And how do you keep the militiant anti-microsoft crowd from destroying your wiki by marking everything "who cares" or otherwise ruining your rating system?
If you limit who has the ability to edit the wiki, then you have to deal with some method to decide who gets to contribute, and who doesn't -- might be a problem, but might not (think "your honor, their own 'experts' did not include people such as PERSON-X or PERSON-Y, noted experts in the field, who tried to volunteer their services but were turned down. Obviously their conclusions are flawed if they don't want experts to review these patents!" -- it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to seem reasonable to a judge).
As I posted elsewhere, this is going to come down to a linux-friendly company with deep pockets paying a flock of patent lawyers to go over stuff.
Nice though wikis can be, they're not the solution to everything.
A wiki would not be immune to the "microsoft sucks because they're microsoft, and they're evil, and stuff" crowd, which is the problem with any sort of community-review of patents -- you'll have those that will dismiss possible infringement simply because they hate microsoft. You'll have those that will even dismiss painfully obvious infringements (assuming, for a moment, they exist) again because of their hatred of microsoft. Multiple people looking at something does not mean accuracy wins -- it means those that make the most noise have their viewpoints heard at the expense of anyone else. And fanboys (microsoft, linux, sony, apple, nintendo, blizzard, rockstar games, whatever, it makes no difference) have absolutely NO problem spending massive ammounts of time expressing their opinions and bashing those that don't agree.
Ultimately, it will come down to someone hiring a flock of patent lawyers to go over the patents, which will cost money, which the community likely won't be able to afford, and THAT means it'll come down to Red Hat, Oracle, IBM, or some other company with similarly deep pockets that's willing to pay for the lawyers. That probably won't happen if microsoft can make deals with them, and it won't happen on anyone's behalf until microsoft starts suing.
Actually, Open Office is compatabile enough with MS Office that I don't really care what other people use. Hell, use emacs or vi or vim or notepad or editplus or anything else, as long as it works for you, its all good.
I didn't use Open Office 1.x, so I can't say anything about what was or wasn't there. I just am not impressed with 2.0, when a) I already have MS Office, and b) I get MS Office as part of the MSDN subscription that work is paying for, so the "cost savings" is a non-issue for me. I'll admit that my preference might be different if I was forking over $400+ for each version of office, but then again I'd probably fork the money over once, and then not upgrade for a long time, which is kind of the point of the article.
Oh, you tried to make a funny, how cute. Except you're thinking of Masochism, which is pleasure from recieving pain, not sadomasochism, being an activity between two (usually consenting, though there are some extremists you usually end up reading about in the news) adults that combines sadism (pleasure from giving pain) and masochism.
Considering the ideas behind the interface ("toolstrips" that change based on what mode you're in) have been in use elsewhere (Alias|Wavefront's Maya, for instance) and its not the "normal" method of hiding hundreds (thousands?) of options under a half-dozen root menus, I say its an improvement.
I had a good friend that had The Complete Blacksmith, Artistry in Iron, and The Pattern Welded Blade, so I have had the chance to look through all of them. They're all good books, and I'm waitingo n Artistry in Iron to arrive. The Pattern Welded Blade is what I would aspire to, but I know I don't have the time it would take to get to that level.
Should mention I'm not a swordsman and not really much of a blacksmith to be honest -- though I do enjoy 'smithing I haven't had as much time as I'd like to devote to that hobby.
I'm basing my guess on examples I've seen, and descriptions and photos from Jim Hrisoulas' books. If you're interested in knife and swordmaking, I'd highly recommend his books, if you can find them (amazon has the first of his, the others are backordered, STILL)
While its hard to tell from that angle without more of the blade being in focus, it *looks* like it might be what's referred to as "cable damascus" or "wire damascus".
Take chunk of steel cable, weld ends to keep it together. Heat, flux, and heat to welding temp, forge into billet (twisting while heated but before forge-welding to tighten up pattern if you'd like). Forge billet into blade.
Look, I'm responding to a post urging everyone to "shop around", saying that doing so isn't an option for some (most?) people in the US. The idealist in me wants to use nuclear-generated power only, but I'm not going to make any blanket statements about which way is the best way to run utilities simply because I do not work in that field, and can honestly say I don't know what the impact would be. I just know that "shopping around" for who you get your electricity from isn't always possible.
As for California, I don't live there, I don't follow their politics, and we all know what a wonderful job the "news" does of reporting anything more than a 10 second clip, so I can't even begin to give an opinion on wether or not their problems have anything to do with my point about people not being able to shop around for their electric provider.
In addition to what you wrote I would urge everybody to ask their electric provider how they produce the energy you buy and look around for companies in the grid that produces energy in a sustainable way.
That'd be great, if large portions of the population were not serviced by government approved, and sometimes government run, monopolies. I'd love to be able to get all my electricity from nuclear power, but with the local city-run monopoly on power service, I don't have that choice.
Thats because there's a very small but very vocal group of socialists on slashdot, who think that anything that results in profit is inheriently bad and must be stopped.
And universal binaries are coming in the near future.
But they're not here NOW. Its hard to compare "now" to "future" in time for a publication deadline. Given what's here NOW (non-Intel-native executables for OSX), WindowsXP (and thus Intel-native) won.
In 6 months (or whever the Intel-native OSX versions are available) the numbers may very well change, and OSX might end up on top like history says it should be.
The post I was replying to claimed the cop had ahold of the guy's hand. I also used a nice little qualifying word, you might have heard of it. The word is "if" -- sounds like you might need to look it up.
that they'd spend so much time on something that I, and many others will go out of their way to avoid ever hearing.
