The difference is that in the US, there's plenty of evidence that it is already being abused. In Netherland it's still only the risk that it may happen.
Well, the article gave a couple good examples of how laws are being abused.
Een dakloze liet Rick van Amersfoort laatst een stapeltje van dertig boetes zien. De oogst van een maand op straat leven: oversteken bij rood licht, in het openbaar een joint roken, hangen op een bankje voor het Amsterdamse Muziektheater. Van Amersfoort werkt bij het bureau Jansen en Janssen, dat geworteld is in de kraakbeweging en politie- en inlichtingendiensten kritisch" volgt. Jij en ik zouden er geen boete voor krijgen, maar deze dakloze is lastig, dus pakt de politie hem zo aan."
"A homeless person showed Rick van Amserfoort his collection of 30 fines. The harvest of one month on the streets: crossing against a red light, smoking a joint in public, loitering on a bench in front of the Amsterdamse Muziektheater. Van Amersfoort works at the bureau Jansen en Janssen, which grew out of the squatting movement, and critically follows the work of the police and the intelligence service. You and I wouldn't receive a fine, but this homeless person is difficult, so the police are always on to him."
and another example:
De legitimatieplicht is volgens Brenninkmeijer een goed voorbeeld. Waarschuwingen dat de politie hem zou kunnen misbruiken, werden weggewuifd. "Nu zie je dat politie betogers vraagt om hun legitimatie. Dan is het een repressiemiddel geworden."
The legitimatieplicht (=law requiring everyone to carry ID in public) is according to Brenninkmeijer a good example. Warnings that the police would misuse this law were waved off. "Now you see that police ask protesters for their ID. It has become a tool of repression."
I agree. It sounds very fishy. It looks like they are counting the combination of XP+coupon as being a Vista sale. I wonder if they also counted it as being XP revenue at the same time? I have a hard time imagining that even 50% of the XP+coupon systems sold before January 30 have been upgraded. Most people are capable or interested in upgrading an OS, and a big chunk of those who are, probably (hopefully!) have common sense to stay with XP.
Actually I can't think of any desktop applications that would really benefit from supporting multithreading to actually warrant the extra effort. Most desktop applications for the average person run perfectly fast as single threaded programs. And the high-end stuff like graphics and 3D rendering have supported SMP for a long long time. You could buy dual processor Pentium Pro machines back in the 90s. I don't see multicore processors fuelling demand for programmers.
So, lets say we have a GPLv2 comercial fork. Is that bad?
I'm pretty sure that FSF's software is distributed under the "GPL v2 or later". Which means that any commercial fork would have to keep using "GPL v2 or later". FSF would then be free to take any changes to the commercial fork, apply them to the FSF version and then release it under the GPL v3.
I mean competition is good right?
Especially when your competition can take your changes and incorporate them into their version, but not the other way around...
This doesn't even goto mention that the GPLv3 doesn't ocme close as it is currently writen to doing this.
Don't worry Eben Moglen has assured us that it will.
The driver also has his hand placed on the steering wheel, suggesting that he is driving and that the traffic is moving. You're right, this couldn't possibly be a Dutch traffic scene.
Some people are so fearful of the ghost of socialism that they can't see that their government has become little more than an an oligarchy controlled by the rich elite.
The fact that you get so much of your news from News Corporation should be a strong hint of just how impartial that news is.
To put the whole topic of "corporate bias in the media" in a nutshell: "Beware of advice from the rich, for they do not seek company."
s/non-democratic countries/countries where piracy is rampant/
That's a bit harsh don't you think? After all China has taken great strides to help reduce the use of illegal software. The Chinese government is even sponsoring development of a Chinese linux distribution, Red Flag Linux. I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't applauding and encouraging these anti-piracy efforts. Think of all of the millions of dollars Microsoft will no longer lose each year to the pirates.;-)
Do those people who wrote CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION over and over again in their lame effort to earn slashdot karma even read the report?
For those who want to check the report, the discussion about interpreting the results starts around page 37 in the first PDF, and covers the correlation vs causation issue. They even say that this is not definiate proof of causation, but correlation here does strongly support the hypothesis.
