1. Commercial fusion power.
2. True AI
3. Duke Nukem Forever
Feh, Duke Nukem Forever is a hopeless amateur in the art of slacking.
What about Knuth, volume 4? It was supposed to be completed before
most of you whippersnappers were born, about 30 years ago. Donald is
still at it.
Convince those of your customers who use and like your existing products that they're dinosaurs -- creaking old fossils. Small brained relics from the ancient past. Make a big ad campaign based on that theme!
They'll upgrade out of sheer embarrassment! I know that if I bought a company's product and then that company told me I was an old fool for liking it, I'd be eager to upgrade to their newer product.
Qt is not an "OSS product"; it's a commercial product that happens also to be released under an open source license. That's a big difference.
QT is distributed under the GPL. That means it can be forked like any other GPLed software.
As with any GPLed software, if you write software based upon it your own software must also
be GPLed. Commercial users who don't want to GPL their code can buy licenses for the unfree
version, since QT is dual licensed. This gives you more choices than you would have if it were
only available under the GPL, yet strangely people who have no problem with GPLed software are
always bitching about Trolltech's licensing options.
The right thing to ask is how much open and public domain source made it to Windows?
I would like to remind you that there is a big difference between licensed, copyrighted open source code and public domain code.
By definition you can do anything you want with works that are in the public domain, including incorporating them into your
proprietary code. There is a reason why GNU stuff isn't public domain.
You guys need to learn that just because you have all the money you don't get to make all of the rules.
This is the United States of America. The people with all the money do get to make all the rules.
What is interesting here is that both sides have "all the money". The winners will be the lawyers.
If you actually read the LinuxBIOS web site, you will see that a prime motivation was to allow remote updating of the BIOS on Linux clusters. It beats attaching a keyboard to each of 256 motherboards and updating them one by one.
Manufacturers of embedded systems are likely to be interested in a BIOS that is free and fast.
It is not so clear what the benefits are for Joe and Mary desktop user. I'm sure most Linux users will continue to use the BIOS that comes with their board.
They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates, they only care about what the average consumer sees as immediate performance.
Actually, they care very much how much power the chip consumes, because this matters in both the server markets at the top and the laptop markets at the bottom. If I recall correctly, AMD's quadcore chip will be able to put individual cores into low power mode when they aren't needed. Of course the highest clocked AMD or Intel chips require their own nuclear reactor to power them, but that's because they're targeted towards the hard core gamer market and it's the hard core gamers who don't care how much power the chip consumes.
During the dot com boom there were ISPs that offered down-market rates if you'd just let them clutter up your browser with ads. Most of us would rather just pay more and not put up with even more ads than are already on the web pages. I make so little use of my cell phone that I'm considering cancelling my service. But under no circumstances am I going to move to some obnoxious ad supported cell service.
Hollywood is very liberal and the Democrats get an awful lot of their campaign money from that virtual place. Those are the same folks cramming DRM down our throats. So, no, I don't expect the Democrats to be any better than the Republicans on this issue.
The only cases where "shims" are used in Linux that I am aware of is in getting proprietary drivers to run under Linux. Examples are the nvidia driver and some wifi drivers. The shims are necessary because normally a driver is compiled into the kernel and thus subject to the GPL. But Microsoft has little interest in selling drivers (they write them, as do other companies, as a necessary evil, not as a source of income). Microsoft can port proprietary apps to Linux in the same way that numerous other companies have done without violating the GPL. And of course the GPL can not force any code to be public domain. In fact GPLed code is copyrighted itself and not in the public domain.
Just say the title out loud to get some idea of why speech recognition is hard, nevermind translation.
Translation has long been regarded as "AI-complete" because to do it well you have to understand what is being said, which involves solving all the other difficult AI problems. The current translation systems are lousy because they don't understand what is being said and most of them don't even attempt to.
So my guess is that this program will be a boondoggle for researchers with little practical result.
By itself the agreement does not cause a GPL violation, whether you call it
a cross license agreement or a convenent not to sue.
