you.
Even if you could get away with it legally for some reason, I really think it's a bad idea to behave that way. Good relations between VIA and OSS developers are essential in order to have Linux run well on their hardware. There is no hard-and-fast line, but in a situation like this (it seems it has had no widespread announcement, no user community, no external contributions), the creators of such a software package should be allowed to change their mind at the last minute.
Maybe the way to address some of these issues would be to have an officiall public review period for patents, with convenient access through a web site.
Imagine something like Slashdot, where each patent application gets posted. Anybody (competitor, script kiddie, whatever) is able to post responses, point to prior art, etc. The patent examiner then can take those discussions into account when making a decision. The discussions would have no legal significance other than being a resource for the patent examiner working on that particular patent (well, they might also constitute published prior art for future patent applications and changes to the patent). If the discussions aren't useful, we are no worse off than now. If they are useful, then the patent examiner can more easily weed out bad patents.
This wouldn't even have to be financed by the PTO. Anybody could set it up outside the PTO and put the published patent applications in there. The only thing that would need to change is that the patent examiners would have to get motivated to look at it before making their decision.
Increasing your cache memory is clearly beneficial: it can only decrease access time to memory. Increasing STM, however, isn't necessarily good: if you remember more things simultaneously, your brain likely has to make associations between more things at a time. Whether it can or cannot depends on other parts of the brain.
In fact, it seems likely that cause and effect are reversed: it seems likely that "higher intelligence" probably causes a larger STM rather than the other way around--the size of the STM would adapt to the needs of the rest of the brain rather than the other way around.
I wonder if the magnetic poles could be useful for such a thing?
For reliable navigation in cities? No. There are too many stray magnetic fields and big lumps of iron around. It can usually give you a rough idea, but no more, and sometimes it's completely wrong. It's OK for hiking, SCUBA, and wooden boats.
I wonder if the magnetic poles could be useful for such a thing?
They could, but electronic compasses generally use solid state sensors.
Interesting idea...hope amazon doesn't patent it before I can!
I strongly suspect that the use of magnetic compasses in handheld and car navigation systems has actually been patented, even though it isn't all that useful.
Vision-based navigation has been used with mobile robots for a long time. In that case, the mobile robot takes pictures of its environment and determines where it is and where it's going based on that. It's useful because GPS doesn't work in many environments and because GPS only gives you location, not spatial orientation (only direction of motion).
A lot of these "traditional" AI problems have gone that way: you can capture images with your phone and send them to a server to be recognized, you can capture speech with your phone and send it to a server to be recognized, etc. People have talked about this kind of visual navigation application for a while, but these guys seem to be the first to present a working system.
That is, problems of the form "capturing image/sound/video, processing it on a computer, and displaying results" are transformed into into "capturing image/sound/video on a cell phone, sending it to a server, processing it on the server, and sending the results back to the cell phone". Let's hope we aren't going to get a flood of trivial patents out of this.
Have you every used GPS? Portable GPS units cut out in cities. Furthermore, they can't tell you the direction you are pointing, so you usually have to start going before they say "oops, you have to go the other direction". And those problems aren't easily fixable.
These security issues are very different from what is usually reported for Windows: these are sniffing attacks (which are not a software problem but a system management problem--don't install telnet), combined with local exploits. Every Linux machine tries to be secure as a machine with multiple logged in users. When people talk about Windows security problems, they are talking about attacks from the outside.
No, the broader reason why mainstream society has become more disposed to immerse itself in fantasy is because of a general cultural stagnation that exists today. At a time when we feel less certain of our ability to impact on the world around us, we tend to retreat into fantasy worlds instead.
Religion, superstitions, story telling, and social stratification represent every bit as much a "retreat from reality" as today's obsessions and entertainments, and they have been with us for millennia.
Reality is what you want it to be. If you like going out with your buddies to baseball games, good for you. If it means staying at home, curling up with a book or playing a video game, however, that's just as "real".
But the criticism of science fiction and fantasy fans - that we are infantile and escapist people, and socially inept to boot - sadly has a little more truth to it.
I don't see the problem. What is socially inept is defined by the prevailing culture. By 1950's standards, almost all of today's socially respectable, well-adapted individuals are "socially inept" as well--they know none of the behavioral norms, dress norms, or skills that any respectable member of society was expected to know back then; culture and social standards have already shifted radically.
Will social norms shift even further? Who knows. But which set of social norms we get depends on the norms we prefer, and to the degree that those preferences are subject to change, the norms can change. If enough people find a geek lifestyle acceptable for others and maybe for themselves, then that lifestyle will become more mainstream.
Same with Kaffe... it has been around since...1998? If Sun is so eager to shut it down, why haven't they?
