In any corporation (even so-called 'employee owned' corporations) 90% or more of the people associated with it have no say in what is done, especially in legal matters. The execs, the corporate counsel, and the legal department call the shots.
Remember, the rank and file engineers at companies like M$, Real, Apple, et. al. are for the most part just geeks like me and you...
The laws of this country make behavior that seems wrong, unfair, or bullyish almost mandatory. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights that go undefended are subsequently weakened. In addition, as we all know here at SlashDot, patents are granted with almost no thought, leaving it up to the courts to figure out which are valid and which are ludicrous. Which of course is biased towards big companies with lots of cash that can afford to pay lawyers to defend them. (oh, and predators whose main business is the licensing of intellectual property; i.e. patent everything in sight and then try to extort money out of people)
The laws are set up so that litigation is maximized (hmmm, what profession do almost all lawmakers come from?)
Look, everyone seems to be arguing about what the user sees. With user configurable themes, i think this is less important.
The real problem is that there are too many APIs: QT+KDE, GTK+Gnome, Motif, Tcl/Tk, etc. etc.
If i'm a software developer and i want to port my windows or mac product over to linux which one do i choose? Which one is the most supported and has a future? Which one is the most widely used? RedHat defaults to Gnome, Caldera and Corel default to KDE.
And no matter which one i choose i'm guaranteed to get flamed on SlashDot by partisans of the other. Great, just what i need: bad publicity. So screw the whole thing, Linux is for servers anyways, right? Or if i do decide to forge ahead i'll follow Mozilla's lead and invent my own. Ick.
IMHO the KDE vs. Gnome wars have damaged the adoption of Linux on the desktop more than anything else. I don't know how to solve the problem, but standardizing on one or the other is a critical step in attracting more widespread commercial software support.
MS: Seems to me to be the most friendly option to the free software community.. their streaming format doesn't appear to be too hard to reverse engineer (assuming it's not documented anywhere - I haven't checked that out)
try it. you'll be surprised.
ASF is documented, but critical details are left out of the documentation. MS is pulling all sorts of shenanigans to make sure no-one implements ASF compatibility (for instance, the documentation available is for ASF version 2, but media player uses version 1 of ASF)
As for codecs - most of the streams appear to use MPEG4
MS has a codec which they call MPEG 4 which is compatible with the current draft standard of the MPEG 4 video stream, but MPEG 4 hasn't been finalized yet. These are not MPEG 4 files and MS is just confusing everybody by implying that they are.
Basically from a technical standpoint you can say anything you want about MS, but ethically they are up to the same old tricks in the streaming media area that they are famous for with OSes and office suites: FUD, embrace and extend, twisting arms with backroom deals, etc.
It seems everytime a graphical interface or "program-to-make-linux-easier" comes out, it detracts from the "power" or the stability of linux. I've seen many graphical configuration tools and they all have some kind of tradeoff.
for my own.02, i'd like to see the config files stay. but i wish they would all migrated to xml. just think, if every linux config file were xml, and there were a generic xml editing tool (i'm thinking something along the lines of regedit) we could have three levels of access to tweaking your config: raw text for those comfortable with that, a regedit-like gui editor, and the "pretty" gui setup tools.
i for one am comfortable with the idea of editing the raw text, i'm just sick and tired of learning a new syntax for every different config file. x config files, kernel module files, the list goes on. simple key-value files, with descriptive key names, would make life so much simpler.
i get the impression that there are 2 kinds of geeks: those that divide the rest of the population into 2 categories and those that...
no, wait...
what i was trying to say is that it seems to me that there are 2 kinds of geeks: those that have a sense of humor and those that don't.
for those of you in the latter category that need to be told this, geek humor is a pretty specific sub-genre of entertainment. monty python, red dawrf, weird al, and yes mel brookes movies. so on that basis this is news for nerds (with a sense of humor).
if you are one of the geeks sans-humor then move along, theres nothing to see here.
I'm so sick of this "if its not free its evil" b.s.
A programmer who, by the sweat of his or her brow, produces a piece of software, owns that fruits of that labor. It belongs to them. End of story.
If, he or she, out of pure nobleness of heart, decides to share the work with the rest of the world by releasing the source under one of the free licenses, we should applaud loudly.