It appears that these researchers actually _do_ know their statistics, unlike most of the trashy flawed research that comes out of the medical profession (and from psychologists in particular).
No, because for every developer that is being paid there are 10s, 100s even, of other people who are doing FOSS development unpaid in their spare time.
Companies do pay people to work on FOSS, and a lot of the bigger projects have paid people at their "core". But don't be deceived, there are 1000s of people quietly and unpaid contributing to FOSS.
A more interesting question might be how much of the work in a typical project is being directly paid for?
70 to 80% of OpenSource developpers are in fact paid to do so by the company they work for...
People don't mention that for the simple reason that it isn't even remotely true. I wouldn't believe a figure of 20%-30% either.
Money isn't (shouldn't be) the main incentive to write OSS programs & i don't think giving a bonus to those who already have a pay would really make any difference.
It doesn't make sense to use money to motivate people to work on FOSS. People working on FOSS that you might want to sponsor, are already highly motivated. Money shouldn't be used for motivation, but instead as a way of freeing up more development time for a developer who, for example, has a day job because they like to eat. There are plenty of highly motivated FOSS developers who would want to spend more time hacking but simple don't have anymore hours in the day.
Experiences I have had with Java involved watching the GUI freeze when garbage collection happens. I would be happy to hear that GC wait times had indeed gotten this fast
I'll not much of a Java fan, but in all fairness the last time that I saw a Java based GUI "pause" due to garbage collection was at least 3-4 years ago while IDEA in this case. We're using Eclipse now at work and it doesn't stop and pause for garbage collection. It is slow all the time.;-) But I don't think I can blame the VM for that one.
Better garbage collection algorithms in the VM have fixed the pausing problem.
> But the Controller give me brainache, because it ends up responding in complex ways > to multitudes of events, passing control back and forth between the M and the V.
We've had some good discussions here at work about that aspect of the MVC pattern. Reading and thinking about the problem has become pretty clear to me that a separate model (M) makes sense, but splitting the controller and view up does not. The issue being that output (V) and input (C) for a model (M) are tightly integrated with each other these days. The code that provides the view/output for the model also accepts input. e.g. a textfield shows text (V) and also accepts input (C). You don't gain anything by trying to split these two aspects up. (Well, ok, you gain a world of pain and messy illogical code).
What does make sense is implementing M + (VC). Separate the model and put the controller and view together. GUI libraries like Qt4 and Swing IIRC in fact do this, even though they advertise that they are MVC based.
What is the advantage of a dual over a single. Simple. NO MORE FREEZING.
...
I am talking about that effect when you do something mundane but cpu intensive like opening a large slow folder and your entire desktop just crashes to a halt only to resume a few secs later often stopping your music as well. ...
Oh it is probably more complex then that but in practice it means your computer just keeps working even under load.
Don't tell me, you were running some flavour of Windows on those machine? yes?
NT's scheduling and multitasking under load has traditionally been pathetic. Running a heavy process on Windows makes all of the other interactive processes (read: programs with GUI) run like toffee.
Granted the Linux kernel's performance hasn't always been great either. It wasn't until the "desktop/interaction optimised" schedulers were brought in that X11 remained smooth even under load.
Maybe be it is Nero or just Windows 2000, but burning a CD on my GF's computer make it impossible to use for anything else until the CD is ready. I certainly don't get that problem on my machine running K3B.
it's converted into fructose because customers want fructose.
Really? I can't think of anyone who has gone out of their way to get a fructose-sweetened product over one sweetened with another kind of sugar. Of course, when *every* mainstream product uses high-fructose corn syrup, there isn't much in the way of choice.
I'm guessing that the "customers" that the earlier poster is referring to is the food manufacturing industry and not us end consumers down at the supermarket.
I don't think it should come as a surprise that so many mainstream products use high-fructose corn syrup. They have surely discovered by now that using fructose in their products instead of other sugars helps keep people hungry longer and hence sells more product.
Ahem. Hovering is a stupid way to select an item and completely unnecessary. It is much faster to lasoo the item(s) by dragging the mouse.
...until there is no free (and neutral) space on the to start a lasso.
