The point is that there were very good typesetting systems before WYSIWYG were invented. People who use TeX now can tell you about it, but that's far from the only one : classic WordPerfect is another one.
WYSIWYG like in Word sounds good until you have real typesetting needs, such as searching and replacing styles so that you have a consistent look across chapters, printing a single chapter with only its matching bibliography instead of the whole document, etc. Writing a book in Word is an ordeal (I've done it) compared to (La)TeX. It's even worse if your co-authors have different versions of Word or use OpenOffice, say.
With a plaintext source there are no such problems. Maintainting a consistent look is as easy as maintaining a good web site with a CMS instead of hacking HTML.
You are describing single-threaded algorithms, not algorithms in general.
An algorithm is not necessarily a single sequence of steps. An algorithm is an abstract description of a computable task. There are such things as parallel algorithms, which are not necessarily "one-dimensional" as you put it. At any rate, it doesn't mater (read on).
Transputers are nothing but early SMP with a fancy name, with zero SIMD or MIMD capability (I know, because I programmed them back in the day), and occam has nothing on modern parallel languages like (who would have thought?) High-Performance Fortran. In particular early version of occam sucked at floating point.
Furthermore, it is a well-known theorem in computer science that any computable task (in particular a parallel one) can be computed on a Turing Machine. In fact is is the very definition of a computable task. Since Transputers perform computable tasks, they are simply Turing-capable, no more, no less.
Finally, whether the brain is or is not a TM (i.e. performs computable tasks) is still an open question. Evidence on either side of the debate is at the moment cirumstantial.
I think you should in fact read the linked article. Stallman is well aware that you have an implied license to read any book in physical form. His essay is about books in digital form, where in fact your effective license to read is held by a third party : neither the authors/publisher or yourself, but the entity that makes the software and hardware that allows you to read the book you've purchased.
These kinds of books cannot by default be lent, rented or put in a library. We'll have to fight for those rights if we really want them, and the parties that make money out of the new media are going to fight every step of the way.
Actually, if you are an OS/X user, the first 3 paragraph apply to you too. The mix of Carbon/Cocoa/X11/QT application, with or without brush metal, is just as nauseating. Yet people rant on how easy it is to use a Mac.
The last few paragraph also apply to Microsoft Office, and many other pieces of software in the Windows world. Can you name a major, non-bloated application? Even Firefox on Windows is heading down that route.
There are fewer and fewer problems every day with Linux, I'm constantly amazed. What Linux needs is vendor support, preferably in providing open-source drivers and applications, that's all. People are really only annoyed if some piece of hardware they've just bought doesn't work with Linux. Otherwise thanks to the constant re-engineering that takes place inside both Apple and Microsoft, people have been getting used to inconsistent applications.
Remember that being tied to a substandard command-line DOS never prevented PCs from becoming popular.
Given that he won't be able to take his wealth beyond the grave, and that with 5% of his wealth left BG will still be amongst the richest people in the world, I'm not so impressed. BG is trying to buy himself respect and forgiveness for the days when he was happy as Larry snuffing innovative IT companies left, right and center, amassing pointless riches while leveraging his monopoly, which he acquired through luck, the stupidity of others and a little talent.
This is all a little vain. Supposedly the B&MG foundation is doing great work, super, I respect that, but this is not BG's work.
Only remember that the money that he is giving away, he took from you and me and millions of others. I personnally have paid many many times over a MS O/S tax, even though I haven't used their O/S on any of my PCs since 1991 or so. The money he got didn't grow on tree. It's easy to be generous with a few extra billions you don't need anyway.
Hate and envy are both mortal sins. At any rate there is no difference between the #1 and the #n spot, with n small. These people are way too rich to make effective use of their money anyway.
I completely agree with you in principle, except that based on previous RIAA cases and behaviour, I don't believe RIAA has any firm proof against any of these students. In the midst of them it's actually not unlikely that some of them are not guilty of much.
Essentially the university is happy to deliver $3000 extortion letters.
