Maybe if you defined LAMP we'd know what you were talking about and you wouldn't be modded down for irrelevancy. Of course, this isn't monster.com or something.
Right... so I send the bytes 3A 29 to someone's computer, and the patented technique could convert it to pixels, say the pixels ":)" which comprise an emoticon, and then display it on the receivers computer.
Yeah. This patent covers, among other things, every font which has a character which can be used as an emoticon. Sure, that's not exactly the intent, but the language of the patent doesn't distinguish the two cases.
What the guy is saying is that he sees a lot of companies sitting around trying to make money off of other people's work (i.e. all twelve thousand linux distributions), whereas he wants to pay people to develop open-source applications. He's just saying that you can't have a business model where you say, "Hey, guys, you write my software for me and then I'm going to make all the money off of it!"
Neither one of those projects was supposed to be a new project; on the contrary, they were homework assignments that the students turned in for their classes. Most engineering colleges have classes that turn out machines like this every single year, and none of them claim to be innovating; it's just to teach students the basics of engineering.
The issue here isn't that people don't know about their computers, it's that they insist that they know things which they don't. This plagues absolutely every skilled profession -- look at all the people who decide they understand their condition better than their doctor and self-medicate, or the people who (true story) expect a master carpenter to build them a fancy table for the cost of the wood. I don't necessarily think that the poster is being arrogant in saying that it's unfair to have to deal with people who demand the impossible from you, lie about what they did and didn't do, and then expect to place the blame on you.
I think it would be *awesome* if anyone found sending porn advertisements to kids would have to face prosecution for exposing lewd material to a minor and had to register as a sex offender and notify their neighbors when they moved into the neighborhood. That would make it so much easier to identify targets for lynch mobs.
Of course, sending pornographic materials to minors is illegal no matter what, so I don't see what this law accomplishes.
Actually, I'd bet that the amount of time that running adds to your life is less than the amount of time you spend running, so really you're losing years of your life by running.
The MMORPG genre has become an emaciated specter of its old self in recent years due to the push to embrace a larger audience. Take a look at some of the recent "advances" in gameplay -- no player interaction, "instancing," and the ability to pay real money for game items -- and you see that in order to take in larger audiences the games are losing the competitive aspects that make them games. Simultaneously, the content has declined from the inital commitment of MUDs to roleplaying (some don't even have combat systems) to the point where the "RP" has been removed and we are left with "MMOGs," largely based on hack-and-slash treadmilling.
Broadening of audiences almost always implies dilution of content, whether in computer games, popular music, or education. For me, the only satisfying online gaming experience out there is and will probably remain to be the old-school text-based MUD.
They're "hiring" kids to work on other people's projects -- e.g. Apache, Perl, etc. Google is deriving exactly as much benefit from this as you are, because all the code is going directly into open source projects.
Please, people, RTFA before you make disparaging comments. Or, for that matter, any comments whatsoever.
Nope, just objecting to the fact that the Slashdot headline is misleading. I'd be surprised if *anyone* (except maybe Microsoft) doesn't run at least some of their servers on Linux. They made it sound like that's all they were using.
Exactly. This article has all the logic of, "Well, you saw Ocean's Eleven. No point wasting your money on an expensive safe when it's just going to get stolen anyway. Just stuff it in your couch."
Of course nothing is safe. Even if your computer is completely invulnerable to outside exploits, if someone is *really* determined they can break into your house, wait for you to log in as root, and then garotte you to have full access to your computer. Does this somehow justify running IE/Windows? No.
Actually, several teams (including my school's) did use pathfinding, and did a pretty decent job of it as well. The CMU team was one that preprogrammed the entire path, and they got one of the best scores, largely because it's really, really hard to develop an autonomous robot in your spare time while attending classes all day. It also doesn't help not to be able to run very many tests on site.
For instance, my school's robot was doing well until it hit a chain link fence. As it turned out, the chain-link fence was almost invisible to the car's vision system -- think about it, it's a bunch of air with these little tiny lines which are pretty hard to distinguish from debris in the air and such. You try writing a computer program that can accurately determine the presence of chain link fencing in a photograph and then see what you think.
As for GPS, again it doesn't tell you whether there's a fence, cow, brick wall, etc. standing in the way, and GPS was blocked for large sections of the course. If you're suggesting dead reckoning instead, note that that's really, really hard even under ideal conditions and essentially impossible outdoors. If a car gets one degree off course and travels 60 miles, it'll end up a mile off of the road, perhaps gleefully crashing through houses / oncoming traffic.
