"Well that's still not a perfect analogy. For example, if the company added a feature to the ski mask that made it harder to pull off, and advertised this feature for use in bank robberies, they'd probably be held liable for its use in a robbery. Or if they didn't advertise it, but did know that the new feature's overwhelming use would be in bank robberies, then they might also be liable."
Are you suggesting that a ski mask with stays on your head when something might pull it off wouldn't be useful to, say, skiers?
If it was designed for bank robbers, sure. If it was designed for skiers and just happened to get a lot of use by bank robbers, that's a very different problem. Throughout history there have been a gazillion products that have been used for things the creators didn't plan for or approve of, unsavory or otherwise.
To go after creators for not making their inventions only useful for "good" things is like going after them for not doing enough idiot-proofing.
"Imagine if all the major computer makers had come up with different kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other?"
Didn't they?
Not the floppy disk, necessarily (although there's, what, 4 or 5 sizes of the 3.5"), but in the 100Mb+ space there was a heaping pile 'o different formats. Zip, obviously, was the big one, but there was quite a few other high density cartridge formats introduced during that period. Many tape formats, too.
The same thing appears to be happening with writable DVD's. Heck, there's also a lot of different CD formats. They're all standardized, but that doesn't mean every CD writer can handle all of them.
The best source about PostScript as a programming language is book "Thinking in PostScript" (http://www.rightbrain.com/pages/books.html).
I read it originally to learn PostScript from a printing perspective, which was somewhat futile. Very little of the book actually talks about printing or page layout at all.
Anyhow, a quick read of the table of contents would be enough to understand that the Game of Life in PostScript is neither difficult nor terribly interesting.
If trade secrets are the issue, then SCO is basically screwed. They might be able to go after IBM for improperly disclosing said trade secrets, but the information is no longer secret and they certainly can't go after anyone else for using code that contains said non-secret.
Patent and copyright violations are a whole different issue. But patents would have been published so there'd be no gain in hiding patent violations. Copyright violations might be something they could prove, but they'd have to work around fair use, idea vs. expression, and all the other copyright violation defenses.
"This is a disaster. Balmer and Gates will trot this out as a major drawback to Open Source. IT is, if true, the living proof of the Intellectual Property issues hey claim for Open Source."
Kinda like how people running particular configurations of SQL server are probably going to have to pay extra because Microsoft didn't properly license Timeline's intellectial property and lost a lawsuit?
With Open Source, it's a heck of a lot easier to know and prove that someone copied stuff. That's all. The obvious comeback to Bill or Steve pointing a finger is to ask them to prove that they don't have any more IP violations buried in their stuff.
Back in university, my roomates and I had a go at leaning dvorak. In our case, the most compelling reason was reduced risk of RSI, not typing speed. As an added bonus, it was also an opportunity for me to learn proper touch typing (which I never did with Qwerty... still haven't).
We never pulled it off.
We got all our X11 keyboards remapped. We changed the keycaps on my PS/2. We downloaded some tutor apps from the net. We even spent quite a bit of time actually practicing. Results were promising... But then reality kicked in.
At university labs, I was routinely using about 5 different keyboards a day, some X, some tty. Remapping all of them wasn't an option, so I was trying to learn Dvorak while still blasting out assignments in Qwerty. Then there's situations during the transition from Qwerty to Dvorak where there's no feedback... Trying to enter a password on a keyboard with Dvorak keycaps but a Qwerty layout is, uh, hard.
What killed the whole thing, however, is that I'm a vi user. vi at the best of times can be a disaster for bad typists. Just trying to navigate via ijkl in vi on Dvorak is futile, much less handling complex ingrained key patterns like df' or 'ay}. After years of vi use, I've got these patterns burned into my fingers. Learning a new keyboard without learning a new editor at the same time won't happen.
Yet another problem is that too much emphasis is placed on the letters. C/C++ programmers need a good symbol layout too and we make at least as much use of the symbols as the letters. Dvorak is, I found, a bit weaker in the symbol layout than Qwerty. {}[];()= are, I think, the most commonly used C symbols... This choice of symbols and the convenient placement on Qwerty is probably not accidental.