What you post is equivalent to saying: since the general population is being subjected to random extortion letters by RIAA, you don't see why university students should be exempted.
I believe RIAA tactics should be fought on every front.
I'd say there is some likelihood, given previous history with RIAA tactics, that at least one of the students hit with a RIAA letter is in fact innocent.
Assuming a 70W difference (more than what Intel claims) in TDP at 100% utilization (unlikely) and a 10c kWh (residential prices are lower, not to mention corporate rates), that works out to 50*0.001*24*365*0.1 = $43 for a year.
Even if you double that to account for extra air-con costs, you're still far from it. The cheapest core-duo is around 200$. The above calculations are for high-end CPU, which cost hundreds more.
In reality, CPU utilization average is generally nowhere near 100% over a whole year, and AMD CPUs have a good power-saving mode (better than Intel's in my experience) when idle which ensures lower actual TDP differences.
Thanks for your input, but I believe you haven't read what I've written;-)
You are confusing copyright and publication. Generally speaking, the copyright owner of a work has complete control over their work. If I write a book in my house or compose a symphony, this is my intellectual property, and I can decide who can read/listen to it, and when, to a very large degree.
As an example, J.K. Rowling is widely believed to have mostly finished writing the last book of the Harry Potter series, yet few indeed are the ones who have been allowed to peruse her work.
Now, if in return for some compensation (tangible or not) I decide to *publish* my book in paper form, then it enters the published realm, where I still have some very clear rights over my work (such as no one can take it and pretend they've written it), some that are accepted usage (like some small portion can be copied for study purposes, that it can be parodied, and can end up on libraries shelves where people can read it), and some usage which haven't been clarified.
Nowhere can you find in accepted usage or law that a whole book can be scanned, its content OCRed and published on the web for all to see without the copyright holder's permission.
Yes Google does obscure some portion of the book, but this is a unilateral, unnegociated decision, over which no one has any say, and the fact remains that Google still holds multiple unauthorized complete copies of that work and that they are using these copies to commercial ends (advertisements). The purpose of Google is not to selflessly provide excerpts like you wrote, it is to generate revenues using other people's work.
Compare that to indexing a standard web page already in electronic form, that people put on their site for all to read for free. This is not the same situation at all.
Google is trying to change the accepted rules to their advantage, good on them, however I personnally know of no clear precedent that legitimize what they are doing.
My bet is that eventually Google will negociate with major publishing houses, because I believe what they are doing is not fair use, but at the same time it is in everybody's best interest.
We assume the copyright owner is the person/entity who has final say over who can read their work and under which circumstances. We assume we are talking about Google books, were anybody can come, type a book title and start browsing a portion of any book.
1- the information on the web is copyrighted but already mostly freely available. You only have to find it, which is what search services are about. In this case the vast majority of web authors want to be in Google's index because they want to be read. Furthermore there is an easy way by which authors who do not want search engines to index some or all of their work can prevent the indexing from happening : the robots.txt file.
In this case, we can admit the copyright owner of web works still has complete and easy control over the distribution of their work.
2- the information in books is also copyrighted but *not* freely available. You need to purchase the book if you want to read it. Libraries are an exception to this system, but only one person can read in any physical copy of the book at any one time. Google's book index disturbs this system greatly : many people can peruse in books at the same time. Furthermore, there is no easy equivalent to the robots.txt file. If you want Google to not index your book, it's possible, but you have to tell them in writing. If you are a publishing house, this means writing as many letters as there are books in your inventory, or sue.
In this case, we readily see that copyright owners do not have complete and easy control over their work anymore. It's been turned to a third party. This is the issue.
Whether what Google is doing is fair use is a different matter, for the courts to decide at the moment.
If you want, the Google book project is the equivalent of indexing the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, without the EB's consent. The EB already has a dual free/for-pay online system, I'm positive they do not want Google to intrude on their service.
Re:libgcc, libstdc++, and Bison
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The FSF apparently now thinks the LGPL was not such a good idea, and they now prefer to GPL everything, with exceptions in some notable cases. Notice there won't be a LGPLv3.