While this may be good for you in the immediate short term, a single piece of software is only going to be useful to you for a relatively small period of time -- three to five years at the most. If you're looking at the long run, funding proprietary vendors will end up creating FUD campaigns, which are a huge deadweight loss of the computer industry. Plus, people often use browser statistics to justify designing against standards and to a particular browser instead, so by using those browsers you are creating a number of bad externalities.
Therefore, you only receive payment once per mailing list, which will be too small to make it a feasible source of income.
It's actually rather easy -- just create thousands of unidentifiable email accounts in one way or another, either by signing up for bunches of webmail addresses or by in creating accounts on random domains (most SEOs own thousands upon thousands of random domains like "hot-sexy-women.com" which could be used for this purpose). Sign each account up for a predetermined list of addresses, then collect one cycle of main and mark it all as spam. This could all be automated by a program that you could download.
Again, the point is being missed here. The students' own sensitive data was in danger, so they were forced to act. Anyone who thinks that reporting the problems to the administration / IT staff would have accomplished anything at all has not attended high school in the past decade.
"Some students were found with command prompts on > their student folders (stored on a school server). It was shown by the IT staff that they neither did nor intended any damage, and the IT staff saw no reason to punish them. While this was obviously stupid on the students' part, they were still punished (initally the school tried to suspend them but after administrative appeals settled for two Saturday detentions)."
You're saying students should be disciplined for using the DOS prompt? Why?
For goodness sake, anyone who's seen your driver's license -- say the bartender at whatever club or whatever -- can open a credit card under your name, and from that point on you're pretty much screwed. There is no reason that SSN should be legal proof-of-identity, because it's absurdly easy to steal.
No, it's more like breaking into your own house to show your landlord that he's not doing his job. Their *own* identities were in harm's way because of the school's poor protection, which makes the situation entirely different.
Although, it would have probably been better to announce a lawsuit directly.
Does anyone else find it strange here that almost everyone identifies first person writing with Zork and/or CYOA? Or am I the only English major in the house?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if you defined LAMP we'd know what you were talking about and you wouldn't be modded down for irrelevancy. Of course, this isn't monster.com or something.
Does your blog have anything to do with your comment, or are you just jamming it into your comment to trick people into going there?
I found nothing to do with software piracy whatsoever. If it's really that important, stuff your blog into a signature.
Right... so I send the bytes 3A 29 to someone's computer, and the patented technique could convert it to pixels, say the pixels ":)" which comprise an emoticon, and then display it on the receivers computer.
Yeah. This patent covers, among other things, every font which has a character which can be used as an emoticon. Sure, that's not exactly the intent, but the language of the patent doesn't distinguish the two cases.
192 Know Person (in the biblical sense of the word...)
Sounds useful to me....
What the guy is saying is that he sees a lot of companies sitting around trying to make money off of other people's work (i.e. all twelve thousand linux distributions), whereas he wants to pay people to develop open-source applications. He's just saying that you can't have a business model where you say, "Hey, guys, you write my software for me and then I'm going to make all the money off of it!"
Neither one of those projects was supposed to be a new project; on the contrary, they were homework assignments that the students turned in for their classes. Most engineering colleges have classes that turn out machines like this every single year, and none of them claim to be innovating; it's just to teach students the basics of engineering.
http://www.gwu.edu/~elliott/facultystaff/grier.cfm
The issue here isn't that people don't know about their computers, it's that they insist that they know things which they don't. This plagues absolutely every skilled profession -- look at all the people who decide they understand their condition better than their doctor and self-medicate, or the people who (true story) expect a master carpenter to build them a fancy table for the cost of the wood. I don't necessarily think that the poster is being arrogant in saying that it's unfair to have to deal with people who demand the impossible from you, lie about what they did and didn't do, and then expect to place the blame on you.
I think it would be *awesome* if anyone found sending porn advertisements to kids would have to face prosecution for exposing lewd material to a minor and had to register as a sex offender and notify their neighbors when they moved into the neighborhood. That would make it so much easier to identify targets for lynch mobs.
Of course, sending pornographic materials to minors is illegal no matter what, so I don't see what this law accomplishes.
Actually, I'd bet that the amount of time that running adds to your life is less than the amount of time you spend running, so really you're losing years of your life by running.
I'd rather be happy than healthy.
The MMORPG genre has become an emaciated specter of its old self in recent years due to the push to embrace a larger audience. Take a look at some of the recent "advances" in gameplay -- no player interaction, "instancing," and the ability to pay real money for game items -- and you see that in order to take in larger audiences the games are losing the competitive aspects that make them games. Simultaneously, the content has declined from the inital commitment of MUDs to roleplaying (some don't even have combat systems) to the point where the "RP" has been removed and we are left with "MMOGs," largely based on hack-and-slash treadmilling.
