By confessing to something really horrible you aquire a curious kind of trust in people: if he says that he didn't kill Nina then who would doubt him now that he so flippantly admitted to the killing of 8 others?
This of course can be a strategy in itself, it's a card he's earnt by confessing and can play against Reiser, someone he clearly wants to see lose everything (re 2004 case for attempted seizure of Reiser's business, Namesys Inc.).
Copyleft is the opposite of Copyright. This is what people think when they hear the term 'Copyleft License'. It's problematic in that is implies "without copyright".
Obama himself even underscores this:
"I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection."
Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses. They simply have legal clauses that encourage +/or allow sharing. Sometimes I wish the term Copyleft was scrapped. It does more damage than good.
I've performed with Pure Data on tour and it stood up well on my Debian laptop. At the time I was either using a gamepad or midi-slider interface to drive the instruments I made with this tool, some of which were multichannel. A friend and I have had several hundred people play with our audiovisual instrument Fijuu2 day in day out for a week. This setup runs on Ubuntu and uses PD as a sound server. Several other friends perform with Supercollideron their Linux laptops.
Where sequencing is concerned I've heard some enjoy Hydrogen. For a DAW on Linux it's hard to go past Ardour, though that's hardly an instrument.
Not trolling but just somebody enlight me, what is new here?
It is for Linux. That is what is new. The two examples you give are for other operating systems. Raising your eyes to the top of the page will reveal this article is in the section "Linux". It's a bit tricky I know.
One topic that is evidently too hot to handle: How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?
Short of neutering them, you can do little other than give them contraception, a little privacy (difficult) and train them in emotionally and socially managing the consequences of swinging widely and/or irresponsibly - it would be of primary importance to avoid the onset of sexual jealousy. This will call for a new kind of training, that they are also fit of mind and heart.
Suppressing the primary biological drive of crew will surely only make them falter in flight and/or grow mad.
There's a lot of comments, (including on/. - see article on Dell shipping Ubuntu Linux), about 'Linux' being less suited to the server role than BSD, (requires daily reboots, lock up without reason..)
The BSD's are a fine family of OS's. This is widely understood now. There's no need to resort to baseless exaggeration to superficially elevate BSD's position in the mind of the reader, who will probably read your comment, in turn, as "the BSD's are so threatened by Linux that I will resort to back-handed absurdities".
You're above comment is contrary to the quiet confidence I'd expect any BSD user to have..
Best you climb back under the bridge I think.. You're safer there, and so are we.
This is a completely meaningless article. It's jaded with itself first of all.
It doesn't really matter what you think of 'open source'. Whether you snigger with hatred, howl in defense or yawn at the recurring fads that surround it: it's perhaps the most singularly influential concept, terror, saviour and slayer facing the conventions of so-called information technology - and even human culture - today.
I had a Dell Inspiron i8k. While it was a beast to lug around, I loved the thing. I took it around the world 3 times - my back has less fond memories - but never have I sat at a laptop since with such a reassuring feeling of robust design, right up there with the Apple G3 but with a better keyboard. I dropped it several times, tipped fortified wine all over it, used it in clubs and bars on a world tour and suffered upon it all manner of other sins to the soul of electric things.. yet never did it yield. There was once a problem with a screen artifact but Dell service was next day and on-site. I was very impressed by this.
Admittedly however, the laptop looked fairly hideous.
Dell has (supposedly) the best record for building systems that do the least damage to the environment and really ought to push this angle in the marketplace. That, coupled with a case that doesn't try to look like an unmanned autonomous aircraft - and offering Linux preinstalled (Ubuntu ideally) - would do well to the ends of lifting Mr. Dell out of stagnancy.
Let's see developing countries make their mark in in the technology sector with their new-found engineered reliance on an American monopolistic coroporation.
Let's see them try to think outside of the Microsoft box and extend the tools that are given to them. Let's see them try to turn all the poor paradigms that a Windows desktop impresses on young minds and transform it into something that's meaningful for the way they might experience the world. Let's see them create new, local and autonomous markets with Microsoft products. Let's see them run MSVC on those machines, let alone satisfy their inquisitive minds as to how the operating system actually works.