I has gotten a lot better, at least with Fedora (Ubuntu still not there, although I haven't tried 7.04). I worry about my Fedora install about as much as my Tiger on MBP now. This wasn't true a year ago, but finally they've figured out how to deal with the Nvidia driver in such a way that it remains available through kernel updates transparently, and *finally* suspend-to-disk works out-of-the box.
As a final note, I think abortion should be legal until 18yrs of age. I bet we wouldn't have nearly as many stupid ass problems if the kids knew their parents could change their mind up until they became legal adults.
You had me until that point. What you suggest is downright inhuman. Suggesting that killing somebody might be the solution to family problems is more than just stupid.
Clearly this round of sabre rattling is not going to end up in court. For a start MS would find itself in very hot water about these vague patent claims : it would create doubt in Microsoft's ranks and jeopardize the stock value.
On the other hand, the issue is to create doubt among traditional US corporate structures. Some might be frightened enough to move back to Windows. On the other hand, smart IT shops won't probably care. When Microsoft start suing their own customers RIAA/MPAA style it might be a sign of their own impending doom.
Oh, I don't know about this, I wouldn't bet on IBM not wanting some kind of very cold dish revenge on Microsoft's behaviour in the late 80s regarding OS/2 and Windows 3.0.
Personally I think Saddam was a horrible dictator, but that for all his evil ways he had been pretty much neutralized in 2001 from the international point of view. His worst deeds, again from the international PoV was to encourage Palestinian terrorism by offerring rewards to families of suicide bombers.
Now in Iraqi affairs he was just as horrible as ever, but my opinion on this is that the American approach has pretty much made things as bad as they could. The international community should have supported an internal resistance movement rather than invading. Democracy and peace is not something you can impose easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Non-sequitur.
The point is that there were very good typesetting systems before WYSIWYG were invented. People who use TeX now can tell you about it, but that's far from the only one : classic WordPerfect is another one.
WYSIWYG like in Word sounds good until you have real typesetting needs, such as searching and replacing styles so that you have a consistent look across chapters, printing a single chapter with only its matching bibliography instead of the whole document, etc. Writing a book in Word is an ordeal (I've done it) compared to (La)TeX. It's even worse if your co-authors have different versions of Word or use OpenOffice, say.
With a plaintext source there are no such problems. Maintainting a consistent look is as easy as maintaining a good web site with a CMS instead of hacking HTML.
You are describing single-threaded algorithms, not algorithms in general.
An algorithm is not necessarily a single sequence of steps. An algorithm is an abstract description of a computable task. There are such things as parallel algorithms, which are not necessarily "one-dimensional" as you put it. At any rate, it doesn't mater (read on).
Transputers are nothing but early SMP with a fancy name, with zero SIMD or MIMD capability (I know, because I programmed them back in the day), and occam has nothing on modern parallel languages like (who would have thought?) High-Performance Fortran. In particular early version of occam sucked at floating point.
Furthermore, it is a well-known theorem in computer science that any computable task (in particular a parallel one) can be computed on a Turing Machine. In fact is is the very definition of a computable task. Since Transputers perform computable tasks, they are simply Turing-capable, no more, no less.
Finally, whether the brain is or is not a TM (i.e. performs computable tasks) is still an open question. Evidence on either side of the debate is at the moment cirumstantial.
Perhaps if WISYWIG had never been invented, people would know how to format their thoughts rather than their paragraphs?
Probably not even 20 years, more like a few months. You can read this book.
I think you should in fact read the linked article. Stallman is well aware that you have an implied license to read any book in physical form. His essay is about books in digital form, where in fact your effective license to read is held by a third party : neither the authors/publisher or yourself, but the entity that makes the software and hardware that allows you to read the book you've purchased.
These kinds of books cannot by default be lent, rented or put in a library. We'll have to fight for those rights if we really want them, and the parties that make money out of the new media are going to fight every step of the way.