The cursive recognizer. My printing is more of a "small caps" than proper printing. I don't know of a handheld that can distinguish case by the size of subsequent letters.
Now I'm not saying that I didn't like the Newton, just that the handwriting wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as Doonesbury made it out to be, but I didn't find it worth the amount of time I spent correcting mistakes... and the dictionary based nature of the recognizer meant that the mistakes were usually doozies, like entire words, not the one letter mistakes I get with Grafitti.
I do, however, miss the Newton screen size terribly...
I used a Newton (2000/2100) for a few years and I have a Palm now.
To be completely honest, I prefer Grafitti. I'd prefer it even more if I could write anywhere on the screen (as Jot allows), but then again I think the Grafitti pad is nice in that it cuts down the wear on the screen.
The problem with the Newton engine is that it took ages to tune it so that it was comfortable. Even then, I found I had to adjust my own writing... bigger, more deliberate scribbles, for example. And trying to actually take notes when it mattered or convert them later was just too much twiddling around. The handwriting recognition worked well when it worked, but it was just an incredible bother to get it that far.
The Palm concept is simple, cheap, functional and (in my opinion) disposable. Grafitti fits well with that model. I imagine that Jot fits even better.
No problem with Konqueror (an older version, mind you). It appears to keep a proper linear history and when you go back, you go back both to a specific page and the page location you left from. The history in the sidebar, on the other hand, is a site hierarchy rather than a linear list.
I can't quite understand why a browser would want to implement what is essentially a linear process as a hierarchy any more than I feel it necessary for a web site to reflect the file system layout...
I operated a vinyl cutter for a while in the late '80s. Quite frankly, most generic drawing tools (vectorized or not) won't cut it (pardon the pun).
Production sign work is all about throughput. 90% of what you do is text with maybe the odd logo. You want to get the data and layout entered while the plotter is doing a run so there's not a lot of time to screw around with a UI. The simple things have to be really simple while the hard things have to be doable.
Most graphics tools have a focus on making nifty effects easy, but most of those nifty effects don't translate to cut vinyl. Blurs, color effects, alpha channel stuff, etc are all useless. Strong text transforms are critical, and vectorization of pretty much everything is good. Strong layout capabilities would be good for reducing waste. Plotter control tools would also be really good so you can cope with things like running to the end of a roll halfway through a job (or encountering a splice in the middle of a roll).
Wow. They're offering a whole entire track. A throwaway dance mix, at that.
Very bold, indeed. Innovative, even.
Maybe next month they'll offer a _different_ track.
What the music industry needs is a change in business model and attitude. That analysts and/. people even seem to give a flying fuck about a multi-billion dollar industry offering up anything for a buck...I can't quite get my head around that.
c.
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 1
`To quote the "Art of War":'
It boggles the mind that someone would read that entire article and come out thinking that Linus Torvalds is fighting a war.
"Allow Gates to hold controlling intrest in no more than one of these companies for a period of 2 years."
This wouldn't do much use. The Gates approach to doing business is already heavily entrenched in the Microsoft culture. Gates could drop off the earth any minute now and I doubt it would have much impact on the way Microsoft does business.
Unless, of course, a new leader that actually had charisma popped up. That would be deadly.
"Can a local prostitute be subject to trial in the USA (in any of the states where it's illegal) because he/she went on his/her "business" in a street in Santiago last night?"
Only if she had a negative impact on an American prostitutes ability to make money. For example, if she gave her client a disease which got passed on to a New York call girl, she'd be liable.
``What can the MPAA say about Chalmers? I know the University is not directly involved, but they are students there.''
University students are typically fair game for cease-and-desist lawsuits, though. A university will certainly defend faculty, but I haven't seen many that won't bend over backwards to help anyone that looks like a lawyer.
More likely, the first sign of MPAA activity these students will lose computing priveledges, have their dorm rooms searched, personal effects confiscated, and possibly have their academic futures sunk.
