Excuse me, I'm interested in writing a science textbook about you, tentatively entitled, "Of Three-headed Space Monsters and Anal Probes." I understand certain states are considering legislation that will protect science teachers' freedom to teach the science presented in my book, once I make it up.
Would you be interested in sitting down for an interview at some point?
I think that I should receive public funding for research. I will do scientificky stuff, and, you know, try to pick holes in existing theories in a variety of ways.
Could please answer the question? You're suggesting that we spend public money on something, but you haven't given the slightest indication of what that might be. I'm a very liberal guy, but I would find such spending practices completely unacceptable.
Those bandwidth hogs sound like a really difficult problem. How could we deal with them?
1. Keep track of how much bandwidth each user uses (this is, of course, trivially simple compared to the packet examination required for shaping, and no doubt they do it already) and, at the end of the month, charge them a quantity of money proportional to the bandwidth they consumed.
2. Slow all peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl and hope for the best. When the best fails to materialize, abuse your last-mile monopoly to impose the same ridiculous policy on your competitors.
Exactly. All the Bankruptcy filing has achieved is delaying the trial by seven months. Absolutely nothing has been resolved while SCO has been in Chapter 11. They've just been able to burn through more of Novell's money.
I don't know how, but I hope this can be used against SCO when judgement day comes. Any attempts to use accounting trickery to argue that Novell's money is gone should be rejected immediately. After all these brazen maneuvers to delay the Novell case, not a single penny left at SCO should be safe. And if that's not enough, then those who have been enriched by this fraud (including the lawyers) should be made to pay.
Oh, I forgot to say that these changes were found between drafts of Of Pandas and People, the very "Intelligent Design" textbook that students were referred to by the statement that Dover science teachers were forced to read.
Should a teacher be able to provide a sound argument against evolution within the rigid confines of science it should not only be acceptable it should be encouraged.
Such a teacher should be encouraged to publish his or her findings in a reputable scientific journal. Science has mechanisms for revealing and debating new findings, for incorporating them into existing theories and developing new ones.
Those mechanisms do not include indoctrinating public school students with pseudo-science, while their parents look on ignorantly.
Your link describes the "God gene" as a hypothesis, not a theory.
Advice to anyone who ever finds themselves in a debate with a creationist: start by asking them to explain what a scientific theory is. Don't go any further until you can actually make them understand this fundamental concept. My prediction is they'll never get it (or at least won't acknowledge it if they do).
Weren't these specs released in response to criticisms about unspecified aspects of OOXML? It makes reference to legacy behaviors implemented as in various Microsoft (and, in a few cases, non-Microsoft) products, and I suppose these specs were supposed to help since they more or less specify some of that stuff.
But Joel basically tells us not even to bother trying to implement them. They were designed to be fast and to rely on Windows libraries, they're burdened by decades of legacy, and they were never intended to provide interoperability, he says. We should just use Office.
What does that say about OOXML? When you take these lock-in document formats and just translate them to XML, how does that help anyone? As OOXML's opponents have said time and again, it is a "standard" that will be meaningful implemented by exactly one party, Microsoft, and it will do nothing to promote interoperability.
It's a pity Joel didn't address this, but it's not hard to connect the dots.
Didn't I read something around Christmas that Wiis were flying off the shelves with a much lower attachment rate than the 360s or PS3s? If so, then big fscking deal.
Your information is obsolete. Games for Wii have been outselling 360 and PS3 games (both in absolute terms and relative to its larger install base) for at least a couple of months now.
It's no surprise that the 360, which has been on the market for almost twice as long as Wii, has a higher attach rate, but Wii is catching up. PS3, predictably, is in third place. Granted, Nintendo is responsible for the majority of Wii's software sales, but Wii still has more third-party million sellers than PS3 (6 vs. 5).
When third partiy publishers release quality games for Wii, they sell very well. Specifically, which third party publishers do you claim are having difficulties?
Does anyone honestly believe that IBM didn't do the things he is accusing them of? Of course IBM behaved unethically, they had to after all the shinanigans that Microsoft tried to pull first.
Wha?
He accuses IBM of voting against OOXML in ECMA and of lobbying national bodies to vote against it in ISO.
Do I think that IBM did that? Of course.
Would I categorize that as unethical behaviour? Not on your life! I think those are perfectly legitimate actions, and I'm glad IBM took them.
