They will look at Oracle and say they didn't get the code (because libreOffice is quickly taking that) and they didn't get the people (because they all split) so what did they get for all that money? Office furniture? I predict in less than 3 years the ONLY ones you'll see buying FOSS companies are patent trolls hoping to milk the IP.
I agree with your argument. But seeing the same argument from a positive perspective, a prospective buyer will understand that all they're getting is office furniture unless they're willing to respect the product they bought and the community behind it, and use it to their advantage. So I predict that in 3 years the only ones buying FOSS are companies who understand FOSS, which is great.
Lets face it, its nice to know when the reign of King George III started, but unless that is your field of expertise, you should simply know the skills needed to Google the question.
Memorization by itself is indeed useless, but in education it is the means not the goal (at least it should be). And especially for history it does a reasonably good job.
We need to make clear what is the purpose of education. On the one side there are things we learn that have a practical use, in the sense of being directly applicable to our life (as you say, "in the real world"). On the other hand, a big part of education (arguably the biggest) is about cultivating human beings, raising people that are not barbarians. It's about how we think, behave and react in general, and not about dealing with practical problems.
Now think about the King George example, or to make the point stronger think about World War II. It's clear that you cannot be called a civilized human if you don't know anything about the existence of WWII. The important thing here of course is not the ability to recall information, the important thing is to have read and thought about WWII. Reading and thinking about it changes your mind even if you barely remember the basic stuff afterwards.
So if the goal was to retrieve information, a history course could be summarized as "google: WWII". But the goal is to make students read and think about it, and asking to memorize it is a reasonable goal to achieve this.
Of course in other areas the goal is different, and I completely agree with you that memorizing is useless.
Thankfully, SoftVis 2010 (the ACM symposium where his paper is going to be presented) does not take into account reviews from anonymous cowards on slashdot.
In fact, there's just one thing that Adobe should do now. Release (at last) a descent flash player for (non-apple) phones. Google is going to push it, to offer an advantage over the iphone. If flash becomes as ubiquitous as it is in desktops, Steve might have to reconsider.
How many times do you hear gamers complain that a game is a crappy port because it is not properly written for the platform it is on, but instead tries squeeze in the functionality of some other platform? That is the exact thing he doesn't want on his platform.
You can't possibly compare games to iphone apps. A game is a really complicated piece of software that needs a lot of tweaking to achieve good quality in a new platform. Most mobile apps are small utilities that achieve a simple useful (or funny) task. You don't need low level C code for that, you could perfectly do it in flash.
The "quality" arguments are just BS. It's all about control.
You miss the point. It's not a general-purpose computer only because it's locked and not marketed as a general-purpose computer. Not really because of any technical limitations (as you could claim for a phone).
If Apple created a MacBook with the same restrictions as the iPad, you would say it's not a general-purpose computer. On the other hand if the iPad ran OSX then it would be perfectly general-purpose, just slow (something like a netbook).
At the same time the iPad can do so many things that it can really replace a general-purpose computer for the 90% of people who use them only to surf the web, watch movies, music, etc.
So here comes the FSF's argument: don't fall into the trap of using locked devices, freedom of computing is really important. I think it's a pretty valid point. If this "app store" trend continues, and in combination with cloud computing (see Chrome OS), it's possible that devices where you can run your own code become a small niche pretty soon.
The cost of enforcement is pretty high, so actual damages might have to include those.
This is totally absurd. If I steal a bread and the bakery develops their own hitech satellite surveillance system to catch me, they couldn't possible claim that they lost a billion dollars because I stole a bread.
If the cost of enforcement is more that the actual damages, it's a stupid business decision and clearly their problem that they chose to do it.
The work that this guy did is amazing, no doubt. But the player supports SWF v1. The current version is 10!
Gnash already supports v7 and some features of v8/9 and is still not very usable.
Doing simple animations is one thing. Do you really expect to have a decent AS3 interpreter running in javascript? No question about video of course.
On the other hand this player could have some niche applications. If someone knows flash, needs some simple animations without violating standards and without messing with JS/SVG directly, they could use this. But as a general-purpose flash player? I don't think so.
I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape the geek-in-a-basement marketshare, it has to focus on the average non-tech user. And no, pasting a link to a windows share is not what this user does.
Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file" that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is. He doesn't organize his files, he doesn't care about file hierarchies, he just wants his file. He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour. Believe it or not, no desktop environment makes it really easy to do such basic stuff.
IMHO Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist is a step in the right direction for the average user.