Microsoft creates a sickness and presents itself as the only cure. By putting Windows junk on the OLPC you're only helping to create a new outsourcing market for fat western corporations at the expense of their own local labour markets. Wait for the the I.T sweatshops to come marching to a job-board near you.
Nice one Nick. What a failure you're allowing this project to become. Microsoft will eiether engulf it and capitalise on it or destroy it entirely. Here we were thinking you were a leader.
So it is quite obvious that the author has very little knowledge of Ubuntu.
..and this is a good thing. Reviewers that are already an expert of the product they under trial generally have a completely different experience and appreciation of the given product than those they are writing for.
The reviews I've read on Ubuntu that are the most insightful are written by those with very little prior knowledge of either environment: as such they reveal their expectations about those products, expectations that reflect more of the 'average user's' needs than that of the expert.
I've been a daily Linux desktop user for 8 or so years, but only now am I seeing reviews by people that start with "I really like how in Ubuntu I don't have to websites to download and install software" and howtos that begin with "So you've just installed Ubuntu and want to change your theme?".
These are very good signs. People are actually trying out this stuff and getting there on their own. The software is working. Our ideas are good.
No one's talking about a conspiracy. You can safely put that word down and walk away from it.
The issue is also not about government efforts to fund research for cures using tax payer's money. Of course this happens and of course it is good. The issue at hand surrounds the role patents play in the strategic interests of pharmaceutical corporations, many of which are multi-nationals, to the ends that patents are actively used to restrict the fabrication and consequent distribution of cures known to save lives and/or make existing lives more bearable in the interests of protecting an existing market. It is a question of business ethics. Should we allow legal constructs like patents to support a monopoly over a known cure? Of course it is sometimes more profitable to keep people half as sick - a lifetime of relief prescriptions - than it is to cure them cheaply, but should we allow this?
As you seem reluctant to actually read real analysis on the matter (even by the W.T.O itself and research parters of your own organisation), I'll give you a case example.
You are undoubtedly familiar with the recent panic surrounding bird flu, an avian virus transferrable to humans and considered quite deadly. Roche developed an anti-virus pill called Tamiflu, known to be very effective against this H5N1 virus but will not allow anyone else to manufacture the pill on the basis that it breaches their patent.
Says the Emory University Professor:
"Something has to be done,'' said Ira Longini, an Emory University professor whose computer model of a potential avian flu pandemic shows that an outbreak could be snuffed out within a month by rushing antiviral drugs to the place where it started. "When you think of the potential damage a pandemic flu could do, and how little drug we have, the situation is quite absurd.
Roche, the pharmaceutical giant, recently announced a European price of $20,424 for a year's supply of its anti-HIV drug Fuzeon. This will translate into an AWP (Average Wholesale Price) in the U.S. of close to $25,000. "Roche has priced Fuzeon at almost three times the price of the most expensive AIDS drug," said ACT UP/NY member Mark Milano. "This excessive price will force ADAP programs to cut other cut other life-saving drugs, restrict entry to their programs, or increase already long waiting lists. This will hasten the death of thousands of people with HIV in the U.S."
The NIH has done alot of research and publishes much of it in the interest of common good. The NIH (and related organisations in other countries) are not at all the problem however.
Bear in mind also that a cure can be published in detail while also remaining patented: don't get patentability mixed up with copyright.
As a medical researcher, you mind find it interesting - perhaps disturbing - to read the following:
Your joke points to a sad reality however, that it's only through patenting cures (ie having a monopoly over a cure) can pharmaceutical companies (free enterprises) get the investment capital to develop medicines. Cures are IP, traded and guarded.