But if a programmer chooses to release it under a non-free license, we should support their right to do so. That, to me, is what freedom is all about. The ability to decide for yourself how your work is disemminated to the rest of the world.
Anyone who claims that open source is free like speech should recognize the parallels to speech here. If you are a supporter of free speech you have to support an environment where people feel safe to express ideas and opinions that not everyone else agrees with. If you start denigrating some forms of expression, then the environment as a whole is no longer free.
Stop this "moral imperative" nonsense. Its noones moral imperative to try to dictate licensing conditions for someone elses work.
I've been around the Internet a long time, and I know that your "good old days" of USENET never existed.
For example: up until about '92 or so, rabid anti-commercial zealots held reign over USENET. If you posted anything from a.com address, or heaven forbid mentioned a commercial product you were hounded out of the ng for 'mis-using' the Net (which was technically supposed to only be used for research and academic purposes -- this was prior to ARPA basically handing off the Net to the public domain).
USENET was never an anarchy. And it was the only mass publishing mechanism on the Net until Gopher and later the Web came about.
The AOL 1.x software was based on AppleLink, the BBS that Apple operated as a developer resource for 3rd party Mac developers (headers, devtools, developer tech support, preleases of MacOS). Its now long defunct, but longtime Mac developers will wince at the memory of AppleLink.
I'm gonna have to disagree that the ARPANet and Internet were the same thing. One may be a descendent of the other, but thats as far as I would take it.
And none of this supports the idea of placing the 'capital of the Internet' in Virginia.
well, in all fairness the G5 would not be the first 64bit PPC. That distinction goes to the PPC620, released in '94. If you expand the PPC family to include the POWER chipsets used in RS/6000s, then you can also include the POWER3 as a 64bit PPC...
since I'm a nice guy I'll even look up a link for ya:
The fact of the matter is you wouldn't be able to afford to not recycle. Everything you have on the moon you either transported up from Earth (expensive, fuel) or you mined+manufactured on the moon (also expensive, time consuming, some things just not possible due to lack of resources).
So any self-sustaining (i.e. not just an Apollo mission) moon-base will by necessity be very frugal with its 'trash'.
The reality is that there is so much polution, at-capacity landfills, etc. in the U.S. because we are too damn rich for our own goods. We've lost all sense of the value of things. You've heard the term 'disposable culture', well its really true. It doesn't have to be this way of course - we could be that much richer by recycling, and not wasting stuff (one of these days you should weigh all your grocery bags and then unpack all the food and weigh the packaging, wrapping, etc. and figure out what the percentage of waste to food is).
One of these centuries we (humanity) are really going to regret wasting all those hydrocarbons on fueling Suburban Utility Vehicles (which lets face it are nothing more than fancied up minivans).
Picture it: A far-off shot of the moon base, cuts to a close up of one of the satellite dishes. "Drink Coke", emblazoned vividly on the dish, competes with the "Reebok" emblem on the side of the lunar rover sitting next to it.
WOO!!
Sigh...
So the best excuse we can come up with for space exploration in this day and age is brand marketing?
According to the "diagram" on their "technology" page (both look more like marketing material) the connection between the tower and the central office is "8 Megs" and each customer gets a "1.5 Megs" connection. So what, ~6 customers and the pipe is swamped? Or am I missing something?
Umm, what other kind of microwave is there?
on
Microwave T1 Service
·
· Score: 1
Dont get me wrong, having a graphical debugger is nice. But when they say "IDE" I think of more than just a debugger. I also think project manager and editor, at the very least.
I haven't downloaded, not looking forward to trying to get java running on my machine. CodeCrusader is working fine for me for now.
Slashdot Mirror
In any corporation (even so-called 'employee owned' corporations) 90% or more of the people associated with it have no say in what is done, especially in legal matters. The execs, the corporate counsel, and the legal department call the shots.
Remember, the rank and file engineers at companies like M$, Real, Apple, et. al. are for the most part just geeks like me and you...
The laws of this country make behavior that seems wrong, unfair, or bullyish almost mandatory. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights that go undefended are subsequently weakened. In addition, as we all know here at SlashDot, patents are granted with almost no thought, leaving it up to the courts to figure out which are valid and which are ludicrous. Which of course is biased towards big companies with lots of cash that can afford to pay lawyers to defend them. (oh, and predators whose main business is the licensing of intellectual property; i.e. patent everything in sight and then try to extort money out of people)
The laws are set up so that litigation is maximized (hmmm, what profession do almost all lawmakers come from?)