What do you mean? Your "this one", SCO OpenServer, *is* SCO UNIX. They simply changed the name of the product in 1995.
They didn't spin off Tarantella. They sold off their UNIX business (OpenServer and Unixware), changed their name to Tarantella, and focused on that product. They were later bought by Sun. Caldera, a Linux company, company bought the UNIX business, changed its name to The SCO Group, and commenced their destructive litigation strategy.
So, we don't hate the old SCO that made SCO UNIX. We hate the new SCO that bought it.
Note that this history is largely covered in the first sentence of the article you linked to.;-)
Anyhow, I found this, which suggests that Canadians can claim donations to US charities against their US income (assuming they have any). That's good enough for me!
Reading this article made my blood boil. Intel very clearly acted in bad faith, and their actions against OLPC will no doubt result in poor kids being deprived of access to technology. Immediately, my thoughts turned to the business I've given Intel and whether I could ever buy from them again.
But my second, more constructive thought was "what can I do to help OLPC?" and I easily found two great answers.
1. Donate. For just $200, you can give an XO laptop to a child in a developing nation. It immediately makes a difference in the life of one child, and it's an opportunity for the XO to prove itself. Our donations no doubt will drive future sales for OLPC. Donations are entirely tax-deductible (Question: does anyone know they're tax-deductible for Canadians?).
2. Develop. If you're a programmer, you can donate some of your time and work on an XO Activity. There's already a pretty impressive array of available software, but there's lots of room for work, and this is one way that OLPC can really differentiate itself. Think about it: thousands of passionate hackers contributing quality free software, all targeted at this machine. That's something that Intel and Microsoft will never be able to compete with because no one else is ever going to be passionate about Classmate & Windows.
The second article seems pretty stupid. It's about a study that makes two points:
Multi-ink cartridges must be replaced as a unit when a single colour runs outs.
Printers warn you that they're low on ink before they run out of ink.
Okay, the first point is reasonable, if obvious. But the second? Here's how the story is introduced (emphasis mine):
According to the study, users are tossing the cartridges when their printers are telling them they're out of ink, not when they necessarily are out of ink.
But, two paragraphs later, a clarification (again, emphasis mine):
Printers routinely report that they are low on ink even when they aren't, and in some cases there are still hundreds of pages worth of ink left.
Yes, I want my printer to warn me that it's low on ink before it runs dry. That way, I can check if I have a refill and if not, I have some time to go to the store and buy one. Are they really claiming that people throw away ink as soon as the printer reports it's running low?
From the summary, you might think that they actually ran printers until they stopped printing and then measured how much ink was left in the cartridge. But it seems they did no such thing. They simply measured how much warning the printers give you before running out of ink and then tried to confuse people by using "low on ink" and "out of ink" interchangeably.
I find that Flash mostly works most of the time. But I've certainly had many bad experiences where it causes the browser to hang or crash on all platforms, though more often on Linux than Windows. And, for some reason, full-screen mode on Linux is totally broken.
Firefox + Flash is definitely less stable than just Firefox alone.
And then, there's other platforms. Have you ever tried YouTube on a Wii? Why is it so jittery? could it be because it's still stuck on version 7 of Flash player? Thanks, Adobe!
An open, standard video format with built-in browser support is exactly what we need. Plug-ins suck.
I have only looked at the excerpts of the contract included in TFA, but I don't see where people are getting the obvious conclusion that the copyright was not transferred in writing.
And that's the problem. The article utterly mischaracterizes the language in the APA.
If you interpret the language from the contract that says Novell is transferring "all rights and ownership of UNIX... including source code . .., such assets to include without limitation" as including the copyright...
But you can't interpret the language that way because that very sentence is followed by...
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Assets to be so purchased shall not include those assets
(the "Excluded Assets") set forth on Schedule 1.1 (b).
And Schedule 1.1 (b) specifically lists the following...
V. Intellectual Property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and
UnixWare.
B. All Patents
There's no ambiguity. The contract basically says, "I give you everything in set A, excluding those things that are in set B." You're arguing that set A is really big, but that doesn't matter at all. The thing that they want is specifically enumerated in set B, so it's excluded.