Moreso, the last thing any pharmaceutical monopoly can afford is for people to get better very easily. For this reason cures are highly guarded discoveries: there are many cures around we don't have access to, and perhaps never will, either because they threaten an existing sickness market or because the IP pushes the price up beyond our reach. Just because we hear about a cure doesn't mean we'll ever see that cure in the wild. Expand this grim fact 100 fold in places like Africa or India where the cost of IP literally comes between them and surviving an otherwise perfectly cureable disease (if only production and distribution were the only cost).
In many respects sickness itself is a managed resource and pharaceutical patents - as a monopoly of a cure - are an active ingredient in this logic.
Worth mentioning that Adobe has a similar patent (ironically presented in a webpage that breaches both the aforementioned patent and this patent):
Abstract of EP0689133
A method for displaying on a computer screen multiple sets of information needed on a recurring basis, comprising the steps of: (1) Establishing an area on the computer screen in which the multiple sets of information are to be displayed, the established area having a maximum size which is substantially less than the entire area of the screen. (2) Providing within the established area a plurality of selection indicators, one for each of the multiple sets of information. (3) Selecting one of the multiple sets of information for display within the established area by pointing to one of the selection indicators within the established area, whereby the selected set of information will be substituted within the established area for the set of information previously being displayed therein. A selected set of information may also be moved out of the selected area by pointing to its selection indicator and dragging it away.
Anyway, you reap what you sow. Apple is a member of the Business Software Alliance, one of the heaviest lobbyists in favour of software patents (and their synchronisation with the cannabilistic US model) here in the EU.
What a relief. The option to be voluntarily surveilled proves they weren't already doing it. Those silly tinfoils hats were bent all along.. Phew.. I knew it!
<tin foil>
What on earth forms the basis of your belief that Democracy itself really exists in America or any other country? Any political science student knows that the best approach to maintaining power in the guise of a Democracy is to fabricate a few basic options and tell people they are Absolutely Free to choose one from the other. As long as people feel they are Free they will believe they are free. Actual freedom and its political derivate 'democracy', need not exist at all however. Ideally of course you reduce democracy to just two parties with each party closely resembling the other excepting a few inconsequential or irresolveable matters - a two party system under one rule. Cheap to administer with low risk of critical thought.
Given the macro-economic fact that around 4% of the world's population is in control of all the worlds primary resources, do you really believe that western countries - as a geo-strategic construct for investment - can afford to take the risk of citizen directed political and economic development? Do you have evidence that where you are born gives you any influence over the economic interests of those that preside over that place? If the citizen is equivocal to a worker in this configuration, in that they generate revenue by means of taxes and stimulate the economy through consumption, why on earth would this geo-political company known as the state allow for employee opinion to have any weight within the broader ambitions of the company proper?
Countries are essentially run as companies, with shareholders investing in stock the company generates when in competition with others. To be a citizen is to be a revenue generator, in the form of tax and by sheer consumptive turn-over. The last thing one of these 'countries' can afford to do is to let the worker-citizens come between them and the investment interests of their trans-national shareholders. Democracy purely exists as a necessary fiction in the interests of maldistributing resources. It's 2007 and we're on a big sphere in a vacumm breeding like rabbits.
</tin foil>
The new release works great on my Asus M3N laptop; this is a rare case and appears to be fixable. The fix is mentioned on the bottom of that bugreport:
Bug 84603 is the same problem and has a workaround. The new ata-piix driver doesn't play nicely with HAL, so use the old piix driver instead.
To hazard a guess you'd modprobe -r ata-piix and modprobe piix. To make this fix 'permanent' you'd add piix to your modules list and blacklist ata-piix. Don't take my word for it though, discuss it in the forums or IRC.
So true. Frankly I would be quite anxious use OS X as my primary OS for this reason alone.
In the context of Linux distributions if it's packaged it is the distributions problem: without smoking incense here, the ecology of the whole distribution is considered to be at risk if there is a security vulnerability in one of the packages in the distribution. You can then rest assured that if you download software beyond what's offered in the already comprehensive repositories, security audited with each update in the software lifecycle, it's at your own risk.
That's the kind of separation of responsibility I like and it's a relief, especially in light of news like this. News so late for all those users.. Ouch.