As part of my CS major, I took courses using Turing, Ada, C, C++, Scheme, Prolog, 80x86 assembler, 68k assembler, and assorted toy languages for various other purposes. To make things even more interesting, not all languages were taught to us. Some profs spent a few weeks on a language while others would hand out a page of notes and expect you to pick things up on your own. We also had to deal with the various Unix flavours that we used depending on the course and what terminals we could get a hold of. Having to port to the profs reference platform induced some serious last minute assignment panic on more than one occasion.
Largely because of those experiences, I don't consider platforms or languages to be an issue. If I need to learn a new language to make something happen, I learn it.
People worry too much about programming languages. They're tools. Use what works and discard what doesn't. Emotional attachment to a tool is an unhealthy sign.
Use the new Tivo unit to pull whichever programs you want into your GPL PVR, then watch it across your LAN without commercials. Less local storage needed, but more programs available.
At least until they build content-control into the display.
If all you care about is fixing the problems and aren't really trying to drum up business for yourself, anonymously contact some of the individuals whose information is being exposed. Sure, technically your breaking the law getting the information, but I imagine that a couple employees getting seriously pissed about their personal information being wide open might solve the real problem pretty quickly.
I'd like to see someone prove, beyond a doubt, that plants can't mutate by themselves to be Roundup resistant. Diseases can do it, why not plants. It seems fundamentally wrong for a corporantion to be able to patent something that could result from a natural process.
GPL software is available for everyone, including taxpayers, to USE.
What you're saying is that private individuals/corporations should be able to build upon taxpayer-funded projects without having any obligation to give back to the taxpayer.
So tell me, do you think it's okay for a private interest to build an office building in a public park for free?
I can see one major reason why companies like Microsoft are going to like it so much.
They'll be getting money for doing nothing.
Think about it.
Right now, if they want to make money, they have to keep pumping out upgrades. Now regardless of what we might think about the upgrade churn problem, it does mean that they have to have a whole bunch of people constantly "innovating" useful new features like the paperclip.
With subscription software, they get paid regardless of what they do. If users get locked into their stuff, they don't even have to fix bugs. What are users going to do? Stop paying? What kind of moron CIO is going to drag their entire company to a screaming halt because of a minor formatting bug or even a major security hole?
"IIRC, Linus' usual behavior with platforms he doesn't frequently use is to let the primary maintainers feed him big merges periodically... he basically lets them run their own "development" cycles (the "odd" cycles for the core kernel) and merge "stable points"."
Actually, I get a completely different impression. It appears that the PPC people are having the same problem that the ISDN people, the USB folks (I think), and Donald Becker have. These people branch off in their own direction, refuse the follow the current development tree, and then periodically play catch up and dump a huge load of crap on Linus and company. Every time this issue is brought up he comes down hard on these groups.
The gist of it is that if you're developing against your own CVS repository rather than tracking Linus' tree, you should expect to get ignored a good part of the time.
"last i checked, it's not illegal for me to go around telling people where to buy drugs. nor is it illegal to write a book telling people how to make pipe bombs."
People who claim that Napster is just giving out directions to people who then do illegal stuff are really wrong.
Napster has created a (really dumb) business model based on BROKERING illegal transactions. Sure, you're not doing anything illegal by telling people where to buy drugs, but Napster is doing the equivalent of setting up a meeting place and time, vouching for both parties, keeping an eye out for the cops, and essentially doing everything except physically moving the money and drugs. If someone were to bust that deal, Napster would likely get nailed as an accessory.
Not that I think shutting down Napster makes any sense. It just means that someone (Freenet, Gnutella, whoever) is going to release a system that's much more resistant to lawsuits. I just can't figure out why everyone hasn't just jumped ship to opennap and friends.
Slashdot Mirror
"Well that's still not a perfect analogy. For example, if the company added a feature to the ski mask that made it harder to pull off, and advertised this feature for use in bank robberies, they'd probably be held liable for its use in a robbery. Or if they didn't advertise it, but did know that the new feature's overwhelming use would be in bank robberies, then they might also be liable."
Are you suggesting that a ski mask with stays on your head when something might pull it off wouldn't be useful to, say, skiers?