My guess is that Sun isn't eager to shut down Kaffe: Kaffe is so incomplete that it is no commercial threat to them, and they don't like antagonizing the OSS community unnecessarily. Besides, it would cost legal fees and it would destroy the "Java is free and open" illusion.
Some parts of.Net for instance is big blocks of Java code with just ReCapitalizedMethodNames.
Oh? Like what "big blocks of Java code" did Microsoft incorporate into.NET? If you know of any, please share that information.
Significant chunks of the.NET API are very similar to Java, but that mostly represents commonly used names anyway, or it arguably represents "fair use". I'm sure Microsoft's lawyers looked at that very carefully (as did Sun's). Of course, with the Sun/Microsoft licensing agreements, Sun probably couldn't say anything at this point even if there was something actionable.
What precedent? If you are thinking about Microsoft, they broke the contract with Sun
Well, and even if contracts were all we had to worry about, all the major players have contracts with Sun that limit what they can do, so the same kind of concern would apply to companies like IBM, Oracle, etc.
Furthermore, Sun made several arguments against Microsoft (in several separate lawsuits even, AFAIK). One was based on contract law, but the other was a business practices lawsuit based on an argument that Microsoft was destroying WORA, quite separately from any contract. Even if they didn't have any IP (and they have plenty), they could continue to make such claims against, say, IBM.
With regards to the rest of my links, you seem to exclude them because they "are behind". I already said they were behind,
But they aren't just "behind", they aren't Java. Java is a well-defined thing: it is what Sun puts the Java label on. They aren't Java and they probably never will be Java.
As was pointed out in another topic today, the first versions of the GNU tools and Linux were written with proprietary tools, on proprietary OSes. Things can move in the direction towards more free, the fact that they come from a less free environment doesn't mean they are tainted forever.
The situation is not really the same. Linux is based on open standards (e.g., POSIX, BSD). UNIX itself was developed at a time when software patents effectively didn't exist. And UNIX changed hands so many times and had received so many outside contributions that the intellectual property just kind of got lost in the process. And even with all that, SCO claims Linux as a derivative work and is causing a lot of people some pain.
Java, however, is not an open standard at all. Unlike UNIX, Sun has gone through great pains to retain ownership of whatever they could conceivably retain ownership of: the specifications, patents, licenses, etc.
Hey, no need to get snippy. I may be mistaken, but accusing me of lying is unfair.
The general attitude in the Java community is "yes, Sun has control, but it's benign control, hence we are justified in calling 'Java' open and free even if it is licensed differently from what people understand 'open and free' to mean". It sounded to me like you were buying into that.
The problem with that view is that it is both wrong and misleading. It is wrong because, whether or not Sun's control is benign now, there is no guarantee that it will remain so; as long as Sun has the legal means to control what is and what isn't Java, they can use that for both good and bad. The more they run into financial difficulties, the more likely it is that they'll use it for bad. And it is misleading because people will incorrectly assume that Java is indeed "open" and "free" in the more commonly used senses of the word.
Don't bother with any of the kernel-mode disconnected file systems. For those kinds of situations, the Unison file synchronizer is a good choice: it performs bidirectional synchronization and uses an efficient protocol that only needs to send differences and some checksums across the wire. It also detects conflicts and (optionally) lets you resolve them automatically. It works on UNIX/Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
Really, the world is better off without the programs these people might write. A person who cannot grasp a context-free grammar is a person who cannot write a useful, working, non-trivial application.
Syntax matters. It may not matter in the way naive programmers think it matters, but it matters. Space probes have blown up because someone typed a period instead of a comma and the compiler couldn't catch it.
Arguing about syntax is like picking a political candidate because he looks attractive: irrelevant.
Assuming that the looks of a political candidate don't matter is as foolish as assuming that programming language syntax doesn't matter. Even if looks didn't tell you a lot aobut a candidate, they would simply matter because they matter to many voters.
Such people do not deserve a say in what syntax---much less language---they use, because they aren't informed enough to make a good choice. [...] Do you want an ignoramus like that to decide who governs you? Do they even deserve voting rights?
Welcome to the real world, where people with limited knowledge and information make important decisions, often irrational decisions. And to help improve such decisions and the effects they have, we have discussions, about syntax, semantics, and everything else. You are welcome to stick your head in the sand, I prefer to participate.
http://www.kaffe.org/ http://www.japhar.org/ http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/classpath.ht ml
The above are not implementations of the Java platform. They don't even come close in terms of features. They haven't passed the compatibility tests. And Sun hasn't approved them or permitted them to use the name "Java".
Furthermore, Kaffe and Japhar probably violate at least one of Sun's patents (related to byte-code checking), and probably more.
http://gcc.gnu.org/java/
gcj is a useful compiler for a language kind-of-like Java, but it is even less close to a full Java implementation. Among other things, gcj by itself is a batch compiler that has little of the reflection and dynamic capabilities of Java and gives you programs with significantly different semantics. In order to achieve more bytecode compatibility, it relies on another JVM (gij or kaffe, I forget which).
http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux.html
Blackdown's implementation is a port of Sun's Java implementation. It is in no way, shape, or form an open source implementation, and Sun owns most of the code.
