The very fact that an NDA is used means that the manufacture knows that the writer
of the driver needs facts that can not be determined by looking at the source of the
driver itself. Typically this involves the use of various magic constants that must
be loaded into device registers at appropriate times. The manufacturer knows what the
magic constants mean. Hopefully the writer of the driver does too. But nobody else does,
and the author of the device driver can't tell them. So if there's a bug (maybe because
the magic constant wasn't quite the right one to use in certain circumstances) there's
no way for another person to fix it. Likewise if there's a desire to expand the functionality of the driver there is again no way for a third party to know what the magic constants should be.
Note that the one Linux success was for a classical, pure, high volume server application. The failures were where there was a premium on collaboration across
multiple sites and use of multimedia. In short, Linux still shines as a server, as
it has for many years, and still sucks for anything else at the enterprise level.
No, I'm not a Microsoft troll. I'm just pointing out that the open source development
model has yet to deliver the tools many big corporations need.
What this shows is not that radiation is harmless to wildlife but rather that human occupation is so devastating to wildlife that merely having to put up with high levels of radioactivity is a relief by comparison.
So long as the college makes sure the students know the rules before they accept admission, I see nothing to object to. If you want a party college, apply to a party college. There's plenty of them. No one is forced to go to a Christian college.
"The prayer groups for the study were located throughout the world and included Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish and multiple Christianity-based denominations."
Obviously the One True God got pissed off that the researchers couldn't even decide which one of them He was, so He sat this one out.
TdR: We are having more success getting documentation, but I am not sure if it is due in any way to our user base size. Part of it might be that many more products are coming from Asia (where business sense still applies -- the customer gets the documentation he wants). I think that the Asian businesses are just being smarter about this. When it comes to documentation requests, an Asian company that says no is rare. An American company that says yes is rare.
It looks like the Asian companies are run by engineers and the American companies are run by lawyers. No wonder our trade deficit is out of control.
In the unlikely event that I ever find myself agreeing with George W. Bush on anything, I will carefully rethink my position and try to find where I made a mistake.
"The automobile, commercial air travel, the PC, the Internet, the cell phone -- all took decades to reach their full potential, and none would have taken root without stubborn entrepreneurs who refused to heed conventional wisdom."
The author fails to note that the automobile, commercial air travel, the PC, and the cell phone were all profitable within a few years of their introduction, even if they had no where near the level of refinement and volume of use that they have today. Space travel is now decades old but still only Earth orbiting, unmanned satellites have any economic justification.
It costs hundreds of dollars per pound to get things into space, and the costs of doing anything once you're there are enormous. Planet Earth has hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of nickel, iron, platinum, gold, etc., but just as for that asteroid most of it costs more to mine than it's worth. Of course, talking about a trillion dollars worth of platinum is silly -- if you actually had such a large quantity it's price would plumment.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
·
· Score: 1
It is not necessary for a practice to be "coercive" in order to be judged an illegal use of monopoly power. Microsoft never put a gun to any PC manufacturer's head to make them accept their pricing policy of charging for the OS per PC whether it was installed or not. But the alternative of paying per installation was priced so much higher that
every manufacturer knew it had to choose the per PC contract if it wanted to be competitive. Microsoft's dominant position meant that installing some other operating system wasn't a realistic option. The "Microsoft tax", which effectively forced competing operating systems out of the market, was properly judged to be an illegal monopolistic practice.
The law operates in the real world, not some libertarian fantasy land.
Weird. You agree with RMS that "Treacherous Computing" and "Digital Restrictions Management" are more accurate terms than market-speak like "[You're not] Trusted Computing" and "[You have no] Digital Rights Managament". But then you object to RMS using these more accurate terms.
After you have written a free program as big and useful as GNU Emacs (to name just one of RMS's contributions) I think more people will pay attention to your ideas of where "open source" should go.
Stallman has always been concerned about the social and ethical issues of software distribution, market share has never been a significant concern of his. If in five years you want to be using an "open source" OS that in fact has been totally locked down with DRM, then go ahead and follow the "pragmatic" open source route. GNU software will always remain free, as in speech.
Its members are mostly academics, who make their living not by programming but by encouraging as many people as possible to major in computer science. So naturally it is in their interest to paint a rosey picture of future employment prospects.
I agree. If a patent examiner knew he would be docked 3 month's salary for every patent he approves that is later overturned, we'd see a lot fewer bogus patents.
