Don't forget that they bought some assets through the bankruptcy court. The status of those "lifetime subscriptions" may be that they were treated as canceled debts.
At this stage, to CHOOSE SOMETHING means to give up on technical progress. It is proper to ask for interoperability, so that new wireless cards speak several protocols, but it is stupid to ask the engineers to stop working on improvements.
The article has a more fundamental flaw: the author thinks that the limit on a processor's speed is determined by heat. It's not, at least, not directly. The limit is caused by gate and wire delays: values computed by combinational logic in one bus cycle must reach a stable value by the next bus cycle (let's ignore multicycle paths for now, but the concept is the same). Because of process variations, different
versions of the same chip may have different critical delay. Intel (or AMD) will only sell a processor at speed X if it failed at least one test at speed X+whatever, so if you overclock you're pretty much guaranteed to be in trouble if you don't take some measures to compensate.
Temperature plays a role in the sense that semiconductor circuits are somewhat faster at lower temperatures, so if you can keep your chip
substantially cooler than spec you can get away with overclocking. But if an overclocked chip is put into a normal, vanilla PC case, you're almost guaranteed to have trouble as soon as the machine warms up.
If people in the US and the UK value their lives, they will resist the impulse to try to turn Iraq into a colony that is run for corporate profit.
(And yes, that's what this is, even though these guys are masquerading as a charity: they intend to take a cut from selling the "high.iq" domain).
Iraq's domain namespace belongs to the Iraqi people, not to a clever British IT consultancy. Similarly, the decision as to whether to deploy GSM or CDMA belongs to the future Iraqi government, not to a
congressman in the pocket of Qualcomm.
Next, we'll see a bunch of Midwestern farmers clamor to get the government to buy up their grain
and dump it on Iraq, thereby setting back efforts to rebuild Iraqi agriculture (which employs far more Iraqis than the oil industry does).
We're now at a tipping point: we can either insist
that Iraq be run in the interest of Iraqis, or we can allow it to be taken over by a bunch of cronies and lobbyists. If the latter happens, we'll generate so much hate that it will be unsafe for Americans and Brits to travel abroad.
For Red Hat to ship code equivalent to DeCSS in source form would be a DMCA violation, no question; courts have already so ruled. Since Ogle is GPL, Red Hat is forbidden from distributing binaries if they don't distribute source. Therefore Red Hat can't distribute Ogle, period.
The DMCA prohibits "trafficking", not use, so
it's legal for an American to download and run Ogle, but if you give it to someone else, you might be risking a five-year jail term. Crazy,
but until some court decides to toss the DMCA,
that's what you're dealing with.
The answers to almost all of those questions comes down to one single point, one that I'm sure that the Red Hat folks are tired of repeating: they are committed to a policy of pure open source/free software in the distro, period, and they won't include anything that will make them subject to patent licensing or the DMCA. That means they won't ship MP3, proprietary NVidia drivers, or DVD playback, or Microsoft fonts. However, you can get these all from the net if you want them. If your Nvidia driver crashes the kernel, then complaining to Red Hat is complaining to the wrong party: Red Hat can only see their source, NVidia can see all of the source.
Since the OSNews people have been around enough to already know these answers, since we had this same
discussion when Red Hat 8 came out, it is rude and pointless of them to repeat the same questions. Are they hoping that, one day, Red Hat will wake up and say, "OK, we agree: open source was a stupid idea. We've negotiated licenses from all these folks, and now Red Hat X is a proprietary distro, but it plays MP3s and DVDs out of the box,
and we support NVidia drivers. We've tweaked every pixel to match Eugenia's suggestions, too. But no more free ISO downloads, it costs $150, and there's a per-CPU license"?
And yes, I'm aware that some non-US-based distros made different decisions on some of these matters. Note, though, that not being based in the US, they don't need to worry as much about liability from bogus software patents. In the meantime, Red Hat users can install apt, then install MP3 and DVD playback support with a single line.
Read all about it.
Welcome to free software. If it doesn't work on a minority platform, it's up to people who care about that platform (e.g. folks like you) to contribute fixes, or at least to contribute help in isolating the bugs. Just because you're seeing problems on OpenBSD, by the way, doesn't mean it is "platform-specific" -- after all, it runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X, plus many others.
Actually almost everything that's good in SCO was
legally "stolen" from its implementers at UC Berkeley and elsewhere, who did it as part of BSD.