In fact, there are no independent implementations of the Java 2 platform at all as far as I can tell: anything that is even close to implementing the Java 2 platform depends on lots of code licensed from Sun. That is, IBM, Oracle, BEA, Blackdown, Borland, Apple, etc., all take Sun's source code, alter it to varying degrees, and then ship it.
Furthermore, any of the developers at any of those companies who have worked on Sun's source code are likely unable to ever work on an open source Java implementation because Sun could claim ownership of the open source implementation as a derivative work with fair probability of success.
As I was saying: there are no free alternatives to large chunks of the Java implementation. For example, there is no usable, free Swing implementation.
Sure, a lot of these projects are far behind the official Java in version and capabilities today, but if Sun would suddenly change the licensing or start to charge people for using Java, there are a huge amount of companies (IBM, Oracle, BEA...) with too much invested in Java, and a huge number of experienced Java programmers. Don't you think they would sponsor these projects to quickly get a viable open source alternative up and running?
It's not clear that they legally can. IBM, Oracle, and BEA all have specific contractual obligations to Sun. Even if they didn't, Sun takes the position that everybody that implements Java has to pass compatibility tests. That's their condition for having the right to use Sun's intellectual property contained in the Java specification (a right, one might add, that they can probably revoke at any time).
Sun can enforce these restrictions because they own the copyrights for the specifications, because you agree to their license agreements when you access their specifications, and because they own numerous patents related to the Java platform as well, which you only get a license on if you play by their rules. Sun has demonstrated that they will go to court to enforce those provisions when it suits their business needs, so there is even a precedent.
So, if Sun suddenly starts charging people for using Java, presumably, they wouldn't let their business be destroyed by free competitors, they would also tighten the requirements for licensing, and free competitors probably wouldn't need to apply.
Face it, Java just isn't an open platform. It is intrinsically impossible to have an open platform with enforceable compatibility standards. It's one or the other. Sun has chosen the latter and so have you apparently. Live with your choice, but don't pretend that it's something it isn't.
As the mods to the parent post illustrates, when people who have legitimate grievances and complaints with the usability of desktop linux get attacked by the linux faithful and get modded as flamebait,
His grievances may or may not be legitimate. But he didn't limit himself to uttering "grievances" about KDE, he gave an unfounded and bogus technical analysis of the problem.
He may not be able to cut-and-paste what he likes, and his KDE desktop may crawl like a snail, but that is not due to X11 and it won't get fixed by replacing X11 with anything else.
And because people have to listen to that kind of uninformed, misguided whining from people like you and him again and again, people are getting tired of it, hence the "troll" and "flamebait" rating. If you don't like KDE, complain to the KDE developers, don't make silly statements about X11.
Let me provide another rebuttal for your uninformed comments about X11.
Comment 1: Haven't we been here for years, now? "Linux is almost ready", "We've all but surpassed windows", etc.
"All but surpassed" means that Linux is now equal to Windows, with the expectation that it will soon be better. So, yes, that's a big step forward from "almost ready".
Comment 2: We won't have a desktop that can compete with windows until we still fix the stupid things that are inherent to x-windows WM's. All I want in life is to be able to cut-and-paste reliably between applications.
Cutting and pasting has nothing to do with the "WM", it's part of the server. X11 has a modern, well-defined protocol for cut-and-paste, something that can handle arbitrary MIME types. If applications don't use it (and I agree more should), it's a problem with application writers, not X11.
Text, and pictures, mind you, and in a perfect world, spreadsheet data.
I would like to be able to do that on Macintosh and Windows as well. Unfortunately, non-text types are supported poorly by many applications on all platforms.
You know what else would be nice? If it were faster - i.e. didn't have to go through unix sockets to do anything.
You're jumping to conclusions. The overhead of Gnome and KDE is not related to going through UNIX-domain sockets, as you can easily see by running raw X11 applications (and Gnome, at least, is plenty fast on modern hardware, which is why there is a limit to how much time people invest in optimizing it).
In fact, X11 running on supported hardware is much faster than Macintosh Quartz and Windows in many drawing tasks. Furthermore, UNIX sockets are one of the fastest IPC mechanisms around and X11's asynchronous communication model is ideally suited to modern hardware.
What, you say, shared memory is faster? Funny you should mention that: X11 uses shared memory for communications on the local machine as well.
Or if it didn't have to render all image files into bitmaps offscreen to display them.
X11 has always had its native graphics APIs. For various reasons, different toolkits have chosen to ignore those and do their own off-screen software rendering, but that's not X11's fault.