But suppose someone creates a new Linux distribution, ForkLinux, derived from
Novell SUSE. Now suppose Microsoft decides to sue ForkLinux for violating
their patents. According to section 7 of the GPL, you can not distribute
GPL software unless you can convey to the recipients any rights necessary for
them to be able to distribute the software themselves. (That's not a quote, that's
the meaning.) So if ForkLinux can't be distributed because of violating Microsoft
patents, neither can Novell's Linux. It does not matter whether Microsoft permits
Novell to use their patents, the GPL will not let Novell distribute Linux unless
people who recieve Novell's Linux can also distribute it, with any changes they have
made.
The higher wages paid to employees when there is a shortage may result in higher prices that reduce overall demand for the product (and thus reduce the demand for the labor). But that depends on the price elasticity of the demand. In situations where there is little elasticity (as in health care) increasing wages relieves the shortage not by reducing the end product demand but by encouraging more people to go into nursing in the first place.
I guarantee that if nurses' wages were doubled the "nurse shortgage" would vanish within the time required to achieve certification as a nurse. (The shortage would actually decline prior to that time as people who left nursing because it wasn't worth the stress and hassle would get back into it.)
A "shortgage" of labor simply means that businessmen have to pay people more than they would prefer.
There is always a wage at which any "shortage" disappears, but that is not the fix prefered by the
business class (importing more cheap labor or outsourcing is).
You never hear about a CEO shortage even when they make millions a year.
"After all, the theory behind gravity itself is that the gravitational pull is infinite at the center of gravity."
I assume you flunked physics 101. The Earth's gravity is maximal at its surface, as you tunnel towards its geometric center (which is also the Earth's center of gravity) the net gravitational force steadily declines until it is 0 at the center.
Actually most people use Google because the home page is practically blank.
When I want to do a search I don't want to load a page of weather reports, astrological
forecasts, celebrity news, advertisements unrelated to what I intend to search for,
etc. I can't stand anybody's "portal" home page. But Google is my home page precisely
because it doesn't load my screen with crap when I fire up my browser.
How does the GPL v3 reduce your freedom? If you don't want to change the code in your Tivo noboby's
forcing you to. The principal of the GPL has always been that GPLed code should be distributed with source in a way that makes it practical for those who wish to do so to modify the code. That is its whole point. GPL v3 merely corrects some loop holes that have arrived with the development of hardware enforced DRM and the proliferation of software patents.
If Linus is appalled by this concept, as apparently he is, he should have used the BSD license. And then not complain when corporations imbed his code in their products with proprietary modifications and give nothing back.
"We... hope to preserve and defend our heritage, culture, customs, traditions, morals, and values, as well as our blood itself, against hostile alien elements that are destructive to who we are and we as a race hold dear."
That was written by a white man. Had it been written by an Australian aborigine, it would be a civil rights
web site.
"And, accorting [sic] to the article, this was all coming from the mouth of an intel person, not AMD."
Actually, according to the article, the person providing the information was Ben Sander, who works for
AMD:
"The details of Barcelona discussed in this article were presented by Ben Sander, who led the performance modeling group for Barcelona."
Yes, the guy who submitted the Slashdot summary screwed up. But use a little common sense. Is an Intel spokesman going to give us the inside skinny on a new, unreleased, AMD chip?
So far no body has been found, so we don't even know if a crime has occurred, nevermind who did it. It seems premature to bring out the pitchforks and torches.
Cluster bombs are useful for just one purpose -- killing people. Israel has recently dumped loads of U.S. made cluster bombs on Lebanon. Tell the Lebanese that they aren't weapons of mass destruction.
The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm...climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm...to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century.
One thing to keep in mind is that the sun has been steadily getting hotter over geologic time. This has been matched by a general downtrend in the amount of C02 in the atmosphere. The bottom line is that a "thermal extinction" event today will require lower levels of CO2 than a thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene.