Then there's some frantic spinning to try to suggest that because pretty much everything in items I through IV of the Excluded Assets specifically refers to NetWare, obviously "All copyrights" must mean only NetWare copyrights, too. Of course, that's nonsense: the fact that "NetWare" is repeated in every item that refers specifically to NetWare suggests that this item most certainly does not refer to NetWare. Moreover, "the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare" clearly do not refer to NetWare, so why would "All copyrights"? And a final kicker, SCO does not claim (and has never claimed) to have received any patents from the APA, while patents are excluded in precisely the same manner as copyrights.
The arguments presented in the article are bogus: they were already offered to the court, and were resoundingly rejected.
The simple answer would have been that even Firefox's major versions are non-disruptive. Microsoft seemingly can't deliver a new version of IE without changing the way they think the Internet should work.
I work at a large corporation with two standard supported browsers: IE and Firefox. When IE 7 was released, we received an e-mail warning us not to upgrade, as doing so would break critical applications. Similar thing with XP SP2. New releases of Firefox just get pushed out without problem.
Seriously. And that's just in America. They'll need to do it every two weeks to win worldwide.
What you just heard was the sound of Microsoft rather unimpressively blowing its load.
They just released what will probably be the biggest game ever on the console (or is there going to be a Halo 4?), and only managed to squeeze past Wii by 27,000 units (about 5%). And this in the 360's strongest territory.
Worldwide, Wii outsold 360 in September, 1,075,000 to 735,000. The 360 managed to hold a lead over Wii for a mere two weeks and is now trailing again.
The ODF spec is less than one-sixth the size of OOXML, and yet the OASIS group spent more than twice as long as the ECMA group working on it. In other words, ODF received over an order of magnitude more attention from the OASIS group than OOXML from ECMA.
Be real: Microsoft wrote the spec and ECMA rubber-stamped it.
The point is that OOXML was written by Microsoft and ODF was written by a group of independent, competing companies, all with an interest in producing an implementable spec. That's why then ended up producing a better spec.
Sun is not IBM. They are separate businesses with different business interests. The ODF spec represents an intersection of those interests. That is a good thing for the format and its users. Are you really claiming that ODF would be better if it was created by people who wanted it to fail?
Microsoft is a single business. Their interest is in dressing up their format as a standard while locking customers in and competitors out.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, I'm interested in writing a science textbook about you, tentatively entitled, "Of Three-headed Space Monsters and Anal Probes." I understand certain states are considering legislation that will protect science teachers' freedom to teach the science presented in my book, once I make it up.
Would you be interested in sitting down for an interview at some point?
I think that I should receive public funding for research. I will do scientificky stuff, and, you know, try to pick holes in existing theories in a variety of ways.
Could please answer the question? You're suggesting that we spend public money on something, but you haven't given the slightest indication of what that might be. I'm a very liberal guy, but I would find such spending practices completely unacceptable.
Those bandwidth hogs sound like a really difficult problem. How could we deal with them?
1. Keep track of how much bandwidth each user uses (this is, of course, trivially simple compared to the packet examination required for shaping, and no doubt they do it already) and, at the end of the month, charge them a quantity of money proportional to the bandwidth they consumed.
2. Slow all peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl and hope for the best. When the best fails to materialize, abuse your last-mile monopoly to impose the same ridiculous policy on your competitors.
Exactly. All the Bankruptcy filing has achieved is delaying the trial by seven months. Absolutely nothing has been resolved while SCO has been in Chapter 11. They've just been able to burn through more of Novell's money.
I don't know how, but I hope this can be used against SCO when judgement day comes. Any attempts to use accounting trickery to argue that Novell's money is gone should be rejected immediately. After all these brazen maneuvers to delay the Novell case, not a single penny left at SCO should be safe. And if that's not enough, then those who have been enriched by this fraud (including the lawyers) should be made to pay.
Oh, I forgot to say that these changes were found between drafts of Of Pandas and People, the very "Intelligent Design" textbook that students were referred to by the statement that Dover science teachers were forced to read.
To this:
That's right. There even exists an evolutionary link between the creationist and the design proponent: the cdesign propoentsist!
A single court injunction against teaching creationism and ID should do it, no?
Should a teacher be able to provide a sound argument against evolution within the rigid confines of science it should not only be acceptable it should be encouraged.
Such a teacher should be encouraged to publish his or her findings in a reputable scientific journal. Science has mechanisms for revealing and debating new findings, for incorporating them into existing theories and developing new ones.
Those mechanisms do not include indoctrinating public school students with pseudo-science, while their parents look on ignorantly.
Your link describes the "God gene" as a hypothesis, not a theory.