One reason for why some toolkits have done this is in order to support Windows semantics on X11; you really can't blame X11 for the shortcomings of such cross-platform hacks. In fact, any cross-platform toolkit is going to have to make compromises, and just because of perceived market share, X11 usually ends up on the short end of the stick there. Don't blame X11 for the platform-tradeoffs of cross-platform toolkit vendors. In fact, just say "no" to cross-platform toolkits altogether.
Another reason is that some toolkits wanted an imaging model that X11 did not yet support natively, and instead of defining a server extension, they hacked together something client-side. It's debatable whether that was ever justified, but with XRender, X11 has a native graphics API that is every bit as full-featured as the latest Windows and Macintosh APIs, so there is no need for that. If your toolkit doesn't use it, complain to your toolkit vendor/author.
Once open source software becomes dependant on C#, Microsoft will pull out their submarine patents and start shutting down open source projects. [...] Even if the ECMA demands Microsoft license their patents under ECMA standards,
ECMA not only demands RAND, they first of all demand disclosure of patents. Therefore, there are no "submarine patents"--the set of patents related to ECMA C# is well known. Furthermore, any patent enforcable on ECMA C# would have had to be filed at most a year after publication of the first draft and would be public by now, so even if Microsoft was lying through their teeth, we know by now the complete set of patents that could possibly be relevant.
Claims like yours that there are some mystery "submarine" patents related to ECMA C# are pure FUD.
Microsoft is not stupid. They didn't ask Ximian to use C# for nothing. They have something planned.
I see: so, according to you, the reason people are working on Mono is because Microsoft "asked" them. And, according to you, everybody is stupid except for Microsoft: stupid people investing their time in Mono, stupid companies investing millions in it, etc.
Dream on. The Mono developers are exercising an exruciating amount of care to make sure they have their legal bases covered. One only wishes other OSS developers were so careful.
What you should really worry about is what happens to all those OSS Java projects as Sun either goes out of business or gets more and more into bed with Microsoft. You see, while Microsoft clearly doesn't own ECMA C#, Sun owns the Java platform and large chunks of its implementation, with no free alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that this theory depends on melting ice, not growing ice, which may be one reason scientists find the ice age scenario so hard to swallow.
Maybe George Bush would have trouble with the notion that melting ice caps can cause an ice age, but would would "scientists" find that "hard to swallow"?
A scientist shouldn't have a priori biases about such an assertion, and their attitudes towards this theory should be based on specific data and reasoning, not on a general discomfort with the notion that warming in a small part of the world can lead to cooling in the rest of the world.
(And to the Bushes, and all their fans, think of it this way: "When you take ice cubes out of your freezer and put them in your drink, your drink gets cold, too. So, it shouldn't surprise you that when ice comes out of the polar regions the rest of the world gets cold." As a scientific explanation for why melting polar ice caps can cause ice ages, that is, of course, completely bogus, but so are all the other theories Bush and his fossil fuel fan club have, so that shouldn't matter to them.)
You can do 10 years of C++ programming and learn very little. And someone else can do 2 years of C++ programming and be a much better programmer than you (and still "know less" C++ than you).
Some environments also tend to equalize skills. For applications programming in Visual C++, it doesn't make that much of a difference whether you have 2 years or 10 years of experience: the environment ensures a certain degree of uniformity of product. Java and C#, in fact, further equalize the playing field by removing most of the tricky stuff (memory management, error checking, etc.) from day-to-day programming, the stuff that traditionally required skill and expertise to deal with correctly.
By analogy, it probably doesn't make much of a difference to his product whether a MacDonald's short order cook has 2 years or 10 years experience: you get the same predictable mass-market stuff out of him. Yet, there are many restaurants where the difference between 2 years and 10 years experience for a cook are huge.
So, in short, your boss isn't obviously wrong or obviously right--it depends on the kind of work you are doing. If you are doing mainstream application development, I suspect your boss is largely right. (Keep in mind that unlike the MacDonald's short order cook, your standardized mass-market job can be outsourced to India, so maybe it's time to move into something more challenging.)
The purpose of the summary ratings is not to let you pick "the best" item, it is to draw your attention to the outliers. For example, if a game (or car or whatever) from a company you have never heard of receives a really high overall rating, you might take the time to look at it. And if a game (or car or whatever) that you just assumed was good and were going to buy based on its brand receives a really low rating, you might check the review and maybe investigate alternatives.
It depends on what you mean by "very high quality" and "solution".
First of all, Gigabit Ethernet is plenty fast for even the highest quality video, so technically, there is no problem.
You may be able to get some black box with video in on one end and Ethernet out on the other, but it's likely to be pretty expensive.