When will gadget developers realise that it's completely stupid to put lots of tiny little holes around buttons?
Speakers on gadgets are all very well but like so many laptops (the widescreen Apple and some Fijitsu notebooks esp) they get full of dust and gunk if the holes are facing up or around the keypad. Get it together, sheesh. Your device doesn't exist on the drawing board, the idea is that it's actually used by (grubby) humans.
Increasingly it appears that OS X isn't considered enough of a threat to strategically ignore. If the leaked European antitrust memos are any indication we've moved from a "there aren't the numbers to justify supporting Linux" to "supporting Linux will undermine our grip on the market".
Anyway, the best outcome here is that users simply learn to tell the difference between open and closed standards, and turf formats that are closed. Formats become 'standard' (in the market sense) when they become popular. Closed standards don't happen to us, we happen to them (if you get my drift).
Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day?
You protect your idea by implementing it. If someone else makes a better implementation then good on them. Good ideas are everywhere. If your idea is that good, you should take responsibility for it, not sit on it. Unimplemented ideas are good for nothing.
We already live in a world where people can sit on ideas that if implemented could, I don't know, save someone's life (pharamceutical patents) and clean bad water for little cost (industrial patents). The cost to human life caused by monopolies of these kinds in both India and Africa is enormous. Why should we allow for such monopolies over ideas for better software? We should be encouraging competition across implementation, not legal departments.
Slashdot Mirror
By confessing to something really horrible you aquire a curious kind of trust in people: if he says that he didn't kill Nina then who would doubt him now that he so flippantly admitted to the killing of 8 others?
This of course can be a strategy in itself, it's a card he's earnt by confessing and can play against Reiser, someone he clearly wants to see lose everything (re 2004 case for attempted seizure of Reiser's business, Namesys Inc.).
Obama himself even underscores this: Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses. They simply have legal clauses that encourage +/or allow sharing. Sometimes I wish the term Copyleft was scrapped. It does more damage than good.
My little iBook has been singing along for over a year with _no problems_. This is clearly just another attempt at spreadi ww W()(())()*** 111||||ww
I've performed with Pure Data on tour and it stood up well on my Debian laptop. At the time I was either using a gamepad or midi-slider interface to drive the instruments I made with this tool, some of which were multichannel. A friend and I have had several hundred people play with our audiovisual instrument Fijuu2 day in day out for a week. This setup runs on Ubuntu and uses PD as a sound server. Several other friends perform with Supercollideron their Linux laptops .
Where sequencing is concerned I've heard some enjoy Hydrogen. For a DAW on Linux it's hard to go past Ardour, though that's hardly an instrument.
Psst: it's not a race.
Short of neutering them, you can do little other than give them contraception, a little privacy (difficult) and train them in emotionally and socially managing the consequences of swinging widely and/or irresponsibly - it would be of primary importance to avoid the onset of sexual jealousy. This will call for a new kind of training, that they are also fit of mind and heart.
Suppressing the primary biological drive of crew will surely only make them falter in flight and/or grow mad.
The BSD's are a fine family of OS's. This is widely understood now. There's no need to resort to baseless exaggeration to superficially elevate BSD's position in the mind of the reader, who will probably read your comment, in turn, as "the BSD's are so threatened by Linux that I will resort to back-handed absurdities".
You're above comment is contrary to the quiet confidence I'd expect any BSD user to have..
Best you climb back under the bridge I think.. You're safer there, and so are we.
This is a completely meaningless article. It's jaded with itself first of all.
It doesn't really matter what you think of 'open source'. Whether you snigger with hatred, howl in defense or yawn at the recurring fads that surround it: it's perhaps the most singularly influential concept, terror, saviour and slayer facing the conventions of so-called information technology - and even human culture - today.
Pass it on.