So far I haven't seen evidence that any major manufacturers of consumer video/audio are willing to produce a format that isn't backed by Hollywood. Would you spend tens of millions to gear up for manufacturing products that use a format for which people can't find commerically produced movies and songs? How many people will actually buy such a product?
HDCP has already been cracked, so it's just a matter of time before someone makes a cheap converter that decrypts it. Of course it will be illegal in the home of the brave, land of the free.
Yes, it's GPL and dual licensed, not LGPL and single licensed. That means that the many software companies that are developing closed sourced applications using the commercial license for My SQL could be forced to either pay obnoxious Oracle-determined
fees or else open up their source (or rewrite it to use a different DB).
RMS started warning about software patents about 20 years ago. Now we have an utter mess, and no one will be able to convince me that the ability to patent software has been a significant spur to inovation.
While fluoride can protect teeth, it is also a poison when ingested. That is why you shouldn't eat toothpaste. So I question the wisdom of adding fluoride to the water supply.
When you are hired you have to sign an employment agreement. This will typically contain clauses stating that what you do are works for hire, copyrights will be owned by your employer, you must assign patent rights to your employer, etc. At that time if you are concerned about such things you can strike out the parts about patents. Of course your employer may choose not to hire you in that case. On the other hand, you may be surprised at how many employers will agree to this -- the employment agreements are just boilerplate created by lawyers, and management knows that they're unlikely to make any money on patents anyway. Of course you will have to agree not to take the patents for yourself, your objection is to the patents themselves, not who gets them.
If you have already signed the employment agreement without making such changes, you have little cause for complaint when you are asked to produce patentable results.
In the 1960s it took America slightly more than 8 years to go from a dead start (John Kennedy's initial announcement of the moon program) to landing on the moon using a J-2 engine. Now, 40 years later, it's going to take 12 years to land on the moon again, using a J-2 engine. My country peaked a long time ago.
Linux has always been the OS of choice for super villians.
If it's compatible with orbiting mind control lasers then surely it's
suitable for autonomous military vehicles.
As I pointed out, we're already far beyond what is needed to fend off the next ice age. We are pushing the climate into a temperature range it hasn't been in for tens of millions of years, at a time when our population is already straining the biological capacity of the earth.
As far as "population control" goes, as an environmentalist (yes, one of those people Slashdot libertarian ideologues hate) I do indeed believe we need to stabilize our population. But I don't favor killing people and the people doing the most breeding right now don't seem interested in stopping, so I'm not sure what can be done about that.
Slashdot Mirror
The very fact that an NDA is used means that the manufacture knows that the writer of the driver needs facts that can not be determined by looking at the source of the driver itself. Typically this involves the use of various magic constants that must be loaded into device registers at appropriate times. The manufacturer knows what the magic constants mean. Hopefully the writer of the driver does too. But nobody else does, and the author of the device driver can't tell them. So if there's a bug (maybe because the magic constant wasn't quite the right one to use in certain circumstances) there's no way for another person to fix it. Likewise if there's a desire to expand the functionality of the driver there is again no way for a third party to know what the magic constants should be.
Note that the one Linux success was for a classical, pure, high volume server application. The failures were where there was a premium on collaboration across multiple sites and use of multimedia. In short, Linux still shines as a server, as it has for many years, and still sucks for anything else at the enterprise level. No, I'm not a Microsoft troll. I'm just pointing out that the open source development model has yet to deliver the tools many big corporations need.
What this shows is not that radiation is harmless to wildlife but rather that human occupation is so devastating to wildlife that merely having to put up with high levels of radioactivity is a relief by comparison.
So long as the college makes sure the students know the rules before they accept admission, I see nothing to object to. If you want a party college, apply to a party college. There's plenty of them. No one is forced to go to a Christian college.
In some subbasement at Fort Meade, within vast rows of high density holographic storage devices, must lie the world's largest stash of pirated pr0n.
Obviously the One True God got pissed off that the researchers couldn't even decide which one of them He was, so He sat this one out.
It looks like the Asian companies are run by engineers and the American companies are run by lawyers. No wonder our trade deficit is out of control.
Of course it's an economic decision. IBM is in business to make money for its shareholders, not to carry out acts of idealism.
In the unlikely event that I ever find myself agreeing with George W. Bush on anything, I will carefully rethink my position and try to find where I made a mistake.
if Google didn't keep search records traceable to a user at all. That would save them a lot of legal hassles, too.
The author fails to note that the automobile, commercial air travel, the PC, and the cell phone were all profitable within a few years of their introduction, even if they had no where near the level of refinement and volume of use that they have today. Space travel is now decades old but still only Earth orbiting, unmanned satellites have any economic justification.