The generic solution is to do it with computers. You need a real-time video capture card, a server computer, a streaming video server that accepts video from the card, a client computer, and a video decoder (that may be as simple as a regular graphics card with TV output). If we are talking about "high quality" at TV resolutions, there are lots and lots of solutions available for that.
Just say "Although the file arrived undamaged, I'm afraid I couldn't read your attachment. You could perhaps send it again in PDF or plain text format."
If you want to be more specific, you can say "I can't get Microsoft Word for my machine and therefore can't your attachment. Could you please send it in PDF or plain text format?"
Long-winded talk of "monopolies" and "politics" are unlikely to be any more effective and will only make you look unprofessional to many people.
The fact VIA was openly distributing it under the GPL is good enough for me.
The question is whether VIA was "openly distributing" it, or whether it was just a VIA employee acting on his own (e.g., because he was mistaken in thinking that the OSS release had been approved when it had not been). Because the VIA employee doesn't own the software in question, he can't give you a GPL license to it and the license would not apply.
"the creators of such a software package should be allowed to change their mind at the last minute."
No, they shouldn't. There's a huge amount of contract law that says co.
My "should" didn't refer to the law, it referred to what I think ought to be proper etiquette in this case.
As for the the law, that question is not whether you can change your mind on contracts you have entered into, it is whether you have entered into a contract with VIA in the first place.
You have a license to use and distribute the software.
A license is a contract between the copyright holder and you. If the copyright holder didn' enter into the contract with you, then you don't have a license.
If a VIA employee posted it on an official website I would think that you can have a good expectation that this was properly authorized. It would be pretty hard for them to argue you knew this wasn't valid.
If a Macdonald's employee spills coffee all over you, you think that is "properly authorized" as well? Corporate employees make all sorts of mistakes. Believing that something has been authorized for an open source release when it has not is a pretty plausible mistake.
Of course, it does set an unsettling precedent if companies can change their mind on an OSS release. But courts are likely to be reasonable about that: if the company makes official press releases announcing the OSS release and starts recruiting OSS developers, they can't argue the release was accidental. If it was just a couple of web pages pointing to a download on a website for a day, they would probably be successful in arguing that it was accidental.
Merely the fact that the software had a GPL copyright on it and happened to be available somehow doesn't mean that you can redistribute it. Until a piece of software has been intentionally released by its owner under the GPL, it is not covered by the GPL.
Furthermore, one of the most likely reason VIA pulled this is that they don't have the right to distribute it (patents, other people's copyrights, etc.). Then, even if you acquired a copy under the GPL, you couldn't use it because the GPL would be invalid.
Also, the person posting it may not have been authorized to do so by the copyright holder (the company itself). That would also mean that you don't, in fact, have the right to use it under the GPL because the GPL is an agreement between you and the copyright holder (VIA), and VIA has not entered into that agreement with you.
Even if you could get away with it legally for some reason, I really think it's a bad idea to behave that way. Good relations between VIA and OSS developers are essential in order to have Linux run well on their hardware. There is no hard-and-fast line, but in a situation like this (it seems it has had no widespread announcement, no user community, no external contributions), the creators of such a software package should be allowed to change their mind at the last minute.
Maybe the way to address some of these issues would be to have an officiall public review period for patents, with convenient access through a web site.
Imagine something like Slashdot, where each patent application gets posted. Anybody (competitor, script kiddie, whatever) is able to post responses, point to prior art, etc. The patent examiner then can take those discussions into account when making a decision. The discussions would have no legal significance other than being a resource for the patent examiner working on that particular patent (well, they might also constitute published prior art for future patent applications and changes to the patent). If the discussions aren't useful, we are no worse off than now. If they are useful, then the patent examiner can more easily weed out bad patents.
This wouldn't even have to be financed by the PTO. Anybody could set it up outside the PTO and put the published patent applications in there. The only thing that would need to change is that the patent examiners would have to get motivated to look at it before making their decision.
Increasing your cache memory is clearly beneficial: it can only decrease access time to memory. Increasing STM, however, isn't necessarily good: if you remember more things simultaneously, your brain likely has to make associations between more things at a time. Whether it can or cannot depends on other parts of the brain.
In fact, it seems likely that cause and effect are reversed: it seems likely that "higher intelligence" probably causes a larger STM rather than the other way around--the size of the STM would adapt to the needs of the rest of the brain rather than the other way around.
I wonder if the magnetic poles could be useful for such a thing?
For reliable navigation in cities? No. There are too many stray magnetic fields and big lumps of iron around. It can usually give you a rough idea, but no more, and sometimes it's completely wrong. It's OK for hiking, SCUBA, and wooden boats.
I wonder if the magnetic poles could be useful for such a thing?
They could, but electronic compasses generally use solid state sensors.
Interesting idea...hope amazon doesn't patent it before I can!
I strongly suspect that the use of magnetic compasses in handheld and car navigation systems has actually been patented, even though it isn't all that useful.