Double-click-to-activate really is a broken and useless concept. KDE uses single click by default and I have never heard anybody complain about that, even ex Windows users.
That is because a lot of distros change the default back to double click, and most double clickers know how to change KDE to use double click. Among KDE developers I would guess that about 50% use single and 50% use double.
Personally for me, single click "breaks" konqueror. I can't use KDE with single click. Being able to select things in a sane way is too engrained in the way I use the computer. And I don't see any benefits to single click. My double clicker works just fine thank you very much.:-)
Just to give some more details about how this works.
Most (all?) bank cards in the Netherlands at least, are smart card with a normal magnetic strip. Smart card in that they contain a chip that can be used for authentication (I believe the chip contains its own private key and can do its own encription. it probably has a certain amount of nonvolatile memory.) The magnetic strip is used in shops for point of sale electronic payment.
Online banking. The small calculator device is simply an interface for talking to the chip on a bank pass. You insert the card and the device asks for your 4 digit pincode. Logging onto the website involves entering your bank card number (this is not a CC number). The site then gives you a 7 or 8 digit number which you then enter into the device. The device signs the number and gives a 9-10 digit number which you then submit to the bankwebsite. Assuming all went well, you've in. Transferring money requires another challenge/response. Transferring a large amount of money (>2000 euro I think) requires signing certain digits from the destination account number. (This guards against a man in middle fiddling with your money transfers, they can't set the destination account number).
All in all I think it is a very good and well thought out system. The devices are all the same, and all bank passes came standard with chips. The website even works well on Firefox and Konqueror.
Incidently, the smart chips can also be used as electronic purses ("chipknip?", think electronic payment, micropayment) that you 'charge' up with money at an ATM and then can use in shops by putting the card in a chip reader and pressing one button to confirm the transaction. Despite the amount of advertising spent by the banks on this, it still hasn't caught on. I've never used it, I've never seen anyone use it though.
Instead of a USB phone, what you can do is get a "USB to RJ11" adaptor. It is actually just a USB based sound card that you can connect a normal telephone handset to. I got one off ebay for about 30 euro (cost+shipping), sent out from Taiwan. These devices haven't reached the computer stores yet. I'm using one with my cordless phone and it works well. (It's connected to a windows box BTW). I've disconnected my landline and use SkypeOut for long distance calls (and my mobile phone).
Sure Skype is a closed source product, but so was my landline. Lesser (and cheaper) of two evils.
> > * you can't directly type in the directory you > > want. > > Sure you can. Just put your cursor in the file > name box and type away. It'll even autocomplete > for you.
You type the directory in at a completely different place on the dialog than where the current dir is displayed, which doesn't make sense... but anyway, I guess you are right.
> > * there is no way of entering a custom "filter > > by filetype" pattern. (eg. *.py) > > Ditto with this. Type *.py in the file name box, > hit enter, and all your Python files will only > show up.
nope, not on vanilla XP. The file dialog in Word and Textpad won't let me do that...:-/
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like it, get into politics :-)
Or move to the anarchists' utopia of Somalia. There's plenty of freedom there for everyone.
--
Simon
--
Simon
Well, the article gave a couple good examples of how laws are being abused.
"A homeless person showed Rick van Amserfoort his collection of 30 fines. The harvest of one month on the streets: crossing against a red light, smoking a joint in public, loitering on a bench in front of the Amsterdamse Muziektheater. Van Amersfoort works at the bureau Jansen en Janssen, which grew out of the squatting movement, and critically follows the work of the police and the intelligence service. You and I wouldn't receive a fine, but this homeless person is difficult, so the police are always on to him."
and another example:
The legitimatieplicht (=law requiring everyone to carry ID in public) is according to Brenninkmeijer a good example. Warnings that the police would misuse this law were waved off. "Now you see that police ask protesters for their ID. It has become a tool of repression."
--
Simon
All of them since the Amiga 1000 in 1985.
And how about memory protection?
Never had it.
--
Simon
I agree. It sounds very fishy. It looks like they are counting the combination of XP+coupon as being a Vista sale. I wonder if they also counted it as being XP revenue at the same time? I have a hard time imagining that even 50% of the XP+coupon systems sold before January 30 have been upgraded. Most people are capable or interested in upgrading an OS, and a big chunk of those who are, probably (hopefully!) have common sense to stay with XP.