If it was designed for bank robbers, sure. If it was designed for skiers and just happened to get a lot of use by bank robbers, that's a very different problem. Throughout history there have been a gazillion products that have been used for things the creators didn't plan for or approve of, unsavory or otherwise.
To go after creators for not making their inventions only useful for "good" things is like going after them for not doing enough idiot-proofing.
c.
"Imagine if all the major computer makers had come up with different
kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other?"
Didn't they?
Not the floppy disk, necessarily (although there's, what, 4 or 5
sizes of the 3.5"), but in the 100Mb+ space there was a heaping pile
'o different formats. Zip, obviously, was the big one, but there was
quite a few other high density cartridge formats introduced during
that period. Many tape formats, too.
The same thing appears to be happening with writable DVD's. Heck, there's
also a lot of different CD formats. They're all standardized, but that
doesn't mean every CD writer can handle all of them.
Same shit...
c.
The best source about PostScript as a programming language is book "Thinking in PostScript" (http://www.rightbrain.com/pages/books.html).
I read it originally to learn PostScript from a printing perspective, which was somewhat futile. Very little of the book actually talks about printing or page layout at all.
Anyhow, a quick read of the table of contents would be enough to understand that the Game of Life in PostScript is neither difficult nor terribly interesting.
c.
If trade secrets are the issue, then SCO is basically screwed. They
might be able to go after IBM for improperly disclosing said trade
secrets, but the information is no longer secret and they certainly
can't go after anyone else for using code that contains said non-secret.
Patent and copyright violations are a whole different issue. But
patents would have been published so there'd be no gain in hiding
patent violations. Copyright violations might be something they could
prove, but they'd have to work around fair use, idea vs. expression,
and all the other copyright violation defenses.
Plus, copyright violations can easily be recoded.
c.
"This is a disaster. Balmer and Gates will trot this out as a major drawback to Open Source. IT is, if true, the living proof of the Intellectual Property issues hey claim for Open Source."
8 6, 00.asp
Kinda like how people running particular configurations of SQL server are probably going to have to pay extra because Microsoft didn't properly license Timeline's intellectial property and lost a lawsuit?
http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=394
With Open Source, it's a heck of a lot easier to know and prove that someone copied stuff. That's all. The obvious comeback to Bill or Steve pointing a finger is to ask them to prove that they don't have any more IP violations buried in their stuff.
c.
"Just trying to navigate via ijkl in vi on Dvorak is futile"
Okay, hjkl. I said "burned into my fingers", not my brain.
c.
Back in university, my roomates and I had a go at leaning dvorak. In our case, the most compelling reason was reduced risk of RSI, not typing speed. As an added bonus, it was also an opportunity for me to learn proper touch typing (which I never did with Qwerty... still haven't).
We never pulled it off.
We got all our X11 keyboards remapped. We changed the keycaps on my PS/2. We downloaded some tutor apps from the net. We even spent quite a bit of time actually practicing. Results were promising... But then reality kicked in.
At university labs, I was routinely using about 5 different keyboards a day, some X, some tty. Remapping all of them wasn't an option, so I was trying to learn Dvorak while still blasting out assignments in Qwerty. Then there's situations during the transition from Qwerty to Dvorak where there's no feedback... Trying to enter a password on a keyboard with Dvorak keycaps but a Qwerty layout is, uh, hard.
What killed the whole thing, however, is that I'm a vi user. vi at the best of times can be a disaster for bad typists. Just trying to navigate via ijkl in vi on Dvorak is futile, much less handling complex ingrained key patterns like df' or 'ay}. After years of vi use, I've got these patterns burned into my fingers. Learning a new keyboard without learning a new editor at the same time won't happen.
Yet another problem is that too much emphasis is placed on the letters. C/C++ programmers need a good symbol layout too and we make at least as much use of the symbols as the letters. Dvorak is, I found, a bit weaker in the symbol layout than Qwerty. {}[];()= are, I think, the most commonly used C symbols... This choice of symbols and the convenient placement on Qwerty is probably not accidental.
c.