Vision-based navigation has been used with mobile robots for a long time. In that case, the mobile robot takes pictures of its environment and determines where it is and where it's going based on that. It's useful because GPS doesn't work in many environments and because GPS only gives you location, not spatial orientation (only direction of motion).
A lot of these "traditional" AI problems have gone that way: you can capture images with your phone and send them to a server to be recognized, you can capture speech with your phone and send it to a server to be recognized, etc. People have talked about this kind of visual navigation application for a while, but these guys seem to be the first to present a working system.
That is, problems of the form "capturing image/sound/video, processing it on a computer, and displaying results" are transformed into into "capturing image/sound/video on a cell phone, sending it to a server, processing it on the server, and sending the results back to the cell phone". Let's hope we aren't going to get a flood of trivial patents out of this.
Have you every used GPS? Portable GPS units cut out in cities. Furthermore, they can't tell you the direction you are pointing, so you usually have to start going before they say "oops, you have to go the other direction". And those problems aren't easily fixable.
These security issues are very different from what is usually reported for Windows: these are sniffing attacks (which are not a software problem but a system management problem--don't install telnet), combined with local exploits. Every Linux machine tries to be secure as a machine with multiple logged in users. When people talk about Windows security problems, they are talking about attacks from the outside.
No, the broader reason why mainstream society has become more disposed to immerse itself in fantasy is because of a general cultural stagnation that exists today. At a time when we feel less certain of our ability to impact on the world around us, we tend to retreat into fantasy worlds instead.
Religion, superstitions, story telling, and social stratification represent every bit as much a "retreat from reality" as today's obsessions and entertainments, and they have been with us for millennia.
Reality is what you want it to be. If you like going out with your buddies to baseball games, good for you. If it means staying at home, curling up with a book or playing a video game, however, that's just as "real".
But the criticism of science fiction and fantasy fans - that we are infantile and escapist people, and socially inept to boot - sadly has a little more truth to it.
I don't see the problem. What is socially inept is defined by the prevailing culture. By 1950's standards, almost all of today's socially respectable, well-adapted individuals are "socially inept" as well--they know none of the behavioral norms, dress norms, or skills that any respectable member of society was expected to know back then; culture and social standards have already shifted radically.
Will social norms shift even further? Who knows. But which set of social norms we get depends on the norms we prefer, and to the degree that those preferences are subject to change, the norms can change. If enough people find a geek lifestyle acceptable for others and maybe for themselves, then that lifestyle will become more mainstream.
Same with Kaffe ... it has been around since...1998? If Sun is so eager to shut it down, why haven't they?
.Net for instance is big blocks of Java code with just ReCapitalizedMethodNames.
.NET? If you know of any, please share that information.
.NET API are very similar to Java, but that mostly represents commonly used names anyway, or it arguably represents "fair use". I'm sure Microsoft's lawyers looked at that very carefully (as did Sun's). Of course, with the Sun/Microsoft licensing agreements, Sun probably couldn't say anything at this point even if there was something actionable.
My guess is that Sun isn't eager to shut down Kaffe: Kaffe is so incomplete that it is no commercial threat to them, and they don't like antagonizing the OSS community unnecessarily. Besides, it would cost legal fees and it would destroy the "Java is free and open" illusion.
Some parts of
Oh? Like what "big blocks of Java code" did Microsoft incorporate into
Significant chunks of the
What precedent? If you are thinking about Microsoft, they broke the contract with Sun
Well, and even if contracts were all we had to worry about, all the major players have contracts with Sun that limit what they can do, so the same kind of concern would apply to companies like IBM, Oracle, etc.
Furthermore, Sun made several arguments against Microsoft (in several separate lawsuits even, AFAIK). One was based on contract law, but the other was a business practices lawsuit based on an argument that Microsoft was destroying WORA, quite separately from any contract. Even if they didn't have any IP (and they have plenty), they could continue to make such claims against, say, IBM.
With regards to the rest of my links, you seem to exclude them because they "are behind". I already said they were behind,
But they aren't just "behind", they aren't Java. Java is a well-defined thing: it is what Sun puts the Java label on. They aren't Java and they probably never will be Java.
As was pointed out in another topic today, the first versions of the GNU tools and Linux were written with proprietary tools, on proprietary OSes. Things can move in the direction towards more free, the fact that they come from a less free environment doesn't mean they are tainted forever.
The situation is not really the same. Linux is based on open standards (e.g., POSIX, BSD). UNIX itself was developed at a time when software patents effectively didn't exist. And UNIX changed hands so many times and had received so many outside contributions that the intellectual property just kind of got lost in the process. And even with all that, SCO claims Linux as a derivative work and is causing a lot of people some pain.
Java, however, is not an open standard at all. Unlike UNIX, Sun has gone through great pains to retain ownership of whatever they could conceivably retain ownership of: the specifications, patents, licenses, etc.