The global warming deniers today are in pretty much the same position as the "young earth" biblical literalists. They ignore scientfic data that doesn't tell them what they find convenient to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Convince those of your customers who use and like your existing products that they're dinosaurs -- creaking old fossils. Small brained relics from the ancient past. Make a big ad campaign based on that theme! They'll upgrade out of sheer embarrassment! I know that if I bought a company's product and then that company told me I was an old fool for liking it, I'd be eager to upgrade to their newer product.
Qt is not an "OSS product"; it's a commercial product that happens also to be released under an open source license. That's a big difference.
QT is distributed under the GPL. That means it can be forked like any other GPLed software. As with any GPLed software, if you write software based upon it your own software must also be GPLed. Commercial users who don't want to GPL their code can buy licenses for the unfree version, since QT is dual licensed. This gives you more choices than you would have if it were only available under the GPL, yet strangely people who have no problem with GPLed software are always bitching about Trolltech's licensing options.
The right thing to ask is how much open and public domain source made it to Windows?
I would like to remind you that there is a big difference between licensed, copyrighted open source code and public domain code. By definition you can do anything you want with works that are in the public domain, including incorporating them into your proprietary code. There is a reason why GNU stuff isn't public domain.
You guys need to learn that just because you have all the money you don't get to make all of the rules.
This is the United States of America. The people with all the money do get to make all the rules. What is interesting here is that both sides have "all the money". The winners will be the lawyers.
If you actually read the LinuxBIOS web site, you will see that a prime motivation was to allow remote updating of the BIOS on Linux clusters. It beats attaching a keyboard to each of 256 motherboards and updating them one by one.
Manufacturers of embedded systems are likely to be interested in a BIOS that is free and fast.
It is not so clear what the benefits are for Joe and Mary desktop user. I'm sure most Linux users will continue to use the BIOS that comes with their board.
Actually, they care very much how much power the chip consumes, because this matters in both the server markets at the top and the laptop markets at the bottom. If I recall correctly, AMD's quadcore chip will be able to put individual cores into low power mode when they aren't needed. Of course the highest clocked AMD or Intel chips require their own nuclear reactor to power them, but that's because they're targeted towards the hard core gamer market and it's the hard core gamers who don't care how much power the chip consumes.
During the dot com boom there were ISPs that offered down-market rates if you'd just let them clutter up your browser with ads. Most of us would rather just pay more and not put up with even more ads than are already on the web pages. I make so little use of my cell phone that I'm considering cancelling my service. But under no circumstances am I going to move to some obnoxious ad supported cell service.
Hollywood is very liberal and the Democrats get an awful lot of their campaign money from that virtual place. Those are the same folks cramming DRM down our throats. So, no, I don't expect the Democrats to be any better than the Republicans on this issue.
This may result in people buying high end video cards for headless servers doing weather simulations and the like.
The only cases where "shims" are used in Linux that I am aware of is in getting proprietary drivers to run under Linux. Examples are the nvidia driver and some wifi drivers. The shims are necessary because normally a driver is compiled into the kernel and thus subject to the GPL. But Microsoft has little interest in selling drivers (they write them, as do other companies, as a necessary evil, not as a source of income). Microsoft can port proprietary apps to Linux in the same way that numerous other companies have done without violating the GPL. And of course the GPL can not force any code to be public domain. In fact GPLed code is copyrighted itself and not in the public domain.
Just say the title out loud to get some idea of why speech recognition is hard, nevermind translation. Translation has long been regarded as "AI-complete" because to do it well you have to understand what is being said, which involves solving all the other difficult AI problems. The current translation systems are lousy because they don't understand what is being said and most of them don't even attempt to.
So my guess is that this program will be a boondoggle for researchers with little practical result.