Unix didn't even do virtual memory until the BSD guys did it for them (the first Unix for the Vax
that did proper virtual memory with page faults, as opposed to swapping, came out of Berkeley).
Actually, there are two "exit strategies" that venture capitalists think about when they fund a company; an IPO is one, an acquisition by a large public company is another. In the case of Silicon Valley, the latter possibility is actually more common.
Oh, please. CNN extremely liberal? CNN's war coverage is hardly distinguishable from Fox News.
You write that "everyone things that they are centrist"; if so, clearly you are quite politically conservative.
It's not possible to be unbiased, so good journalists try to bend over backwards to counter their own bias. Thus many reporters who vote Democrat were near-savage in their criticism of Bill Clinton. But Fox News doesn't operate that way; they are open about their bias and don't try to correct for it. I'd give them points for honesty, if it weren't for their "We report, you decide" slogans.
Re:It will not be over by summer
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
You've got to be kidding. The US conduct in the Philippines is a national shame, widely condemned
at the time by people like Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). But there is a parallel: we promised them freedom from Spain, then decided to keep it as a colony, and the people rebelled.
What we did in the Philippines was to kill about a million people, according to reports by US generals!
See here,
for example.
It will not be over by summer
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That is, while Saddam will be gone by summer, US troops will have to be there forever, and they are likely to find themselves under guerilla attack from various factions who don't accept US rule.
Facts aren't the whole story of science; you find this out if you work with grad students at a good research university. At some point in graduate school, the student is expected to make a transition between being an excellent test-taker to being able to produce something new, and many alleged-brilliant students don't successfully make the transition (though they usually successfully get out with master's degrees, and no, this is not a slam against people whose highest degree is MS). They're great at doing algebraic manipulation to get the homework right, and they have excellent memories, but they don't really grasp how things fit together. They are the ones who always try to get the TAs to give them enough hints to turn the word problem into an equation, so that they can get the answer without understanding the concept.
They always got ahead by spitting back the answers the prof wanted, and have trouble shifting to finding out things that the prof does not know, or evaluating what is likely to be true when the question is unsettled.
It's more important for students to understand the scientific method and critical thinking than to just memorize a lot of apparently unrelated facts.
She wasn't talking about making them easier to read. By making it a narrative, the student sees the process of science, the adventure of figuring out what was formerly unknown, and is more likely to get an understanding of how things fit together than if she is just asked to memorize a series of facts.
Politics. At the college level, individual professors decide what books to assign; in many cases if there isn't a decent text, the professor has a strong incentive (the tenure system, royalties, reputation, etc) to write his/her own. For K-12, teachers have no such power; committees make the decisions, and it's far worse if the book offends someone than if it is merely boring. So, as a result, K-12 texts are almost always boring.
While the Google algorithm is non-obvious, the claims are so broad as to encompass obvious
approaches. It seems that any search procedure
that awards any kind of bonus or penalty that is a function of interconnectivity would infringe the last two claims.
It's a moot point: no copyright on GPLed code will ever expire, because we lost the Eldred case. This means that Disney will have its paid congresscritters extend the copyright term again every time Mickey Mouse threatens to go into the public domain. As a result, all GPLed code will always be copyrighted.
If we had won Eldred, then eventually GPLed code would enter the public domain.
As has been
pointed out, the movie got the Nash equilibrium principle entirely wrong. Since a cheater can benefit by going for the blonde at the last minute, after the other guys have already committed themselves, it's not an equilibrium.
Give me a break: Microsoft has unlimited opportunity to present their side, with large numbers of people on the payroll who do nothing but try to sell Microsoft tools to the US government, 40 hours a day, 50 weeks a year. The question on the table is whether it is appropriate to give Microsoft a slot in the "Open Source and Government" conference.
I frequently review papers for conferences, and I will reject a paper if it is off-topic for the conference. This does not impede anyone's freedom of speech, the paper can be presented at a more appropriate conference. Microsoft's presentation simply isn't relevant to the conference topic,
and given the limited time and limited number of slots available, it would have been better if they hadn't been invited.
Since the organizer has already made the mistake of inviting them, I suppose that it might as well be allowed to stand. But politeness needs to go both ways: if Microsoft gets up and engages in red-baiting and fear-mongering, as they've done in the past, there's no reason they should expect to be treated politely.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that they bought some assets through the bankruptcy court. The status of those "lifetime subscriptions" may be that they were treated as canceled debts.
And the answer is:
Shame on us.