Hey, no need to get snippy. I may be mistaken, but accusing me of lying is unfair.
The general attitude in the Java community is "yes, Sun has control, but it's benign control, hence we are justified in calling 'Java' open and free even if it is licensed differently from what people understand 'open and free' to mean". It sounded to me like you were buying into that.
The problem with that view is that it is both wrong and misleading. It is wrong because, whether or not Sun's control is benign now, there is no guarantee that it will remain so; as long as Sun has the legal means to control what is and what isn't Java, they can use that for both good and bad. The more they run into financial difficulties, the more likely it is that they'll use it for bad. And it is misleading because people will incorrectly assume that Java is indeed "open" and "free" in the more commonly used senses of the word.
So, I was assu
Don't bother with any of the kernel-mode disconnected file systems. For those kinds of situations, the Unison file synchronizer is a good choice: it performs bidirectional synchronization and uses an efficient protocol that only needs to send differences and some checksums across the wire. It also detects conflicts and (optionally) lets you resolve them automatically. It works on UNIX/Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
Really, the world is better off without the programs these people might write. A person who cannot grasp a context-free grammar is a person who cannot write a useful, working, non-trivial application.
Syntax matters. It may not matter in the way naive programmers think it matters, but it matters. Space probes have blown up because someone typed a period instead of a comma and the compiler couldn't catch it.
Arguing about syntax is like picking a political candidate because he looks attractive: irrelevant.
Assuming that the looks of a political candidate don't matter is as foolish as assuming that programming language syntax doesn't matter. Even if looks didn't tell you a lot aobut a candidate, they would simply matter because they matter to many voters.
Such people do not deserve a say in what syntax---much less language---they use, because they aren't informed enough to make a good choice. [...] Do you want an ignoramus like that to decide who governs you? Do they even deserve voting rights?
Welcome to the real world, where people with limited knowledge and information make important decisions, often irrational decisions. And to help improve such decisions and the effects they have, we have discussions, about syntax, semantics, and everything else. You are welcome to stick your head in the sand, I prefer to participate.
The above are not implementations of the Java platform. They don't even come close in terms of features. They haven't passed the compatibility tests. And Sun hasn't approved them or permitted them to use the name "Java".
Furthermore, Kaffe and Japhar probably violate at least one of Sun's patents (related to byte-code checking), and probably more.
gcj is a useful compiler for a language kind-of-like Java, but it is even less close to a full Java implementation. Among other things, gcj by itself is a batch compiler that has little of the reflection and dynamic capabilities of Java and gives you programs with significantly different semantics. In order to achieve more bytecode compatibility, it relies on another JVM (gij or kaffe, I forget which).
Blackdown's implementation is a port of Sun's Java implementation. It is in no way, shape, or form an open source implementation, and Sun owns most of the code.
In fact, there are no independent implementations of the Java 2 platform at all as far as I can tell: anything that is even close to implementing the Java 2 platform depends on lots of code licensed from Sun. That is, IBM, Oracle, BEA, Blackdown, Borland, Apple, etc., all take Sun's source code, alter it to varying degrees, and then ship it.
Furthermore, any of the developers at any of those companies who have worked on Sun's source code are likely unable to ever work on an open source Java implementation because Sun could claim ownership of the open source implementation as a derivative work with fair probability of success.
No free alternatives?
As I was saying: there are no free alternatives to large chunks of the Java implementation. For example, there is no usable, free Swing implementation.
Sure, a lot of these projects are far behind the official Java in version and capabilities today, but if Sun would suddenly change the licensing or start to charge people for using Java, there are a huge amount of companies (IBM, Oracle, BEA...) with too much invested in Java, and a huge number of experienced Java programmers. Don't you think they would sponsor these projects to quickly get a viable open source alternative up and running?
It's not clear that they legally can. IBM, Oracle, and BEA all have specific contractual obligations to Sun. Even if they didn't, Sun takes the position that everybody that implements Java has to pass compatibility tests. That's their condition for having the right to use Sun's intellectual property contained in the Java specification (a right, one might add, that they can probably revoke at any time).
Sun can enforce these restrictions because they own the copyrights for the specifications, because you agree to their license agreements when you access their specifications, and because they own numerous patents related to the Java platform as well, which you only get a license on if you play by their rules. Sun has demonstrated that they will go to court to enforce those provisions when it suits their business needs, so there is even a precedent.
So, if Sun suddenly starts charging people for using Java, presumably, they wouldn't let their business be destroyed by free competitors, they would also tighten the requirements for licensing, and free competitors probably wouldn't need to apply.
Face it, Java just isn't an open platform. It is intrinsically impossible to have an open platform with enforceable compatibility standards. It's one or the other. Sun has chosen the latter and so have you apparently. Live with your choice, but don't pretend that it's something it isn't.