Broadening of audiences almost always implies dilution of content, whether in computer games, popular music, or education. For me, the only satisfying online gaming experience out there is and will probably remain to be the old-school text-based MUD.
They're "hiring" kids to work on other people's projects -- e.g. Apache, Perl, etc. Google is deriving exactly as much benefit from this as you are, because all the code is going directly into open source projects.
Please, people, RTFA before you make disparaging comments. Or, for that matter, any comments whatsoever.
Considering the allegations about diebold systems I can't imagine that this isn't a possible, if not probable, issue.
Nope, just objecting to the fact that the Slashdot headline is misleading. I'd be surprised if *anyone* (except maybe Microsoft) doesn't run at least some of their servers on Linux. They made it sound like that's all they were using.
$ nmap -sS -p 80 -v -O news.bbc.co.uk
[snip]
Running: Sun Solaris 8
OS details: Sun Solaris 8
Uptime 251.064 days (since Sat Sep 25 14:50:31 2004)
[snip]
Exactly. This article has all the logic of, "Well, you saw Ocean's Eleven. No point wasting your money on an expensive safe when it's just going to get stolen anyway. Just stuff it in your couch."
Of course nothing is safe. Even if your computer is completely invulnerable to outside exploits, if someone is *really* determined they can break into your house, wait for you to log in as root, and then garotte you to have full access to your computer. Does this somehow justify running IE/Windows? No.
Actually, several teams (including my school's) did use pathfinding, and did a pretty decent job of it as well. The CMU team was one that preprogrammed the entire path, and they got one of the best scores, largely because it's really, really hard to develop an autonomous robot in your spare time while attending classes all day. It also doesn't help not to be able to run very many tests on site.
For instance, my school's robot was doing well until it hit a chain link fence. As it turned out, the chain-link fence was almost invisible to the car's vision system -- think about it, it's a bunch of air with these little tiny lines which are pretty hard to distinguish from debris in the air and such. You try writing a computer program that can accurately determine the presence of chain link fencing in a photograph and then see what you think.
As for GPS, again it doesn't tell you whether there's a fence, cow, brick wall, etc. standing in the way, and GPS was blocked for large sections of the course. If you're suggesting dead reckoning instead, note that that's really, really hard even under ideal conditions and essentially impossible outdoors. If a car gets one degree off course and travels 60 miles, it'll end up a mile off of the road, perhaps gleefully crashing through houses / oncoming traffic.
While this may be good for you in the immediate short term, a single piece of software is only going to be useful to you for a relatively small period of time -- three to five years at the most. If you're looking at the long run, funding proprietary vendors will end up creating FUD campaigns, which are a huge deadweight loss of the computer industry. Plus, people often use browser statistics to justify designing against standards and to a particular browser instead, so by using those browsers you are creating a number of bad externalities.
Therefore, you only receive payment once per mailing list, which will be too small to make it a feasible source of income.
It's actually rather easy -- just create thousands of unidentifiable email accounts in one way or another, either by signing up for bunches of webmail addresses or by in creating accounts on random domains (most SEOs own thousands upon thousands of random domains like "hot-sexy-women.com" which could be used for this purpose). Sign each account up for a predetermined list of addresses, then collect one cycle of main and mark it all as spam. This could all be automated by a program that you could download.
Again, the point is being missed here. The students' own sensitive data was in danger, so they were forced to act. Anyone who thinks that reporting the problems to the administration / IT staff would have accomplished anything at all has not attended high school in the past decade.
"Some students were found with command prompts on > their student folders (stored on a school server). It was shown by the IT staff that they neither did nor intended any damage, and the IT staff saw no reason to punish them. While this was obviously stupid on the students' part, they were still punished (initally the school tried to suspend them but after administrative appeals settled for two Saturday detentions)."
You're saying students should be disciplined for using the DOS prompt? Why?
For goodness sake, anyone who's seen your driver's license -- say the bartender at whatever club or whatever -- can open a credit card under your name, and from that point on you're pretty much screwed. There is no reason that SSN should be legal proof-of-identity, because it's absurdly easy to steal.
No, it's more like breaking into your own house to show your landlord that he's not doing his job. Their *own* identities were in harm's way because of the school's poor protection, which makes the situation entirely different.
Although, it would have probably been better to announce a lawsuit directly.
Oops! I meant to write "second," honest!
Does anyone else find it strange here that almost everyone identifies first person writing with Zork and/or CYOA? Or am I the only English major in the house?