In my opinion true cloud computing means that you can share processing power (e.g. Boinc) and storage (e.g. file sharing) with others. At the moment we still have somewhat centralized solutions where everyone relies on a few big companies (Google, Amazon, SAP,...) which are providing special services. On the long term this is too limiting since those companies always need to find ways to make their service financially viable.
In reality it is not the scientist/engineer/singer who gets to hold the patent or copyright anyway. If you want to get a job in any of these fields you are strongly urged to sign away the rights on your work in return for your pay checks. Even if you are unemployed later or you die, the dissemination of your idea still will be subject to that company's interest. And even the companies are sometimes screwed by patent laws: Opel was taken over by GM and the US government is now holding Opel's patents as a security for subsidising GM. Opel on its own would not be permitted to build cars any more. I.e. the employees need the permission of the US government to make a living.
I still remember playing Larry and having a hard time to get the woman in the bar to dance with me: Larry: Would you like to dance with me? Woman: I don't understand. Larry: Let's dance! Woman: I don't understand. Larry: I want to dance with you! Woman: I don't understand. Larry: Shall we dance? Woman: I don't understand. Larry: Do you want to dance? Woman: I don't understand.
* two hours of trying*
Larry: DANCE Woman: Oh yes. That's a good idea. Why didn't you ask me earlier?
There is a nice TED talk about Pleo. Unfortunately the thing comes with proprietary software and you can only customise it using motion profiles and sounds. I am not sure how much this has affected sales, but you can get much more hacker friendly robots from Robosavvy.com.
I am still waiting for a walking robot with onboard ARM processor and Linux, actuators with hackable controllers, sensors (resolvers, accelerometer, maybe gyroscope, contact sensors). It doesn't even need to be able to pick up objects. There are several robots listed on Linuxdevices.com (even Pleo although I think Pleo OS is not based on Linux) but they are either not that powerful yet or they are somewhat expensive.
But it is certainly not easy to get your act together and do a proper design including mechanics, electronics, and software.
The Dalai Lama has made it clear time and time again that the institution of the Dalai Lama only will continue to exist if the Tibetan population chooses so. He is in favour of democracy and sees himself as semi-retired. The Dalai Lama lives in exil and unlike the Chinese government he is not in a position to "partice religious apartheid".
I can recommend to read the Computer Laboratory Tech-Report. They have quite a bit of advice on how security should be tightened and how sensitive data should be handled. Among other things the authors clearly state that no system connected to the internet can withstand the attacks of a really committed opponent such as the Chinese government for a long time. However there are other compelling reasons apart from security to use free software.
You can find free web designs at OpenDesigns.org. If you need a static web page using HTML/CSS, you can do a contract with one of those developers. You don't need a full-time HTML/CSS developer for this. On the other hand if you have are planning a large website, you will need more techniques than HTML/CSS. I.e. generate web pages using something like Webgen or a full blown web server using Apache, MySQL, Ruby/PHP/other, memcached,...
In UK there are posters showing a garbage bin with illegally disposed special waste. Below the poster says: "Fortunately a neighbour reported it otherwise somebody could have used it to build a bomb."
We Slashdot readers shouldn't complain considering how desperate other terrorists are.
Sounds like the typical business of proprietary software to me. Milk your developers for as much copyrightable stuff as possible and give them money in return. When someone is not passionate any more (i.e. has burned out) just take the hard decision and fire them. Once you have accumulated enough intellectual property, you can start using it to push less ruthless companies out of business.
Patent Covenant is however extended to the compilation and use of a compiled version (as Executable) of this software for study and evaluation purposes only, with the exclusion of distribution of compiled code or any other commercial exploitation.
Well, maybe someone is trying to argue that other OSI licenses also don't promise anything regarding royalty-free patent-licenses. But this is because licenses are predominantly about the author's copyright and not about the patents. However if the text of this licenses explicitely deals with patents and uses them to restrict users rights, then it formally violates already item 1 of the Open Source Definition.
Stallman's answer comes to mind
If your software would keep us divided and helpless, please don't write it. We are better off without it. We will find other ways to use our computers, and preserve our freedom.
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? They are using stock options to pay their employees. They are then buying back stock to prevent devaluation of the shares. This has enabled them to save a lot of money on salaries and taxes. Also see this article: Why Microsoft's Stock Options Scare Me
"Investors now want to know that you're not going to be paying tons and tons of money for servers because you decided to build in a stack that isn't as efficient as possible," he (Alex Payne) said.
I think in the beginning it matters a lot what language you use. If the scale of your Web business is small, the salaries of your staff will be the biggest item on the list of expenses. I guess now they'll have quite a number of computers and having to buy 20% more servers will cost them quite a bit. If they are saying now that Scala is good for them, it does not mean anything. At this point it probably would be profitable for them to port a large part of their software to COBOL. A more forward-looking approach would be to improve the Ruby VM. But maybe they need somebody else to do it for them.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion true cloud computing means that you can share processing power (e.g. Boinc) and storage (e.g. file sharing) with others. At the moment we still have somewhat centralized solutions where everyone relies on a few big companies (Google, Amazon, SAP, ...) which are providing special services. On the long term this is too limiting since those companies always need to find ways to make their service financially viable.