At this stage, to CHOOSE SOMETHING means to give up on technical progress. It is proper to ask for interoperability, so that new wireless cards speak several protocols, but it is stupid to ask the engineers to stop working on improvements.
The article has a more fundamental flaw: the author thinks that the limit on a processor's speed is determined by heat. It's not, at least, not directly. The limit is caused by gate and wire delays: values computed by combinational logic in one bus cycle must reach a stable value by the next bus cycle (let's ignore multicycle paths for now, but the concept is the same). Because of process variations, different versions of the same chip may have different critical delay. Intel (or AMD) will only sell a processor at speed X if it failed at least one test at speed X+whatever, so if you overclock you're pretty much guaranteed to be in trouble if you don't take some measures to compensate.
Temperature plays a role in the sense that semiconductor circuits are somewhat faster at lower temperatures, so if you can keep your chip substantially cooler than spec you can get away with overclocking. But if an overclocked chip is put into a normal, vanilla PC case, you're almost guaranteed to have trouble as soon as the machine warms up.
So how does turning over their national domain to a British IT consulting firm contribute to the rebuilding of Iraq?
If people in the US and the UK value their lives, they will resist the impulse to try to turn Iraq into a colony that is run for corporate profit. (And yes, that's what this is, even though these guys are masquerading as a charity: they intend to take a cut from selling the "high.iq" domain). Iraq's domain namespace belongs to the Iraqi people, not to a clever British IT consultancy. Similarly, the decision as to whether to deploy GSM or CDMA belongs to the future Iraqi government, not to a congressman in the pocket of Qualcomm. Next, we'll see a bunch of Midwestern farmers clamor to get the government to buy up their grain and dump it on Iraq, thereby setting back efforts to rebuild Iraqi agriculture (which employs far more Iraqis than the oil industry does).
We're now at a tipping point: we can either insist that Iraq be run in the interest of Iraqis, or we can allow it to be taken over by a bunch of cronies and lobbyists. If the latter happens, we'll generate so much hate that it will be unsafe for Americans and Brits to travel abroad.
For Red Hat to ship code equivalent to DeCSS in source form would be a DMCA violation, no question; courts have already so ruled. Since Ogle is GPL, Red Hat is forbidden from distributing binaries if they don't distribute source. Therefore Red Hat can't distribute Ogle, period.
The DMCA prohibits "trafficking", not use, so it's legal for an American to download and run Ogle, but if you give it to someone else, you might be risking a five-year jail term. Crazy, but until some court decides to toss the DMCA, that's what you're dealing with.
The answers to almost all of those questions comes down to one single point, one that I'm sure that the Red Hat folks are tired of repeating: they are committed to a policy of pure open source/free software in the distro, period, and they won't include anything that will make them subject to patent licensing or the DMCA. That means they won't ship MP3, proprietary NVidia drivers, or DVD playback, or Microsoft fonts. However, you can get these all from the net if you want them. If your Nvidia driver crashes the kernel, then complaining to Red Hat is complaining to the wrong party: Red Hat can only see their source, NVidia can see all of the source.
Since the OSNews people have been around enough to already know these answers, since we had this same discussion when Red Hat 8 came out, it is rude and pointless of them to repeat the same questions. Are they hoping that, one day, Red Hat will wake up and say, "OK, we agree: open source was a stupid idea. We've negotiated licenses from all these folks, and now Red Hat X is a proprietary distro, but it plays MP3s and DVDs out of the box, and we support NVidia drivers. We've tweaked every pixel to match Eugenia's suggestions, too. But no more free ISO downloads, it costs $150, and there's a per-CPU license"?
And yes, I'm aware that some non-US-based distros made different decisions on some of these matters. Note, though, that not being based in the US, they don't need to worry as much about liability from bogus software patents. In the meantime, Red Hat users can install apt, then install MP3 and DVD playback support with a single line. Read all about it.
Welcome to free software. If it doesn't work on a minority platform, it's up to people who care about that platform (e.g. folks like you) to contribute fixes, or at least to contribute help in isolating the bugs. Just because you're seeing problems on OpenBSD, by the way, doesn't mean it is "platform-specific" -- after all, it runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X, plus many others.
Actually almost everything that's good in SCO was legally "stolen" from its implementers at UC Berkeley and elsewhere, who did it as part of BSD. Unix didn't even do virtual memory until the BSD guys did it for them (the first Unix for the Vax that did proper virtual memory with page faults, as opposed to swapping, came out of Berkeley).