If you run your site on a single server then it's much smaller than slashdot, no matter how many cores or ram you have. Also, it means that your site is down much more often than it should. If you want a serious infrastructure with redundancy, EC2 is a quite cheap solution, with many advantages in terms of maintenance and scaling.
Yes, but I don't think that RMS in his letter actually wanted to promote dual licensing.
The letter states his opinion on a very specific issue: the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. RMS thinks this is bad for MySQL and one of the reasons is that a source of funding, namely dual licensing, that used to be re-invested in the development of MySQL will probably stop being used that way. The point is that, if Oracle holds the copyright, sells licences, but doesn't give back to the community in terms of development of the GPL version, this will be worse than the current situation. RMS prefers that MySQL stays away from Oracle, this doesn't mean that he likes dual licensing (after all, none of the GNU software is dual licenced).
The letter was sent to the European Commission in support of blocking the acquisition. It's not the usual RMS speech.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright because the copies lack originality. Even if accurate reproductions require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the key element for copyrightability under U.S. law is that copyrighted material must show sufficient originality.
Ok you don't mind paying a little extra to make your mp3 player work with your Mac, fine by me.
Now tell me, do you want your printer to work with your Mac or not? What about your camera, external hard disk or DSL modem? Do you visit any websites other than apple.com? Do you expect them to work with safari?
If you do want these stuff then you do give a huge damn about interoperability and standards, even if you are too short-sighted to realize it.
Ogg use on the internet is a rounding error at best;
This is totally irrelevant. HTML5 is a new standard and can use whatever is best for the job, not what was popular for whatever reason before. Because otherwise we should use the crappy Sorenson H.263 (old flash codec), it's probably still the #1 codec on the web.
The fact is that for something so important and so widely used as the web, it is indispensable that the standard can be freely used by everyone, and not controlled by whoever happens to have the patents for some video format. Freedom of the web is much much much more important than picture quality. Let alone that if ogg is used in HTML5, it will attract a lot of research and very quickly we'll have a high quality, free to use video format.
Btw, your codec list is misleading. Flash does support H.264 but still its old format (H.263) is more widely used. Moreover it supports HTTP and 99% of the video sites (including youtube) use HTTP to serve videos. RTMP is used for "real" streaming with Flash Media Server (Adobe's streaming server that few people use due to high price) and RTMPe that you mention, is the encrypted version of RTMP, used by very very few.
While I'm uncomfortable with my IP address given out, I don't consider it the biggest breach of confidentiality; IP addresses should not be considered a secret. I visit 100s of sites, and they all know my IP. I use bit torrent, where 100s of other people know my IP.
The only thing these web sites know is that you IP visited their website. Similarly, these people on bittorrent only know that this IP downloaded one particular song. Now what if your ISP reveals the complete list of sites you visit? Or blogspot reveals that you own a blog? By your reasoning this should be ok, these sites know the IP anyway.
Privacy is not about hiding secret information, it's about hiding the link between public information. Your IP is public and the list of all websites in the world is public, but the link between the two is very important.
Anyway, the RIAA cannot use my IP to incriminate me, because the tags my scrobbler send to them are not proof that I listened to that music because plenty of music is mistagged.
In court you don't need mathematical proof, you need evidence. Arguing that an mp3 tagged as "metallica" was in fact a recording of you singing in the bathtub is not the best defense.
I realize people here may not care for my disregard for my privacy online, but I'd counter that you are insane if you think you actually have privacy on free online sites.
Being free has nothing to do. I expect a high level of privacy from well known sites like last.fm. And in many countries websites are actually required by law to be very explicit about their privacy policies and let users decide if they want to use the site or not.
Slashdot Mirror
They will look at Oracle and say they didn't get the code (because libreOffice is quickly taking that) and they didn't get the people (because they all split) so what did they get for all that money? Office furniture? I predict in less than 3 years the ONLY ones you'll see buying FOSS companies are patent trolls hoping to milk the IP.
I agree with your argument. But seeing the same argument from a positive perspective, a prospective buyer will understand that all they're getting is office furniture unless they're willing to respect the product they bought and the community behind it, and use it to their advantage. So I predict that in 3 years the only ones buying FOSS are companies who understand FOSS, which is great.
Lets face it, its nice to know when the reign of King George III started, but unless that is your field of expertise, you should simply know the skills needed to Google the question.
Memorization by itself is indeed useless, but in education it is the means not the goal (at least it should be). And especially for history it does a reasonably good job.