Have you checked. ?
Actually, if you are an OS/X user, the first 3 paragraph apply to you too. The mix of Carbon/Cocoa/X11/QT application, with or without brush metal, is just as nauseating. Yet people rant on how easy it is to use a Mac.
The last few paragraph also apply to Microsoft Office, and many other pieces of software in the Windows world. Can you name a major, non-bloated application? Even Firefox on Windows is heading down that route.
There are fewer and fewer problems every day with Linux, I'm constantly amazed. What Linux needs is vendor support, preferably in providing open-source drivers and applications, that's all. People are really only annoyed if some piece of hardware they've just bought doesn't work with Linux. Otherwise thanks to the constant re-engineering that takes place inside both Apple and Microsoft, people have been getting used to inconsistent applications.
Remember that being tied to a substandard command-line DOS never prevented PCs from becoming popular.
Given that he won't be able to take his wealth beyond the grave, and that with 5% of his wealth left BG will still be amongst the richest people in the world, I'm not so impressed. BG is trying to buy himself respect and forgiveness for the days when he was happy as Larry snuffing innovative IT companies left, right and center, amassing pointless riches while leveraging his monopoly, which he acquired through luck, the stupidity of others and a little talent.
This is all a little vain. Supposedly the B&MG foundation is doing great work, super, I respect that, but this is not BG's work.
Only remember that the money that he is giving away, he took from you and me and millions of others. I personnally have paid many many times over a MS O/S tax, even though I haven't used their O/S on any of my PCs since 1991 or so. The money he got didn't grow on tree. It's easy to be generous with a few extra billions you don't need anyway.
Hate and envy are both mortal sins. At any rate there is no difference between the #1 and the #n spot, with n small. These people are way too rich to make effective use of their money anyway.
I completely agree with you in principle, except that based on previous RIAA cases and behaviour, I don't believe RIAA has any firm proof against any of these students. In the midst of them it's actually not unlikely that some of them are not guilty of much.
Essentially the university is happy to deliver $3000 extortion letters.
What you post is equivalent to saying: since the general population is being subjected to random extortion letters by RIAA, you don't see why university students should be exempted.
I believe RIAA tactics should be fought on every front.
I'd say there is some likelihood, given previous history with RIAA tactics, that at least one of the students hit with a RIAA letter is in fact innocent.
Gravity is also a field that has both a magnitude and direction since it creates action.
Not quite,
Assuming a 70W difference (more than what Intel claims) in TDP at 100% utilization (unlikely) and a 10c kWh (residential prices are lower, not to mention corporate rates), that works out to 50*0.001*24*365*0.1 = $43 for a year.
Even if you double that to account for extra air-con costs, you're still far from it. The cheapest core-duo is around 200$. The above calculations are for high-end CPU, which cost hundreds more.
In reality, CPU utilization average is generally nowhere near 100% over a whole year, and AMD CPUs have a good power-saving mode (better than Intel's in my experience) when idle which ensures lower actual TDP differences.
Thanks for your input, but I believe you haven't read what I've written ;-)
You are confusing copyright and publication. Generally speaking, the copyright owner of a work has complete control over their work. If I write a book in my house or compose a symphony, this is my intellectual property, and I can decide who can read/listen to it, and when, to a very large degree.
As an example, J.K. Rowling is widely believed to have mostly finished writing the last book of the Harry Potter series, yet few indeed are the ones who have been allowed to peruse her work.
Now, if in return for some compensation (tangible or not) I decide to *publish* my book in paper form, then it enters the published realm, where I still have some very clear rights over my work (such as no one can take it and pretend they've written it), some that are accepted usage (like some small portion can be copied for study purposes, that it can be parodied, and can end up on libraries shelves where people can read it), and some usage which haven't been clarified.
Nowhere can you find in accepted usage or law that a whole book can be scanned, its content OCRed and published on the web for all to see without the copyright holder's permission.