Look, everyone seems to be arguing about what the user sees. With user configurable themes, i think this is less important.
The real problem is that there are too many APIs: QT+KDE, GTK+Gnome, Motif, Tcl/Tk, etc. etc.
If i'm a software developer and i want to port my windows or mac product over to linux which one do i choose? Which one is the most supported and has a future? Which one is the most widely used? RedHat defaults to Gnome, Caldera and Corel default to KDE.
And no matter which one i choose i'm guaranteed to get flamed on SlashDot by partisans of the other. Great, just what i need: bad publicity. So screw the whole thing, Linux is for servers anyways, right? Or if i do decide to forge ahead i'll follow Mozilla's lead and invent my own. Ick.
IMHO the KDE vs. Gnome wars have damaged the adoption of Linux on the desktop more than anything else. I don't know how to solve the problem, but standardizing on one or the other is a critical step in attracting more widespread commercial software support.
MS: Seems to me to be the most friendly option to the free software community.. their streaming format doesn't appear to be too hard to reverse engineer (assuming it's not documented anywhere - I haven't checked that out)
try it. you'll be surprised.
ASF is documented, but critical details are left out of the documentation. MS is pulling all sorts of shenanigans to make sure no-one implements ASF compatibility (for instance, the documentation available is for ASF version 2, but media player uses version 1 of ASF)
As for codecs - most of the streams appear to use MPEG4
MS has a codec which they call MPEG 4 which is compatible with the current draft standard of the MPEG 4 video stream, but MPEG 4 hasn't been finalized yet. These are not MPEG 4 files and MS is just confusing everybody by implying that they are.
Basically from a technical standpoint you can say anything you want about MS, but ethically they are up to the same old tricks in the streaming media area that they are famous for with OSes and office suites: FUD, embrace and extend, twisting arms with backroom deals, etc.
It seems everytime a graphical interface or "program-to-make-linux-easier" comes out, it detracts from the "power" or the stability of linux. I've seen many graphical configuration tools and they all have some kind of tradeoff.
.02, i'd like to see the config files stay. but i wish they would all migrated to xml. just think, if every linux config file were xml, and there were a generic xml editing tool (i'm thinking something along the lines of regedit) we could have three levels of access to tweaking your config: raw text for those comfortable with that, a regedit-like gui editor, and the "pretty" gui setup tools.
.02
for my own
i for one am comfortable with the idea of editing the raw text, i'm just sick and tired of learning a new syntax for every different config file. x config files, kernel module files, the list goes on. simple key-value files, with descriptive key names, would make life so much simpler.
as i said, just my
i get the impression that there are 2 kinds of geeks: those that divide the rest of the population into 2 categories and those that...
no, wait...
what i was trying to say is that it seems to me that there are 2 kinds of geeks: those that have a sense of humor and those that don't.
for those of you in the latter category that need to be told this, geek humor is a pretty specific sub-genre of entertainment. monty python, red dawrf, weird al, and yes mel brookes movies. so on that basis this is news for nerds (with a sense of humor).
if you are one of the geeks sans-humor then move along, theres nothing to see here.
I'm so sick of this "if its not free its evil" b.s.
A programmer who, by the sweat of his or her brow, produces a piece of software, owns that fruits of that labor. It belongs to them. End of story.
If, he or she, out of pure nobleness of heart, decides to share the work with the rest of the world by releasing the source under one of the free licenses, we should applaud loudly.
But if a programmer chooses to release it under a non-free license, we should support their right to do so. That, to me, is what freedom is all about. The ability to decide for yourself how your work is disemminated to the rest of the world.
Anyone who claims that open source is free like speech should recognize the parallels to speech here. If you are a supporter of free speech you have to support an environment where people feel safe to express ideas and opinions that not everyone else agrees with. If you start denigrating some forms of expression, then the environment as a whole is no longer free.
Stop this "moral imperative" nonsense. Its noones moral imperative to try to dictate licensing conditions for someone elses work.
(sorry for the rant)
FireWire is much better than SCSI or SCSI2 for storage devices (UW SCSI2 may be faster but its a lot more expensive e.g. $80 cables!)
fast, plug -n- play, hot pluggable, daisy chainable, the FireWire bus can provide power for some devices, what more could you ask for?