The cursive recognizer. My printing is more of a "small
caps" than proper printing. I don't know of a handheld
that can distinguish case by the size of subsequent letters.
Now I'm not saying that I didn't like the Newton, just
that the handwriting wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
It wasn't anywhere near as bad as Doonesbury made it out
to be, but I didn't find it worth the amount of time I spent
correcting mistakes... and the dictionary based nature of
the recognizer meant that the mistakes were usually doozies,
like entire words, not the one letter mistakes I get with
Grafitti.
I do, however, miss the Newton screen size terribly...
c.
I used a Newton (2000/2100) for a few years and I have a Palm now.
To be completely honest, I prefer Grafitti. I'd prefer it even more if
I could write anywhere on the screen (as Jot allows), but then again
I think the Grafitti pad is nice in that it cuts down the wear on the
screen.
The problem with the Newton engine is that it took ages to tune
it so that it was comfortable. Even then, I found I had to adjust my
own writing... bigger, more deliberate scribbles, for example. And
trying to actually take notes when it mattered or convert them later
was just too much twiddling around. The handwriting recognition worked
well when it worked, but it was just an incredible bother to get it
that far.
The Palm concept is simple, cheap, functional and (in my opinion)
disposable. Grafitti fits well with that model. I imagine that Jot
fits even better.
c.
No problem with Konqueror (an older version, mind you). It appears
to keep a proper linear history and when you go back, you go back both
to a specific page and the page location you left from. The history
in the sidebar, on the other hand, is a site hierarchy rather than a
linear list.
I can't quite understand why a browser would want to implement what is
essentially a linear process as a hierarchy any more than I feel it
necessary for a web site to reflect the file system layout...
c.
I operated a vinyl cutter for a while in the late
'80s. Quite frankly, most generic drawing tools
(vectorized or not) won't cut it (pardon the pun).
Production sign work is all about throughput. 90%
of what you do is text with maybe the odd logo.
You want to get the data and layout entered while
the plotter is doing a run so there's not a lot
of time to screw around with a UI. The simple
things have to be really simple while the
hard things have to be doable.
Most graphics tools
have a focus on making nifty effects easy, but most
of those nifty effects don't translate to cut vinyl.
Blurs, color effects, alpha channel stuff, etc are
all useless. Strong text transforms are critical,
and vectorization of pretty much everything is
good. Strong layout capabilities would be good
for reducing waste. Plotter control tools would
also be really good so you can cope with things like
running to the end of a roll halfway through a job
(or encountering a splice in the middle of a roll).
c.
Wow. They're offering a whole entire track. A
/. people even
throwaway dance mix, at that.
Very bold, indeed. Innovative, even.
Maybe next month they'll offer a _different_ track.
What the music industry needs is a change in business
model and attitude. That analysts and
seem to give a flying fuck about a multi-billion
dollar industry offering up anything for a buck...I
can't quite get my head around that.
c.
`To quote the "Art of War":'
It boggles the mind that someone would read that entire article and come out thinking that Linus Torvalds is fighting a war.
You can't lose if you don't play.
c.
"Allow Gates to hold controlling intrest in no more than one of these companies for a period of 2 years."
This wouldn't do much use. The Gates approach to doing business is already heavily entrenched in the Microsoft culture. Gates could drop off the earth any minute now and I doubt it would have much impact on the way Microsoft does business.
Unless, of course, a new leader that actually had charisma popped up. That would be deadly.
c.
"Can a local prostitute be subject to trial in the USA (in any of the states where it's illegal) because he/she went on his/her "business" in a street in Santiago last night?"
Only if she had a negative impact on an American prostitutes ability to make money. For example, if she gave her client a disease which got passed on to a New York call girl, she'd be liable.
c.
``What can the MPAA say about Chalmers? I know the University is not directly involved, but they are students there.''
University students are typically fair game for cease-and-desist lawsuits, though. A university will certainly defend faculty, but I haven't seen many that won't bend over backwards to help anyone that looks like a lawyer.
More likely, the first sign of MPAA activity these students will lose computing priveledges, have their dorm rooms searched, personal effects confiscated, and possibly have their academic futures sunk.