This is just a covert operation to get computer generated books accepted by the public. This was predicted by Roald Dahl.
In reality it is not the scientist/engineer/singer who gets to hold the patent or copyright anyway. If you want to get a job in any of these fields you are strongly urged to sign away the rights on your work in return for your pay checks. Even if you are unemployed later or you die, the dissemination of your idea still will be subject to that company's interest.
And even the companies are sometimes screwed by patent laws: Opel was taken over by GM and the US government is now holding Opel's patents as a security for subsidising GM. Opel on its own would not be permitted to build cars any more. I.e. the employees need the permission of the US government to make a living.
no text
http://xkcd.com/350/
I still remember playing Larry and having a hard time to get the woman in the bar to dance with me:
Larry: Would you like to dance with me?
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: Let's dance!
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: I want to dance with you!
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: Shall we dance?
Woman: I don't understand.
Larry: Do you want to dance?
Woman: I don't understand.
* two hours of trying*
Larry: DANCE
Woman: Oh yes. That's a good idea. Why didn't you ask me earlier?
There is a nice TED talk about Pleo. Unfortunately the thing comes with proprietary software and you can only customise it using motion profiles and sounds. I am not sure how much this has affected sales, but you can get much more hacker friendly robots from Robosavvy.com. I am still waiting for a walking robot with onboard ARM processor and Linux, actuators with hackable controllers, sensors (resolvers, accelerometer, maybe gyroscope, contact sensors). It doesn't even need to be able to pick up objects. There are several robots listed on Linuxdevices.com (even Pleo although I think Pleo OS is not based on Linux) but they are either not that powerful yet or they are somewhat expensive.
But it is certainly not easy to get your act together and do a proper design including mechanics, electronics, and software.
Congratulation to the FSF! The "ignore you" stage is definitely over.
Reminds me of the James Bond movies. Just run a filtering algorithm over the video and slap "Digitally Remastered" on the DVD cover. And suddenly it's © 2009.
This Windows 7 application limit reminds me strongly of the Windows NT Workstation. Apparently they haven't learned from it.
The Dalai Lama has made it clear time and time again that the institution of the Dalai Lama only will continue to exist if the Tibetan population chooses so. He is in favour of democracy and sees himself as semi-retired. The Dalai Lama lives in exil and unlike the Chinese government he is not in a position to "partice religious apartheid".
I can recommend to read the Computer Laboratory Tech-Report. They have quite a bit of advice on how security should be tightened and how sensitive data should be handled. Among other things the authors clearly state that no system connected to the internet can withstand the attacks of a really committed opponent such as the Chinese government for a long time. However there are other compelling reasons apart from security to use free software.
Any device which comes with this much DRM should be prefixed with "i".
What about fixing the message size bug? And what about proper negotiation of authentication methods? ...
I'm looking forward to Microsoft's new innovations in de-commoditisation of internet protocols and services.
You can find free web designs at OpenDesigns.org. If you need a static web page using HTML/CSS, you can do a contract with one of those developers. You don't need a full-time HTML/CSS developer for this. On the other hand if you have are planning a large website, you will need more techniques than HTML/CSS. I.e. generate web pages using something like Webgen or a full blown web server using Apache, MySQL, Ruby/PHP/other, memcached, ...
Well, maybe because they have something to hide.
In UK there are posters showing a garbage bin with illegally disposed special waste. Below the poster says: "Fortunately a neighbour reported it otherwise somebody could have used it to build a bomb."
We Slashdot readers shouldn't complain considering how desperate other terrorists are.
Sounds like the typical business of proprietary software to me. Milk your developers for as much copyrightable stuff as possible and give them money in return. When someone is not passionate any more (i.e. has burned out) just take the hard decision and fire them. Once you have accumulated enough intellectual property, you can start using it to push less ruthless companies out of business.
From the email:
Well, maybe someone is trying to argue that other OSI licenses also don't promise anything regarding royalty-free patent-licenses. But this is because licenses are predominantly about the author's copyright and not about the patents. However if the text of this licenses explicitely deals with patents and uses them to restrict users rights, then it formally violates already item 1 of the Open Source Definition.
Stallman's answer comes to mind
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? They are using stock options to pay their employees. They are then buying back stock to prevent devaluation of the shares. This has enabled them to save a lot of money on salaries and taxes. Also see this article: Why Microsoft's Stock Options Scare Me
I think in the beginning it matters a lot what language you use. If the scale of your Web business is small, the salaries of your staff will be the biggest item on the list of expenses. I guess now they'll have quite a number of computers and having to buy 20% more servers will cost them quite a bit. If they are saying now that Scala is good for them, it does not mean anything. At this point it probably would be profitable for them to port a large part of their software to COBOL. A more forward-looking approach would be to improve the Ruby VM. But maybe they need somebody else to do it for them.
Port the application to LISP. In 15 years everyone will see that it was the programming language of the future all along.
If you have high resolution data or vector files this should be a technical proof that the work is your creation.
And by the way: I guess the "new device" is going to be a digital camera.