And 800 Mb/s FireWire standard is just around the corner.
Its time to dump SCSI. Its served well for 15 years now. Lets move on to something better...
(my $.02)
And if the software you're installing isn't an app? (i.e. a library, etc.)
Shared things, by definition, have to be discoverable by other software on the system...
I don't know to much about Mac's, but if the older version will run Linux
they do...
I've been around the Internet a long time, and I know that your "good old days" of USENET never existed.
.com address, or heaven forbid mentioned a commercial product you were hounded out of the ng for 'mis-using' the Net (which was technically supposed to only be used for research and academic purposes -- this was prior to ARPA basically handing off the Net to the public domain).
For example: up until about '92 or so, rabid anti-commercial zealots held reign over USENET. If you posted anything from a
USENET was never an anarchy. And it was the only mass publishing mechanism on the Net until Gopher and later the Web came about.
The AOL 1.x software was based on AppleLink, the BBS that Apple operated as a developer resource for 3rd party Mac developers (headers, devtools, developer tech support, preleases of MacOS). Its now long defunct, but longtime Mac developers will wince at the memory of AppleLink.
k
http://hypermall.com/History/ah22.html#AppleLin
I'm gonna have to disagree that the ARPANet and Internet were the same thing. One may be a descendent of the other, but thats as far as I would take it.
And none of this supports the idea of placing the 'capital of the Internet' in Virginia.
Huh?
i ver/docs/dp090999.htm
I thought the first TCP/IP transmission happened between UCLA and Stanford, thus defining the 'birth' of the Internet:
http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/columns/modemdr
That firmly places the 'birthplace' of the Internet in California...
The 450MHz and 500MHz Sawtooth based G4s have an internal FireWire connector (in addition to the 2 external ones)
you obviously didn't read the f*cking story because it talked about the effectiveness of bear repellent.
Nothing irritates me more than people who post on Slashdot without ever reading the fucking material first.
sheesh. sorry for that little rant.
well, in all fairness the G5 would not be the first 64bit PPC. That distinction goes to the PPC620, released in '94. If you expand the PPC family to include the POWER chipsets used in RS/6000s, then you can also include the POWER3 as a 64bit PPC...
since I'm a nice guy I'll even look up a link for ya:
www.chips.ibm.com/news/1994/94101810.html
The fact of the matter is you wouldn't be able to afford to not recycle. Everything you have on the moon you either transported up from Earth (expensive, fuel) or you mined+manufactured on the moon (also expensive, time consuming, some things just not possible due to lack of resources).
So any self-sustaining (i.e. not just an Apollo mission) moon-base will by necessity be very frugal with its 'trash'.
The reality is that there is so much polution, at-capacity landfills, etc. in the U.S. because we are too damn rich for our own goods. We've lost all sense of the value of things. You've heard the term 'disposable culture', well its really true. It doesn't have to be this way of course - we could be that much richer by recycling, and not wasting stuff (one of these days you should weigh all your grocery bags and then unpack all the food and weigh the packaging, wrapping, etc. and figure out what the percentage of waste to food is).
One of these centuries we (humanity) are really going to regret wasting all those hydrocarbons on fueling Suburban Utility Vehicles (which lets face it are nothing more than fancied up minivans).
Picture it: A far-off shot of the moon base, cuts to a close up of one of the satellite dishes. "Drink Coke", emblazoned vividly on the dish, competes with the "Reebok" emblem on the side of the lunar rover sitting next to it.
WOO!!
Sigh...
So the best excuse we can come up with for space exploration in this day and age is brand marketing?
> A big rock with no usable atmosphere seems pretty :)
> useless for anything except science and perhaps
> mining industry. Mars, on the other hand...
...is not a big (cold, dry) rock with no usable atmosphere? It isn't several times the distance?
According to the "diagram" on their "technology" page (both look more like marketing material) the connection between the tower and the central office is "8 Megs" and each customer gets a "1.5 Megs" connection. So what, ~6 customers and the pipe is swamped? Or am I missing something?
(see subject)
Dont get me wrong, having a graphical debugger is nice. But when they say "IDE" I think of more than just a debugger. I also think project manager and editor, at the very least.
I haven't downloaded, not looking forward to trying to get java running on my machine. CodeCrusader is working fine for me for now.