We need to make clear what is the purpose of education. On the one side there are things we learn that have a practical use, in the sense of being directly applicable to our life (as you say, "in the real world"). On the other hand, a big part of education (arguably the biggest) is about cultivating human beings, raising people that are not barbarians. It's about how we think, behave and react in general, and not about dealing with practical problems.
Now think about the King George example, or to make the point stronger think about World War II. It's clear that you cannot be called a civilized human if you don't know anything about the existence of WWII. The important thing here of course is not the ability to recall information, the important thing is to have read and thought about WWII. Reading and thinking about it changes your mind even if you barely remember the basic stuff afterwards.
So if the goal was to retrieve information, a history course could be summarized as "google: WWII". But the goal is to make students read and think about it, and asking to memorize it is a reasonable goal to achieve this.
Of course in other areas the goal is different, and I completely agree with you that memorizing is useless.
It's pretty hard to keep the graph up-to-date.
Thankfully, SoftVis 2010 (the ACM symposium where his paper is going to be presented) does not take into account reviews from anonymous cowards on slashdot.
InnoDB, OTOH, locks *the entire table* to update an auto increment field.
This is fixed in MySQL 5.1, just use innodb_autoinc_lock_mode=2
As far as I can tell there aren't a lot of good reasons to actively choose MySQL.
Tell that to facebook and google, cause they think otherwise.
I totally agree that MySQL lacks lots of features. But it's a pretty solid db that is successfully used by lots of people in production environments.
... well, you know what
In fact, there's just one thing that Adobe should do now. Release (at last) a descent flash player for (non-apple) phones. Google is going to push it, to offer an advantage over the iphone. If flash becomes as ubiquitous as it is in desktops, Steve might have to reconsider.
Please mod parent up.
Of course all corporations act based on their interest, but there's still a lot of room for corporate culture. So:
- Apple locks every 3rd party _compiler_ out of their phone because it's in their interest.
- Google open sources a high quality codec because it's in their interest.
IMHO, at least Google tries to respect consumers together with their interest.
How many times do you hear gamers complain that a game is a crappy port because it is not properly written for the platform it is on, but instead tries squeeze in the functionality of some other platform? That is the exact thing he doesn't want on his platform.
You can't possibly compare games to iphone apps. A game is a really complicated piece of software that needs a lot of tweaking to achieve good quality in a new platform. Most mobile apps are small utilities that achieve a simple useful (or funny) task. You don't need low level C code for that, you could perfectly do it in flash.
The "quality" arguments are just BS. It's all about control.
You miss the point. It's not a general-purpose computer only because it's locked and not marketed as a general-purpose computer. Not really because of any technical limitations (as you could claim for a phone).
If Apple created a MacBook with the same restrictions as the iPad, you would say it's not a general-purpose computer. On the other hand if the iPad ran OSX then it would be perfectly general-purpose, just slow (something like a netbook).
At the same time the iPad can do so many things that it can really replace a general-purpose computer for the 90% of people who use them only to surf the web, watch movies, music, etc.
So here comes the FSF's argument: don't fall into the trap of using locked devices, freedom of computing is really important. I think it's a pretty valid point. If this "app store" trend continues, and in combination with cloud computing (see Chrome OS), it's possible that devices where you can run your own code become a small niche pretty soon.
The cost of enforcement is pretty high, so actual damages might have to include those.
This is totally absurd. If I steal a bread and the bakery develops their own hitech satellite surveillance system to catch me, they couldn't possible claim that they lost a billion dollars because I stole a bread.
If the cost of enforcement is more that the actual damages, it's a stupid business decision and clearly their problem that they chose to do it.
The work that this guy did is amazing, no doubt. But the player supports SWF v1. The current version is 10!
Gnash already supports v7 and some features of v8/9 and is still not very usable.
Doing simple animations is one thing. Do you really expect to have a decent AS3 interpreter running in javascript? No question about video of course.
On the other hand this player could have some niche applications. If someone knows flash, needs some simple animations without violating standards and without messing with JS/SVG directly, they could use this. But as a general-purpose flash player? I don't think so.
So is "apple", would you name your new phone like that?
Trademarks is all about registering common words for business purposes. And it makes some sense (at least much more than patents or copyright).
Thanks for your deep insights, I am now convinced that the Gnome people should listen to anonymous trolls like you to make their decisions.
I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape the geek-in-a-basement marketshare, it has to focus on the average non-tech user. And no, pasting a link to a windows share is not what this user does.
Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file" that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is. He doesn't organize his files, he doesn't care about file hierarchies, he just wants his file. He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour. Believe it or not, no desktop environment makes it really easy to do such basic stuff.
IMHO Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist is a step in the right direction for the average user.
If you run your site on a single server then it's much smaller than slashdot, no matter how many cores or ram you have. Also, it means that your site is down much more often than it should. If you want a serious infrastructure with redundancy, EC2 is a quite cheap solution, with many advantages in terms of maintenance and scaling.
With the two new types, their instance list looks like the McDonalds menu.
I'd like a Quadruple Extra Large with cheese please.
Yes, but I don't think that RMS in his letter actually wanted to promote dual licensing.
The letter states his opinion on a very specific issue: the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. RMS thinks this is bad for MySQL and one of the reasons is that a source of funding, namely dual licensing, that used to be re-invested in the development of MySQL will probably stop being used that way. The point is that, if Oracle holds the copyright, sells licences, but doesn't give back to the community in terms of development of the GPL version, this will be worse than the current situation. RMS prefers that MySQL stays away from Oracle, this doesn't mean that he likes dual licensing (after all, none of the GNU software is dual licenced).
The letter was sent to the European Commission in support of blocking the acquisition. It's not the usual RMS speech.
It's called Affero GPL
Quoting from one of TFAs (emphasis mine):
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), was a
decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New
York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could
not be protected by copyright because the copies lack originality. Even if
accurate reproductions require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the
key element for copyrightability under U.S. law is that copyrighted material
must show sufficient originality.
Ok you don't mind paying a little extra to make your mp3 player work with your Mac, fine by me.
Now tell me, do you want your printer to work with your Mac or not? What about your camera, external hard disk or DSL modem? Do you visit any websites other than apple.com? Do you expect them to work with safari?
If you do want these stuff then you do give a huge damn about interoperability and standards, even if you are too short-sighted to realize it.
Not to mention, it will also wipe out all the aforementioned crapware.
It will be quite fun if a bot-wars started, where the rest of the bots try to kill Mydoom before it kills their hosts.
My thoughts exactly, nobody needs to run the code, just understand some parts of it.
Clearly Goldman Sachs should have used Perl, which has the "write-only" security feature built well into the language.
Ogg use on the internet is a rounding error at best;
This is totally irrelevant. HTML5 is a new standard and can use whatever is best for the job, not what was popular for whatever reason before. Because otherwise we should use the crappy Sorenson H.263 (old flash codec), it's probably still the #1 codec on the web.
The fact is that for something so important and so widely used as the web, it is indispensable that the standard can be freely used by everyone, and not controlled by whoever happens to have the patents for some video format. Freedom of the web is much much much more important than picture quality. Let alone that if ogg is used in HTML5, it will attract a lot of research and very quickly we'll have a high quality, free to use video format.
Btw, your codec list is misleading. Flash does support H.264 but still its old format (H.263) is more widely used. Moreover it supports HTTP and 99% of the video sites (including youtube) use HTTP to serve videos. RTMP is used for "real" streaming with Flash Media Server (Adobe's streaming server that few people use due to high price) and RTMPe that you mention, is the encrypted version of RTMP, used by very very few.
While I'm uncomfortable with my IP address given out, I don't consider it the biggest breach of confidentiality; IP addresses should not be considered a secret. I visit 100s of sites, and they all know my IP. I use bit torrent, where 100s of other people know my IP.
The only thing these web sites know is that you IP visited their website. Similarly, these people on bittorrent only know that this IP downloaded one particular song. Now what if your ISP reveals the complete list of sites you visit? Or blogspot reveals that you own a blog? By your reasoning this should be ok, these sites know the IP anyway.
Privacy is not about hiding secret information, it's about hiding the link between public information. Your IP is public and the list of all websites in the world is public, but the link between the two is very important.
Anyway, the RIAA cannot use my IP to incriminate me, because the tags my scrobbler send to them are not proof that I listened to that music because plenty of music is mistagged.
In court you don't need mathematical proof, you need evidence. Arguing that an mp3 tagged as "metallica" was in fact a recording of you singing in the bathtub is not the best defense.
I realize people here may not care for my disregard for my privacy online, but I'd counter that you are insane if you think you actually have privacy on free online sites.
Being free has nothing to do. I expect a high level of privacy from well known sites like last.fm. And in many countries websites are actually required by law to be very explicit about their privacy policies and let users decide if they want to use the site or not.