Actually, there are two "exit strategies" that venture capitalists think about when they fund a company; an IPO is one, an acquisition by a large public company is another. In the case of Silicon Valley, the latter possibility is actually more common.
No, RMS is not a millionaire and never was; the McArthur prize was worth $250k when he got it.
Oh, please. CNN extremely liberal? CNN's war coverage is hardly distinguishable from Fox News. You write that "everyone things that they are centrist"; if so, clearly you are quite politically conservative.
It's not possible to be unbiased, so good journalists try to bend over backwards to counter their own bias. Thus many reporters who vote Democrat were near-savage in their criticism of Bill Clinton. But Fox News doesn't operate that way; they are open about their bias and don't try to correct for it. I'd give them points for honesty, if it weren't for their "We report, you decide" slogans.
You've got to be kidding. The US conduct in the Philippines is a national shame, widely condemned at the time by people like Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). But there is a parallel: we promised them freedom from Spain, then decided to keep it as a colony, and the people rebelled.
What we did in the Philippines was to kill about a million people, according to reports by US generals! See here, for example.
That is, while Saddam will be gone by summer, US troops will have to be there forever, and they are likely to find themselves under guerilla attack from various factions who don't accept US rule.
His father would be proud, since he was by the standards of bofkentucky both a "hippy" and a "socialist".
Albert Gore, Sr. lost his Senate seat primarily because he opposed the Vietnam War. He was right, and the people of Tennessee were wrong.
Facts aren't the whole story of science; you find this out if you work with grad students at a good research university. At some point in graduate school, the student is expected to make a transition between being an excellent test-taker to being able to produce something new, and many alleged-brilliant students don't successfully make the transition (though they usually successfully get out with master's degrees, and no, this is not a slam against people whose highest degree is MS). They're great at doing algebraic manipulation to get the homework right, and they have excellent memories, but they don't really grasp how things fit together. They are the ones who always try to get the TAs to give them enough hints to turn the word problem into an equation, so that they can get the answer without understanding the concept. They always got ahead by spitting back the answers the prof wanted, and have trouble shifting to finding out things that the prof does not know, or evaluating what is likely to be true when the question is unsettled.
It's more important for students to understand the scientific method and critical thinking than to just memorize a lot of apparently unrelated facts.
She wasn't talking about making them easier to read. By making it a narrative, the student sees the process of science, the adventure of figuring out what was formerly unknown, and is more likely to get an understanding of how things fit together than if she is just asked to memorize a series of facts.
Politics. At the college level, individual professors decide what books to assign; in many cases if there isn't a decent text, the professor has a strong incentive (the tenure system, royalties, reputation, etc) to write his/her own. For K-12, teachers have no such power; committees make the decisions, and it's far worse if the book offends someone than if it is merely boring. So, as a result, K-12 texts are almost always boring.
Wrong, Italy gets lots of earthquakes, and has plenty of very old houses.
While the Google algorithm is non-obvious, the claims are so broad as to encompass obvious approaches. It seems that any search procedure that awards any kind of bonus or penalty that is a function of interconnectivity would infringe the last two claims.
It's a moot point: no copyright on GPLed code will ever expire, because we lost the Eldred case. This means that Disney will have its paid congresscritters extend the copyright term again every time Mickey Mouse threatens to go into the public domain. As a result, all GPLed code will always be copyrighted.
If we had won Eldred, then eventually GPLed code would enter the public domain.
As has been pointed out, the movie got the Nash equilibrium principle entirely wrong. Since a cheater can benefit by going for the blonde at the last minute, after the other guys have already committed themselves, it's not an equilibrium.
rsync is not suitable for a server that will serve many clients, as the computational load is intense. It trades off CPU for bandwidth.
Give me a break: Microsoft has unlimited opportunity to present their side, with large numbers of people on the payroll who do nothing but try to sell Microsoft tools to the US government, 40 hours a day, 50 weeks a year. The question on the table is whether it is appropriate to give Microsoft a slot in the "Open Source and Government" conference.
I frequently review papers for conferences, and I will reject a paper if it is off-topic for the conference. This does not impede anyone's freedom of speech, the paper can be presented at a more appropriate conference. Microsoft's presentation simply isn't relevant to the conference topic, and given the limited time and limited number of slots available, it would have been better if they hadn't been invited.
Since the organizer has already made the mistake of inviting them, I suppose that it might as well be allowed to stand. But politeness needs to go both ways: if Microsoft gets up and engages in red-baiting and fear-mongering, as they've done in the past, there's no reason they should expect to be treated politely.