Advice to anyone who ever finds themselves in a debate with a creationist: start by asking them to explain what a scientific theory is. Don't go any further until you can actually make them understand this fundamental concept. My prediction is they'll never get it (or at least won't acknowledge it if they do).
Weren't these specs released in response to criticisms about unspecified aspects of OOXML? It makes reference to legacy behaviors implemented as in various Microsoft (and, in a few cases, non-Microsoft) products, and I suppose these specs were supposed to help since they more or less specify some of that stuff.
But Joel basically tells us not even to bother trying to implement them. They were designed to be fast and to rely on Windows libraries, they're burdened by decades of legacy, and they were never intended to provide interoperability, he says. We should just use Office.
What does that say about OOXML? When you take these lock-in document formats and just translate them to XML, how does that help anyone? As OOXML's opponents have said time and again, it is a "standard" that will be meaningful implemented by exactly one party, Microsoft, and it will do nothing to promote interoperability.
It's a pity Joel didn't address this, but it's not hard to connect the dots.
Didn't I read something around Christmas that Wiis were flying off the shelves with a much lower attachment rate than the 360s or PS3s? If so, then big fscking deal.
No, you imagined that.
Here's what you probably actually read: Wii attach rate soared to 8:1 for December. That's ahead of the 360's 7.76 and PS3's 5.04 during the same period.
Your information is obsolete. Games for Wii have been outselling 360 and PS3 games (both in absolute terms and relative to its larger install base) for at least a couple of months now.
It's no surprise that the 360, which has been on the market for almost twice as long as Wii, has a higher attach rate, but Wii is catching up. PS3, predictably, is in third place. Granted, Nintendo is responsible for the majority of Wii's software sales, but Wii still has more third-party million sellers than PS3 (6 vs. 5).
When third partiy publishers release quality games for Wii, they sell very well. Specifically, which third party publishers do you claim are having difficulties?
Does anyone honestly believe that IBM didn't do the things he is accusing them of? Of course IBM behaved unethically, they had to after all the shinanigans that Microsoft tried to pull first.
Wha?
He accuses IBM of voting against OOXML in ECMA and of lobbying national bodies to vote against it in ISO.
Do I think that IBM did that? Of course.
Would I categorize that as unethical behaviour? Not on your life! I think those are perfectly legitimate actions, and I'm glad IBM took them.
What do you mean? Your "this one", SCO OpenServer, *is* SCO UNIX. They simply changed the name of the product in 1995.
;-)
They didn't spin off Tarantella. They sold off their UNIX business (OpenServer and Unixware), changed their name to Tarantella, and focused on that product. They were later bought by Sun. Caldera, a Linux company, company bought the UNIX business, changed its name to The SCO Group, and commenced their destructive litigation strategy.
So, we don't hate the old SCO that made SCO UNIX. We hate the new SCO that bought it.
Note that this history is largely covered in the first sentence of the article you linked to.
Cute, but I was hoping for a real answer. ;)
Anyhow, I found this, which suggests that Canadians can claim donations to US charities against their US income (assuming they have any). That's good enough for me!
Reading this article made my blood boil. Intel very clearly acted in bad faith, and their actions against OLPC will no doubt result in poor kids being deprived of access to technology. Immediately, my thoughts turned to the business I've given Intel and whether I could ever buy from them again.
But my second, more constructive thought was "what can I do to help OLPC?" and I easily found two great answers.
1. Donate. For just $200, you can give an XO laptop to a child in a developing nation. It immediately makes a difference in the life of one child, and it's an opportunity for the XO to prove itself. Our donations no doubt will drive future sales for OLPC. Donations are entirely tax-deductible (Question: does anyone know they're tax-deductible for Canadians?).
2. Develop. If you're a programmer, you can donate some of your time and work on an XO Activity. There's already a pretty impressive array of available software, but there's lots of room for work, and this is one way that OLPC can really differentiate itself. Think about it: thousands of passionate hackers contributing quality free software, all targeted at this machine. That's something that Intel and Microsoft will never be able to compete with because no one else is ever going to be passionate about Classmate & Windows.
Let's make a difference!
The second article seems pretty stupid. It's about a study that makes two points:
Okay, the first point is reasonable, if obvious. But the second? Here's how the story is introduced (emphasis mine):
But, two paragraphs later, a clarification (again, emphasis mine):
Yes, I want my printer to warn me that it's low on ink before it runs dry. That way, I can check if I have a refill and if not, I have some time to go to the store and buy one. Are they really claiming that people throw away ink as soon as the printer reports it's running low?