Yes Google does obscure some portion of the book, but this is a unilateral, unnegociated decision, over which no one has any say, and the fact remains that Google still holds multiple unauthorized complete copies of that work and that they are using these copies to commercial ends (advertisements). The purpose of Google is not to selflessly provide excerpts like you wrote, it is to generate revenues using other people's work.
Compare that to indexing a standard web page already in electronic form, that people put on their site for all to read for free. This is not the same situation at all.
Google is trying to change the accepted rules to their advantage, good on them, however I personnally know of no clear precedent that legitimize what they are doing.
My bet is that eventually Google will negociate with major publishing houses, because I believe what they are doing is not fair use, but at the same time it is in everybody's best interest.
Actually, Here is the RHEL5 cert (both your links are the same).
In modern science, theory comes before observation.
Example : the Higgs boson. Theorized, never yet observed. Topic of the discussion, too.
I think it's been hashed to death.
We assume the copyright owner is the person/entity who has final say over who can read their work and under which circumstances. We assume we are talking about Google books, were anybody can come, type a book title and start browsing a portion of any book.
1- the information on the web is copyrighted but already mostly freely available. You only have to find it, which is what search services are about. In this case the vast majority of web authors want to be in Google's index because they want to be read. Furthermore there is an easy way by which authors who do not want search engines to index some or all of their work can prevent the indexing from happening : the robots.txt file.
In this case, we can admit the copyright owner of web works still has complete and easy control over the distribution of their work.
2- the information in books is also copyrighted but *not* freely available. You need to purchase the book if you want to read it. Libraries are an exception to this system, but only one person can read in any physical copy of the book at any one time. Google's book index disturbs this system greatly : many people can peruse in books at the same time. Furthermore, there is no easy equivalent to the robots.txt file. If you want Google to not index your book, it's possible, but you have to tell them in writing. If you are a publishing house, this means writing as many letters as there are books in your inventory, or sue.
In this case, we readily see that copyright owners do not have complete and easy control over their work anymore. It's been turned to a third party. This is the issue.
Whether what Google is doing is fair use is a different matter, for the courts to decide at the moment.
If you want, the Google book project is the equivalent of indexing the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, without the EB's consent. The EB already has a dual free/for-pay online system, I'm positive they do not want Google to intrude on their service.
The FSF apparently now thinks the LGPL was not such a good idea, and they now prefer to GPL everything, with exceptions in some notable cases. Notice there won't be a LGPLv3.
I has gotten a lot better, at least with Fedora (Ubuntu still not there, although I haven't tried 7.04). I worry about my Fedora install about as much as my Tiger on MBP now. This wasn't true a year ago, but finally they've figured out how to deal with the Nvidia driver in such a way that it remains available through kernel updates transparently, and *finally* suspend-to-disk works out-of-the box.
You had me until that point. What you suggest is downright inhuman. Suggesting that killing somebody might be the solution to family problems is more than just stupid.
This topic sports the least understandable headline ever.
Clearly this round of sabre rattling is not going to end up in court. For a start MS would find itself in very hot water about these vague patent claims : it would create doubt in Microsoft's ranks and jeopardize the stock value.
On the other hand, the issue is to create doubt among traditional US corporate structures. Some might be frightened enough to move back to Windows. On the other hand, smart IT shops won't probably care. When Microsoft start suing their own customers RIAA/MPAA style it might be a sign of their own impending doom.
Oh, I don't know about this, I wouldn't bet on IBM not wanting some kind of very cold dish revenge on Microsoft's behaviour in the late 80s regarding OS/2 and Windows 3.0.
Thanks for the long reply.
Personally I think Saddam was a horrible dictator, but that for all his evil ways he had been pretty much neutralized in 2001 from the international point of view. His worst deeds, again from the international PoV was to encourage Palestinian terrorism by offerring rewards to families of suicide bombers.
Now in Iraqi affairs he was just as horrible as ever, but my opinion on this is that the American approach has pretty much made things as bad as they could. The international community should have supported an internal resistance movement rather than invading. Democracy and peace is not something you can impose easily.