--
Simon
Actually I can't think of any desktop applications that would really benefit from supporting multithreading to actually warrant the extra effort. Most desktop applications for the average person run perfectly fast as single threaded programs. And the high-end stuff like graphics and 3D rendering have supported SMP for a long long time. You could buy dual processor Pentium Pro machines back in the 90s. I don't see multicore processors fuelling demand for programmers.
--
Simon
That is basically what I was getting at.
--
Simon
I'm pretty sure that FSF's software is distributed under the "GPL v2 or later". Which means that any commercial fork would have to keep using "GPL v2 or later". FSF would then be free to take any changes to the commercial fork, apply them to the FSF version and then release it under the GPL v3.
I mean competition is good right?
Especially when your competition can take your changes and incorporate them into their version, but not the other way around...
This doesn't even goto mention that the GPLv3 doesn't ocme close as it is currently writen to doing this.
Don't worry Eben Moglen has assured us that it will.
--
Simon
--
Simon
To put the whole topic of "corporate bias in the media" in a nutshell: "Beware of advice from the rich, for they do not seek company."
--
Simon
That's a bit harsh don't you think? After all China has taken great strides to help reduce the use of illegal software. The Chinese government is even sponsoring development of a Chinese linux distribution, Red Flag Linux. I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't applauding and encouraging these anti-piracy efforts. Think of all of the millions of dollars Microsoft will no longer lose each year to the pirates. ;-)
--
Simon
For those who want to check the report, the discussion about interpreting the results starts around page 37 in the first PDF, and covers the correlation vs causation issue. They even say that this is not definiate proof of causation, but correlation here does strongly support the hypothesis.
It appears that these researchers actually _do_ know their statistics, unlike most of the trashy flawed research that comes out of the medical profession (and from psychologists in particular).
--
Simon
No, because for every developer that is being paid there are 10s, 100s even, of other people who are doing FOSS development unpaid in their spare time.
Companies do pay people to work on FOSS, and a lot of the bigger projects have paid people at their "core". But don't be deceived, there are 1000s of people quietly and unpaid contributing to FOSS.
A more interesting question might be how much of the work in a typical project is being directly paid for?
cheers,
--
Simon
People don't mention that for the simple reason that it isn't even remotely true. I wouldn't believe a figure of 20%-30% either.
It doesn't make sense to use money to motivate people to work on FOSS. People working on FOSS that you might want to sponsor, are already highly motivated. Money shouldn't be used for motivation, but instead as a way of freeing up more development time for a developer who, for example, has a day job because they like to eat. There are plenty of highly motivated FOSS developers who would want to spend more time hacking but simple don't have anymore hours in the day.
cheers,
--
Simon
I'll not much of a Java fan, but in all fairness the last time that I saw a Java based GUI "pause" due to garbage collection was at least 3-4 years ago while IDEA in this case. We're using Eclipse now at work and it doesn't stop and pause for garbage collection. It is slow all the time.
Better garbage collection algorithms in the VM have fixed the pausing problem.
--
Simon
It sounds more likely that you have a hardware problem or incompatibility.
--
Simon
> But the Controller give me brainache, because it ends up responding in complex ways
> to multitudes of events, passing control back and forth between the M and the V.
We've had some good discussions here at work about that aspect of the MVC pattern. Reading and thinking about the problem has become pretty clear to me that a separate model (M) makes sense, but splitting the controller and view up does not. The issue being that output (V) and input (C) for a model (M) are tightly integrated with each other these days. The code that provides the view/output for the model also accepts input. e.g. a textfield shows text (V) and also accepts input (C). You don't gain anything by trying to split these two aspects up. (Well, ok, you gain a world of pain and messy illogical code).
What does make sense is implementing M + (VC). Separate the model and put the controller and view together. GUI libraries like Qt4 and Swing IIRC in fact do this, even though they advertise that they are MVC based.
cheers,
--
Simon
I am talking about that effect when you do something mundane but cpu intensive like opening a large slow folder and your entire desktop just crashes to a halt only to resume a few secs later often stopping your music as well.