From the summary, you might think that they actually ran printers until they stopped printing and then measured how much ink was left in the cartridge. But it seems they did no such thing. They simply measured how much warning the printers give you before running out of ink and then tried to confuse people by using "low on ink" and "out of ink" interchangeably.
I find that Flash mostly works most of the time. But I've certainly had many bad experiences where it causes the browser to hang or crash on all platforms, though more often on Linux than Windows. And, for some reason, full-screen mode on Linux is totally broken.
Firefox + Flash is definitely less stable than just Firefox alone.
And then, there's other platforms. Have you ever tried YouTube on a Wii? Why is it so jittery? could it be because it's still stuck on version 7 of Flash player? Thanks, Adobe!
An open, standard video format with built-in browser support is exactly what we need. Plug-ins suck.
Whoops, I forgot to include a link to the APA, in case you do want to read it for yourself.
I have only looked at the excerpts of the contract included in TFA, but I don't see where people are getting the obvious conclusion that the copyright was not transferred in writing.
And that's the problem. The article utterly mischaracterizes the language in the APA.
If you interpret the language from the contract that says Novell is transferring "all rights and ownership of UNIX ... including source code . . ., such assets to include without limitation" as including the copyright...
But you can't interpret the language that way because that very sentence is followed by...
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Assets to be so purchased shall not include those assets (the "Excluded Assets") set forth on Schedule 1.1 (b).And Schedule 1.1 (b) specifically lists the following...
V. Intellectual Property:A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare.
B. All Patents
There's no ambiguity. The contract basically says, "I give you everything in set A, excluding those things that are in set B." You're arguing that set A is really big, but that doesn't matter at all. The thing that they want is specifically enumerated in set B, so it's excluded.
Then there's some frantic spinning to try to suggest that because pretty much everything in items I through IV of the Excluded Assets specifically refers to NetWare, obviously "All copyrights" must mean only NetWare copyrights, too. Of course, that's nonsense: the fact that "NetWare" is repeated in every item that refers specifically to NetWare suggests that this item most certainly does not refer to NetWare. Moreover, "the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare" clearly do not refer to NetWare, so why would "All copyrights"? And a final kicker, SCO does not claim (and has never claimed) to have received any patents from the APA, while patents are excluded in precisely the same manner as copyrights.
The arguments presented in the article are bogus: they were already offered to the court, and were resoundingly rejected.
The simple answer would have been that even Firefox's major versions are non-disruptive. Microsoft seemingly can't deliver a new version of IE without changing the way they think the Internet should work.
I work at a large corporation with two standard supported browsers: IE and Firefox. When IE 7 was released, we received an e-mail warning us not to upgrade, as doing so would break critical applications. Similar thing with XP SP2. New releases of Firefox just get pushed out without problem.
Seriously. And that's just in America. They'll need to do it every two weeks to win worldwide.
What you just heard was the sound of Microsoft rather unimpressively blowing its load.
They just released what will probably be the biggest game ever on the console (or is there going to be a Halo 4?), and only managed to squeeze past Wii by 27,000 units (about 5%). And this in the 360's strongest territory.
Worldwide, Wii outsold 360 in September, 1,075,000 to 735,000. The 360 managed to hold a lead over Wii for a mere two weeks and is now trailing again.
The ODF spec is less than one-sixth the size of OOXML, and yet the OASIS group spent more than twice as long as the ECMA group working on it. In other words, ODF received over an order of magnitude more attention from the OASIS group than OOXML from ECMA.
Be real: Microsoft wrote the spec and ECMA rubber-stamped it.
The point is that OOXML was written by Microsoft and ODF was written by a group of independent, competing companies, all with an interest in producing an implementable spec. That's why then ended up producing a better spec.
Your comment is nonsensical.
Sun is not IBM. They are separate businesses with different business interests. The ODF spec represents an intersection of those interests. That is a good thing for the format and its users. Are you really claiming that ODF would be better if it was created by people who wanted it to fail?
Microsoft is a single business. Their interest is in dressing up their format as a standard while locking customers in and competitors out.
Ummm, no. The range considered normal is 18.5-25.
11 makes Mary-Kate Olsen look healthy. As in, if you were 5'10", your weight would be 76 lbs.