I had a Dell Inspiron i8k. While it was a beast to lug around, I loved the thing. I took it around the world 3 times - my back has less fond memories - but never have I sat at a laptop since with such a reassuring feeling of robust design, right up there with the Apple G3 but with a better keyboard. I dropped it several times, tipped fortified wine all over it, used it in clubs and bars on a world tour and suffered upon it all manner of other sins to the soul of electric things.. yet never did it yield. There was once a problem with a screen artifact but Dell service was next day and on-site. I was very impressed by this.
Admittedly however, the laptop looked fairly hideous.
Dell has (supposedly) the best record for building systems that do the least damage to the environment and really ought to push this angle in the marketplace. That, coupled with a case that doesn't try to look like an unmanned autonomous aircraft - and offering Linux preinstalled (Ubuntu ideally) - would do well to the ends of lifting Mr. Dell out of stagnancy.
Let's see developing countries make their mark in in the technology sector with their new-found engineered reliance on an American monopolistic coroporation.
Let's see them try to think outside of the Microsoft box and extend the tools that are given to them.
Let's see them try to turn all the poor paradigms that a Windows desktop impresses on young minds and transform it into something that's meaningful for the way they might experience the world.
Let's see them create new, local and autonomous markets with Microsoft products.
Let's see them run MSVC on those machines, let alone satisfy their inquisitive minds as to how the operating system actually works.
Microsoft creates a sickness and presents itself as the only cure. By putting Windows junk on the OLPC you're only helping to create a new outsourcing market for fat western corporations at the expense of their own local labour markets. Wait for the the I.T sweatshops to come marching to a job-board near you.
Nice one Nick. What a failure you're allowing this project to become. Microsoft will eiether engulf it and capitalise on it or destroy it entirely. Here we were thinking you were a leader.
The reviews I've read on Ubuntu that are the most insightful are written by those with very little prior knowledge of either environment: as such they reveal their expectations about those products, expectations that reflect more of the 'average user's' needs than that of the expert.
I've been a daily Linux desktop user for 8 or so years, but only now am I seeing reviews by people that start with "I really like how in Ubuntu I don't have to websites to download and install software" and howtos that begin with "So you've just installed Ubuntu and want to change your theme?".
These are very good signs. People are actually trying out this stuff and getting there on their own. The software is working. Our ideas are good.
The issue is also not about government efforts to fund research for cures using tax payer's money. Of course this happens and of course it is good. The issue at hand surrounds the role patents play in the strategic interests of pharmaceutical corporations, many of which are multi-nationals, to the ends that patents are actively used to restrict the fabrication and consequent distribution of cures known to save lives and/or make existing lives more bearable in the interests of protecting an existing market. It is a question of business ethics. Should we allow legal constructs like patents to support a monopoly over a known cure? Of course it is sometimes more profitable to keep people half as sick - a lifetime of relief prescriptions - than it is to cure them cheaply, but should we allow this?
As you seem reluctant to actually read real analysis on the matter (even by the W.T.O itself and research parters of your own organisation), I'll give you a case example.
You are undoubtedly familiar with the recent panic surrounding bird flu, an avian virus transferrable to humans and considered quite deadly. Roche developed an anti-virus pill called Tamiflu, known to be very effective against this H5N1 virus but will not allow anyone else to manufacture the pill on the basis that it breaches their patent.
Says the Emory University Professor: How about Roche and AIDS? From here: How much is a sickness worth?
The NIH has done alot of research and publishes much of it in the interest of common good. The NIH (and related organisations in other countries) are not at all the problem however.
Bear in mind also that a cure can be published in detail while also remaining patented: don't get patentability mixed up with copyright.
As a medical researcher, you mind find it interesting - perhaps disturbing - to read the following:
Stagnation in the Drug Development Process: Are Patents the Problem?
TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents: fact sheet
Patents, Pharmaceuticals and the Third World
There is much more out there on this problem. I suggest you look around.
Your joke points to a sad reality however, that it's only through patenting cures (ie having a monopoly over a cure) can pharmaceutical companies (free enterprises) get the investment capital to develop medicines. Cures are IP, traded and guarded.