By itself the agreement does not cause a GPL violation, whether you call it a cross license agreement or a convenent not to sue. But suppose someone creates a new Linux distribution, ForkLinux, derived from Novell SUSE. Now suppose Microsoft decides to sue ForkLinux for violating their patents. According to section 7 of the GPL, you can not distribute GPL software unless you can convey to the recipients any rights necessary for them to be able to distribute the software themselves. (That's not a quote, that's the meaning.) So if ForkLinux can't be distributed because of violating Microsoft patents, neither can Novell's Linux. It does not matter whether Microsoft permits Novell to use their patents, the GPL will not let Novell distribute Linux unless people who recieve Novell's Linux can also distribute it, with any changes they have made.
The higher wages paid to employees when there is a shortage may result in higher prices that reduce overall demand for the product (and thus reduce the demand for the labor). But that depends on the price elasticity of the demand. In situations where there is little elasticity (as in health care) increasing wages relieves the shortage not by reducing the end product demand but by encouraging more people to go into nursing in the first place.
I guarantee that if nurses' wages were doubled the "nurse shortgage" would vanish within the time required to achieve certification as a nurse. (The shortage would actually decline prior to that time as people who left nursing because it wasn't worth the stress and hassle would get back into it.)
A "shortgage" of labor simply means that businessmen have to pay people more than they would prefer. There is always a wage at which any "shortage" disappears, but that is not the fix prefered by the business class (importing more cheap labor or outsourcing is). You never hear about a CEO shortage even when they make millions a year.
"After all, the theory behind gravity itself is that the gravitational pull is infinite at the center of gravity."
I assume you flunked physics 101. The Earth's gravity is maximal at its surface, as you tunnel towards its geometric center (which is also the Earth's center of gravity) the net gravitational force steadily declines until it is 0 at the center.
You are assuming that I (and other people) are too stupid to click on "More" when we want to get to Google's other products. Geesh.
Actually most people use Google because the home page is practically blank. When I want to do a search I don't want to load a page of weather reports, astrological forecasts, celebrity news, advertisements unrelated to what I intend to search for, etc. I can't stand anybody's "portal" home page. But Google is my home page precisely because it doesn't load my screen with crap when I fire up my browser.
How does the GPL v3 reduce your freedom? If you don't want to change the code in your Tivo noboby's forcing you to. The principal of the GPL has always been that GPLed code should be distributed with source in a way that makes it practical for those who wish to do so to modify the code. That is its whole point. GPL v3 merely corrects some loop holes that have arrived with the development of hardware enforced DRM and the proliferation of software patents.
If Linus is appalled by this concept, as apparently he is, he should have used the BSD license. And then not complain when corporations imbed his code in their products with proprietary modifications and give nothing back.
From the evil, racist Australian blog:
"We ... hope to preserve and defend our heritage, culture, customs, traditions, morals, and values, as well as our blood itself, against hostile alien elements that are destructive to who we are and we as a race hold dear."
That was written by a white man. Had it been written by an Australian aborigine, it would be a civil rights web site.
I don't have a TV. My only way to play a DVD is on my laptop. This will certainly save me money buying commercial DVDs.
"And, accorting [sic] to the article, this was all coming from the mouth of an intel person, not AMD."
Actually, according to the article, the person providing the information was Ben Sander, who works for AMD:
"The details of Barcelona discussed in this article were presented by Ben Sander, who led the performance modeling group for Barcelona."
Yes, the guy who submitted the Slashdot summary screwed up. But use a little common sense. Is an Intel spokesman going to give us the inside skinny on a new, unreleased, AMD chip?
So far no body has been found, so we don't even know if a crime has occurred, nevermind who did it. It seems premature to bring out the pitchforks and torches.
Cluster bombs are useful for just one purpose -- killing people. Israel has recently dumped loads of U.S. made cluster bombs on Lebanon. Tell the Lebanese that they aren't weapons of mass destruction.
One thing to keep in mind is that the sun has been steadily getting hotter over geologic time. This has been matched by a general downtrend in the amount of C02 in the atmosphere. The bottom line is that a "thermal extinction" event today will require lower levels of CO2 than a thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene.
The global warming deniers today are in pretty much the same position as the "young earth" biblical literalists. They ignore scientfic data that doesn't tell them what they find convenient to believe.