Hopefully I'm wrong.
c.
Amen.
As part of my CS major, I took courses using Turing, Ada, C, C++, Scheme, Prolog, 80x86 assembler, 68k assembler, and assorted toy languages for various other purposes. To make things even more interesting, not all languages were taught to us. Some profs spent a few weeks on a language while others would hand out a page of notes and expect you to pick things up on your own. We also had to deal with the various Unix flavours that we used depending on the course and what terminals we could get a hold of. Having to port to the profs reference platform induced some serious last minute assignment panic on more than one occasion.
Largely because of those experiences, I don't consider platforms or languages to be an issue. If I need to learn a new language to make something happen, I learn it.
People worry too much about programming languages. They're tools. Use what works and discard what doesn't. Emotional attachment to a tool is an unhealthy sign.
c.
Use the new Tivo unit to pull whichever programs you want into your GPL PVR, then watch it across your LAN without commercials. Less local storage needed, but more programs available.
At least until they build content-control into the display.
c.
If all you care about is fixing the problems and aren't really trying to drum up business for yourself, anonymously contact some of the individuals whose information is being exposed. Sure, technically your breaking the law getting the information, but I imagine that a couple employees getting seriously pissed about their personal information being wide open might solve the real problem pretty quickly.
c.
I'd like to see someone prove, beyond a doubt, that plants can't mutate by themselves to be Roundup resistant. Diseases can do it, why not plants. It seems fundamentally wrong for a corporantion to be able to patent something that could result from a natural process.
c.
"I have no doubt that the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, for example, would have greatly preferred to be sued."
On the flip side, I wouldn't be surprised if the CoS wouldn't rather torture and kill its opponents rather than sue them.
For one thing, hit men are cheaper than lawyers.
c.
GPL software is available for everyone, including taxpayers, to USE.
What you're saying is that private individuals/corporations should be able to build upon taxpayer-funded projects without having any obligation to give back to the taxpayer.
So tell me, do you think it's okay for a private interest to build an office building in a public park for free?
c.
I can see one major reason why companies like Microsoft are going to like it so much.
They'll be getting money for doing nothing.
Think about it.
Right now, if they want to make money, they have to keep pumping out upgrades. Now regardless of what we might think about the upgrade churn problem, it does mean that they have to have a whole bunch of people constantly "innovating" useful new features like the paperclip.
With subscription software, they get paid regardless of what they do. If users get locked into their stuff, they don't even have to fix bugs. What are users going to do? Stop paying? What kind of moron CIO is going to drag their entire company to a screaming halt because of a minor formatting bug or even a major security hole?
c.
"IIRC, Linus' usual behavior with platforms he doesn't frequently use is to let the primary maintainers feed him big merges periodically... he basically lets them run their own "development" cycles (the "odd" cycles for the core kernel) and merge "stable points"."
Actually, I get a completely different impression. It appears that the PPC people are having the same problem that the ISDN people, the USB folks (I think), and Donald Becker have. These people branch off in their own direction, refuse the follow the current development tree, and then periodically play catch up and dump a huge load of crap on Linus and company. Every time this issue is brought up he comes down hard on these groups.
The gist of it is that if you're developing against your own CVS repository rather than tracking Linus' tree, you should expect to get ignored a good part of the time.
c.
"last i checked, it's not illegal for me to go around telling people where to buy drugs. nor is it illegal to write a book telling people how to make pipe bombs."
People who claim that Napster is just giving out directions to people who then do illegal stuff are really wrong.
Napster has created a (really dumb) business model based on BROKERING illegal transactions. Sure, you're not doing anything illegal by telling people where to buy drugs, but Napster is doing the equivalent of setting up a meeting place and time, vouching for both parties, keeping an eye out for the cops, and essentially doing everything except physically moving the money and drugs. If someone were to bust that deal, Napster would likely get nailed as an accessory.
Not that I think shutting down Napster makes any sense. It just means that someone (Freenet, Gnutella, whoever) is going to release a system that's much more resistant to lawsuits. I just can't figure out why everyone hasn't just jumped ship to opennap and friends.
c.