As the mods to the parent post illustrates, when people who have legitimate grievances and complaints with the usability of desktop linux get attacked by the linux faithful and get modded as flamebait,
His grievances may or may not be legitimate. But he didn't limit himself to uttering "grievances" about KDE, he gave an unfounded and bogus technical analysis of the problem.
He may not be able to cut-and-paste what he likes, and his KDE desktop may crawl like a snail, but that is not due to X11 and it won't get fixed by replacing X11 with anything else.
And because people have to listen to that kind of uninformed, misguided whining from people like you and him again and again, people are getting tired of it, hence the "troll" and "flamebait" rating. If you don't like KDE, complain to the KDE developers, don't make silly statements about X11.
They were making a chip with an AMD64 compatible instruction set. I would sure hope that the "instructions are similar".
Let me provide another rebuttal for your uninformed comments about X11.
Comment 1: Haven't we been here for years, now? "Linux is almost ready", "We've all but surpassed windows", etc.
"All but surpassed" means that Linux is now equal to Windows, with the expectation that it will soon be better. So, yes, that's a big step forward from "almost ready".
Comment 2: We won't have a desktop that can compete with windows until we still fix the stupid things that are inherent to x-windows WM's. All I want in life is to be able to cut-and-paste reliably between applications.
Cutting and pasting has nothing to do with the "WM", it's part of the server. X11 has a modern, well-defined protocol for cut-and-paste, something that can handle arbitrary MIME types. If applications don't use it (and I agree more should), it's a problem with application writers, not X11.
Text, and pictures, mind you, and in a perfect world, spreadsheet data.
I would like to be able to do that on Macintosh and Windows as well. Unfortunately, non-text types are supported poorly by many applications on all platforms.
You know what else would be nice? If it were faster - i.e. didn't have to go through unix sockets to do anything.
You're jumping to conclusions. The overhead of Gnome and KDE is not related to going through UNIX-domain sockets, as you can easily see by running raw X11 applications (and Gnome, at least, is plenty fast on modern hardware, which is why there is a limit to how much time people invest in optimizing it).
In fact, X11 running on supported hardware is much faster than Macintosh Quartz and Windows in many drawing tasks. Furthermore, UNIX sockets are one of the fastest IPC mechanisms around and X11's asynchronous communication model is ideally suited to modern hardware.
What, you say, shared memory is faster? Funny you should mention that: X11 uses shared memory for communications on the local machine as well.
Or if it didn't have to render all image files into bitmaps offscreen to display them.
X11 has always had its native graphics APIs. For various reasons, different toolkits have chosen to ignore those and do their own off-screen software rendering, but that's not X11's fault.
One reason for why some toolkits have done this is in order to support Windows semantics on X11; you really can't blame X11 for the shortcomings of such cross-platform hacks. In fact, any cross-platform toolkit is going to have to make compromises, and just because of perceived market share, X11 usually ends up on the short end of the stick there. Don't blame X11 for the platform-tradeoffs of cross-platform toolkit vendors. In fact, just say "no" to cross-platform toolkits altogether.
Another reason is that some toolkits wanted an imaging model that X11 did not yet support natively, and instead of defining a server extension, they hacked together something client-side. It's debatable whether that was ever justified, but with XRender, X11 has a native graphics API that is every bit as full-featured as the latest Windows and Macintosh APIs, so there is no need for that. If your toolkit doesn't use it, complain to your toolkit vendor/author.
Once open source software becomes dependant on C#, Microsoft will pull out their submarine patents and start shutting down open source projects. [...] Even if the ECMA demands Microsoft license their patents under ECMA standards,
ECMA not only demands RAND, they first of all demand disclosure of patents. Therefore, there are no "submarine patents"--the set of patents related to ECMA C# is well known. Furthermore, any patent enforcable on ECMA C# would have had to be filed at most a year after publication of the first draft and would be public by now, so even if Microsoft was lying through their teeth, we know by now the complete set of patents that could possibly be relevant.
Claims like yours that there are some mystery "submarine" patents related to ECMA C# are pure FUD.
Microsoft is not stupid. They didn't ask Ximian to use C# for nothing. They have something planned.
I see: so, according to you, the reason people are working on Mono is because Microsoft "asked" them. And, according to you, everybody is stupid except for Microsoft: stupid people investing their time in Mono, stupid companies investing millions in it, etc.
Dream on. The Mono developers are exercising an exruciating amount of care to make sure they have their legal bases covered. One only wishes other OSS developers were so careful.
What you should really worry about is what happens to all those OSS Java projects as Sun either goes out of business or gets more and more into bed with Microsoft. You see, while Microsoft clearly doesn't own ECMA C#, Sun owns the Java platform and large chunks of its implementation, with no free alternatives.