It costs hundreds of dollars per pound to get things into space, and the costs of doing anything once you're there are enormous. Planet Earth has hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of nickel, iron, platinum, gold, etc., but just as for that asteroid most of it costs more to mine than it's worth. Of course, talking about a trillion dollars worth of platinum is silly -- if you actually had such a large quantity it's price would plumment.
It is not necessary for a practice to be "coercive" in order to be judged an illegal use of monopoly power. Microsoft never put a gun to any PC manufacturer's head to make them accept their pricing policy of charging for the OS per PC whether it was installed or not. But the alternative of paying per installation was priced so much higher that every manufacturer knew it had to choose the per PC contract if it wanted to be competitive. Microsoft's dominant position meant that installing some other operating system wasn't a realistic option. The "Microsoft tax", which effectively forced competing operating systems out of the market, was properly judged to be an illegal monopolistic practice.
The law operates in the real world, not some libertarian fantasy land.
Weird. You agree with RMS that "Treacherous Computing" and "Digital Restrictions Management" are more accurate terms than market-speak like "[You're not] Trusted Computing" and "[You have no] Digital Rights Managament". But then you object to RMS using these more accurate terms.
After you have written a free program as big and useful as GNU Emacs (to name just one of RMS's contributions) I think more people will pay attention to your ideas of where "open source" should go.
Stallman has always been concerned about the social and ethical issues of software distribution, market share has never been a significant concern of his. If in five years you want to be using an "open source" OS that in fact has been totally locked down with DRM, then go ahead and follow the "pragmatic" open source route. GNU software will always remain free, as in speech.
Its members are mostly academics, who make their living not by programming but by encouraging as many people as possible to major in computer science. So naturally it is in their interest to paint a rosey picture of future employment prospects.
I agree. If a patent examiner knew he would be docked 3 month's salary for every patent he approves that is later overturned, we'd see a lot fewer bogus patents.
Yet the folks with mod points did not follow your advice. They modded up your post, not the parent.
So far I haven't seen evidence that any major manufacturers of consumer video/audio are willing to produce a format that isn't backed by Hollywood. Would you spend tens of millions to gear up for manufacturing products that use a format for which people can't find commerically produced movies and songs? How many people will actually buy such a product?
HDCP has already been cracked, so it's just a matter of time before someone makes a cheap converter that decrypts it. Of course it will be illegal in the home of the brave, land of the free.
Yes, it's GPL and dual licensed, not LGPL and single licensed. That means that the many software companies that are developing closed sourced applications using the commercial license for My SQL could be forced to either pay obnoxious Oracle-determined fees or else open up their source (or rewrite it to use a different DB).
RMS started warning about software patents about 20 years ago. Now we have an utter mess, and no one will be able to convince me that the ability to patent software has been a significant spur to inovation.
While fluoride can protect teeth, it is also a poison when ingested. That is why you shouldn't eat toothpaste. So I question the wisdom of adding fluoride to the water supply.
When you are hired you have to sign an employment agreement. This will typically contain clauses stating that what you do are works for hire, copyrights will be owned by your employer, you must assign patent rights to your employer, etc. At that time if you are concerned about such things you can strike out the parts about patents. Of course your employer may choose not to hire you in that case. On the other hand, you may be surprised at how many employers will agree to this -- the employment agreements are just boilerplate created by lawyers, and management knows that they're unlikely to make any money on patents anyway. Of course you will have to agree not to take the patents for yourself, your objection is to the patents themselves, not who gets them.
If you have already signed the employment agreement without making such changes, you have little cause for complaint when you are asked to produce patentable results.
In the 1960s it took America slightly more than 8 years to go from a dead start (John Kennedy's initial announcement of the moon program) to landing on the moon using a J-2 engine. Now, 40 years later, it's going to take 12 years to land on the moon again, using a J-2 engine. My country peaked a long time ago.
Linux has always been the OS of choice for super villians. If it's compatible with orbiting mind control lasers then surely it's suitable for autonomous military vehicles.
As I pointed out, we're already far beyond what is needed to fend off the next ice age. We are pushing the climate into a temperature range it hasn't been in for tens of millions of years, at a time when our population is already straining the biological capacity of the earth.
As far as "population control" goes, as an environmentalist (yes, one of those people Slashdot libertarian ideologues hate) I do indeed believe we need to stabilize our population. But I don't favor killing people and the people doing the most breeding right now don't seem interested in stopping, so I'm not sure what can be done about that.