Oh it is probably more complex then that but in practice it means your computer just keeps working even under load.
Don't tell me, you were running some flavour of Windows on those machine? yes?
NT's scheduling and multitasking under load has traditionally been pathetic. Running a heavy process on Windows makes all of the other interactive processes (read: programs with GUI) run like toffee.
Granted the Linux kernel's performance hasn't always been great either. It wasn't until the "desktop/interaction optimised" schedulers were brought in that X11 remained smooth even under load.
Maybe be it is Nero or just Windows 2000, but burning a CD on my GF's computer make it impossible to use for anything else until the CD is ready. I certainly don't get that problem on my machine running K3B.
--
Simon
In what way doesn't Python support true lexical closures?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_programming_la nguage#Closures
--
Simon
I don't think it should come as a surprise that so many mainstream products use high-fructose corn syrup. They have surely discovered by now that using fructose in their products instead of other sugars helps keep people hungry longer and hence sells more product.
--
Simon
Double-click-to-activate really is a broken and useless concept. KDE uses single click by default and I have never heard anybody complain about that, even ex Windows users.
That is because a lot of distros change the default back to double click, and most double clickers know how to change KDE to use double click. Among KDE developers I would guess that about 50% use single and 50% use double.
Personally for me, single click "breaks" konqueror. I can't use KDE with single click. Being able to select things in a sane way is too engrained in the way I use the computer. And I don't see any benefits to single click. My double clicker works just fine thank you very much. :-)
--
Simon
Just to give some more details about how this works.
Most (all?) bank cards in the Netherlands at least, are smart card with a normal magnetic strip. Smart card in that they contain a chip that can be used for authentication (I believe the chip contains its own private key and can do its own encription. it probably has a certain amount of nonvolatile memory.) The magnetic strip is used in shops for point of sale electronic payment.
Online banking. The small calculator device is simply an interface for talking to the chip on a bank pass. You insert the card and the device asks for your 4 digit pincode. Logging onto the website involves entering your bank card number (this is not a CC number). The site then gives you a 7 or 8 digit number which you then enter into the device. The device signs the number and gives a 9-10 digit number which you then submit to the bankwebsite. Assuming all went well, you've in. Transferring money requires another challenge/response. Transferring a large amount of money (>2000 euro I think) requires signing certain digits from the destination account number. (This guards against a man in middle fiddling with your money transfers, they can't set the destination account number).
All in all I think it is a very good and well thought out system. The devices are all the same, and all bank passes came standard with chips. The website even works well on Firefox and Konqueror.
Incidently, the smart chips can also be used as electronic purses ("chipknip?", think electronic payment, micropayment) that you 'charge' up with money at an ATM and then can use in shops by putting the card in a chip reader and pressing one button to confirm the transaction. Despite the amount of advertising spent by the banks on this, it still hasn't caught on. I've never used it, I've never seen anyone use it though.
cheers,
--
Simon
works a treat.
--
Simon
Instead of a USB phone, what you can do is get a "USB to RJ11" adaptor. It is actually just a USB based sound card that you can connect a normal telephone handset to. I got one off ebay for about 30 euro (cost+shipping), sent out from Taiwan. These devices haven't reached the computer stores yet. I'm using one with my cordless phone and it works well. (It's connected to a windows box BTW). I've disconnected my landline and use SkypeOut for long distance calls (and my mobile phone).
Sure Skype is a closed source product, but so was my landline. Lesser (and cheaper) of two evils.
--
Simon
> > * you can't directly type in the directory you
:-/
> > want.
>
> Sure you can. Just put your cursor in the file
> name box and type away. It'll even autocomplete
> for you.
You type the directory in at a completely different place on the dialog than where the current dir is displayed, which doesn't make sense... but anyway, I guess you are right.
> > * there is no way of entering a custom "filter
> > by filetype" pattern. (eg. *.py)
>
> Ditto with this. Type *.py in the file name box,
> hit enter, and all your Python files will only
> show up.
nope, not on vanilla XP. The file dialog in Word and Textpad won't let me do that...
--
Simon