Moreso, the last thing any pharmaceutical monopoly can afford is for people to get better very easily. For this reason cures are highly guarded discoveries: there are many cures around we don't have access to, and perhaps never will, either because they threaten an existing sickness market or because the IP pushes the price up beyond our reach. Just because we hear about a cure doesn't mean we'll ever see that cure in the wild. Expand this grim fact 100 fold in places like Africa or India where the cost of IP literally comes between them and surviving an otherwise perfectly cureable disease (if only production and distribution were the only cost).
In many respects sickness itself is a managed resource and pharaceutical patents - as a monopoly of a cure - are an active ingredient in this logic.
What a relief. The option to be voluntarily surveilled proves they weren't already doing it. Those silly tinfoils hats were bent all along.. Phew.. I knew it!
Such an easy swipe you believer you. Keep it up..
<tin foil> What on earth forms the basis of your belief that Democracy itself really exists in America or any other country? Any political science student knows that the best approach to maintaining power in the guise of a Democracy is to fabricate a few basic options and tell people they are Absolutely Free to choose one from the other. As long as people feel they are Free they will believe they are free. Actual freedom and its political derivate 'democracy', need not exist at all however. Ideally of course you reduce democracy to just two parties with each party closely resembling the other excepting a few inconsequential or irresolveable matters - a two party system under one rule. Cheap to administer with low risk of critical thought.
Given the macro-economic fact that around 4% of the world's population is in control of all the worlds primary resources, do you really believe that western countries - as a geo-strategic construct for investment - can afford to take the risk of citizen directed political and economic development? Do you have evidence that where you are born gives you any influence over the economic interests of those that preside over that place? If the citizen is equivocal to a worker in this configuration, in that they generate revenue by means of taxes and stimulate the economy through consumption, why on earth would this geo-political company known as the state allow for employee opinion to have any weight within the broader ambitions of the company proper?
Countries are essentially run as companies, with shareholders investing in stock the company generates when in competition with others. To be a citizen is to be a revenue generator, in the form of tax and by sheer consumptive turn-over. The last thing one of these 'countries' can afford to do is to let the worker-citizens come between them and the investment interests of their trans-national shareholders. Democracy purely exists as a necessary fiction in the interests of maldistributing resources. It's 2007 and we're on a big sphere in a vacumm breeding like rabbits. </tin foil>
HTH
So true. Frankly I would be quite anxious use OS X as my primary OS for this reason alone.
In the context of Linux distributions if it's packaged it is the distributions problem: without smoking incense here, the ecology of the whole distribution is considered to be at risk if there is a security vulnerability in one of the packages in the distribution. You can then rest assured that if you download software beyond what's offered in the already comprehensive repositories, security audited with each update in the software lifecycle, it's at your own risk.
That's the kind of separation of responsibility I like and it's a relief, especially in light of news like this. News so late for all those users.. Ouch.
When will gadget developers realise that it's completely stupid to put lots of tiny little holes around buttons?
Speakers on gadgets are all very well but like so many laptops (the widescreen Apple and some Fijitsu notebooks esp) they get full of dust and gunk if the holes are facing up or around the keypad. Get it together, sheesh. Your device doesn't exist on the drawing board, the idea is that it's actually used by (grubby) humans.
Increasingly it appears that OS X isn't considered enough of a threat to strategically ignore. If the leaked European antitrust memos are any indication we've moved from a "there aren't the numbers to justify supporting Linux" to "supporting Linux will undermine our grip on the market".
Anyway, the best outcome here is that users simply learn to tell the difference between open and closed standards, and turf formats that are closed. Formats become 'standard' (in the market sense) when they become popular. Closed standards don't happen to us, we happen to them (if you get my drift).
We already live in a world where people can sit on ideas that if implemented could, I don't know, save someone's life (pharamceutical patents) and clean bad water for little cost (industrial patents). The cost to human life caused by monopolies of these kinds in both India and Africa is enormous. Why should we allow for such monopolies over ideas for better software? We should be encouraging competition across implementation, not legal departments.