Not counting the Mac/Linux/Anything-but-windows crowd, there's a bunch that will leave volume turned down or speakers unplugged from beginning of install until they've had a chance to disable ALL sounds.
We don't live in a 70s sci-fi show, we don't need our computer to beep, chime, ding, or otherwise make noise to let us know something happened.
Well, with as many trekkies as slashdot has....more than a few are bound to be Klingon, so sins of the father being visited on the son wouldn't be out of place for them.
And before you all flame me, I'm a trekkie too, though I'm more like Morn than any Klingon. I'd be perfectly happy to sit at the bar and drink all day.:)
The argument "supported hardware is easy to find if you check compatability lists first" is bullshit when you're trying to get people to convert. If you were building a new system to run linux, sure, you can build one you won't have any issues with. But when you're dealing with what people already have, the choice they have is "spend money on hardware to use a free OS" or "fight with the free OS to try to hack something together to make it work". Neither of which are acceptable to some people, especially when what they have works, and you're trying to get them to switch to something better.
Anyway, I'm done with you. I'll keep trying linux distros every couple years, but until they WORK with what I ALREADY HAVE, linux is not an acceptable choice.
Nice of you to leave out the bit where I mentioned the problems I had were with Ubuntu 6.06
Your arguments are full of contradictions "SANE is well supported....be careful, only some canon scanners are supported", so on and so forth. There's more to digital camera support than reading files off the memory card. Webcams, for instance. Hell, my 20d (Hardly a 1995 0.5 megapixel camera) has the ability to have a computer control everything, but will linux let me do that? No. Because Canon doesn't want to play nicely with open source.
1998 has indeed come and gone. Which is a pity for linux, because at least in 1998 the linux zealots would admit there was still work to do instead of insisting that any problems people ran into aren't important. Then again, in 1998 the linux zealots were true geeks, not wannabe fanboys running ubuntu / knoppix because "its cool".
I could go on, but I won't, because there's no point arguing with you, your mind is made up already and you refuse to consider anything else. I at least tried a recent distro before deciding that linux isn't quite ready.
Ah, the old "I haven't run into any problems that I consider important, so none exist" argument. Its bullshit.
The scanner issue would be showstopper for many people, though most of them that it would affect don't know and don't care about linux anyway. Digital camera support is flaky at best. Video cards have horrid support, because the chipmakers aren't willing to cooperate, and therefore require hacks that most people don't put up with. Same with wireless (specifically the broadcom stuff - having to use ndiswrapper to make a laptop's wireless card work is again something a typical user won't put up with, especially when its flaky on top of being a pain in the ass -- and all of this was with that "easy" version of linux -- Ubuntu 6.06 -- and a mid-range HP notebook). Laptop support is still hell, because it uses hardware that is "niche market", yet not specific to industry.
And speaking of industry, if the linux community is so willing to say "well, you're not important enough to even try to support and just use a windows box for that piece of equipment" why the hell should a business NOT turn their back on linux? "Oh, we need to move files to and from the windows machine thats running that piece of equipment?" options are what, fight with getting samba to play nicely with windows, teach everyone to use ftp, or just buy another windows machine? "Oh, and that CAD system could be a windows box too, and make it even easier to get stuff from design to production?" Your attitude towards industry just relagated linux back to the IT geeks to play with in the server room, where it can be the companies webserver, and maybe hold a database that the windows machines use, but the rest of the business just went to windows because it was easier for the idiots outside of IT to deal with.
Linux Zealots are their own worst enemy. Those that cry the loudest about how its ready are also the first to say "you're not important enough to matter" when people have problems.
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And how do you keep the militiant anti-microsoft crowd from destroying your wiki by marking everything "who cares" or otherwise ruining your rating system?
If you limit who has the ability to edit the wiki, then you have to deal with some method to decide who gets to contribute, and who doesn't -- might be a problem, but might not (think "your honor, their own 'experts' did not include people such as PERSON-X or PERSON-Y, noted experts in the field, who tried to volunteer their services but were turned down. Obviously their conclusions are flawed if they don't want experts to review these patents!" -- it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to seem reasonable to a judge).
As I posted elsewhere, this is going to come down to a linux-friendly company with deep pockets paying a flock of patent lawyers to go over stuff.
Nice though wikis can be, they're not the solution to everything.
A wiki would not be immune to the "microsoft sucks because they're microsoft, and they're evil, and stuff" crowd, which is the problem with any sort of community-review of patents -- you'll have those that will dismiss possible infringement simply because they hate microsoft. You'll have those that will even dismiss painfully obvious infringements (assuming, for a moment, they exist) again because of their hatred of microsoft. Multiple people looking at something does not mean accuracy wins -- it means those that make the most noise have their viewpoints heard at the expense of anyone else. And fanboys (microsoft, linux, sony, apple, nintendo, blizzard, rockstar games, whatever, it makes no difference) have absolutely NO problem spending massive ammounts of time expressing their opinions and bashing those that don't agree.
Ultimately, it will come down to someone hiring a flock of patent lawyers to go over the patents, which will cost money, which the community likely won't be able to afford, and THAT means it'll come down to Red Hat, Oracle, IBM, or some other company with similarly deep pockets that's willing to pay for the lawyers. That probably won't happen if microsoft can make deals with them, and it won't happen on anyone's behalf until microsoft starts suing.
Actually, Open Office is compatabile enough with MS Office that I don't really care what other people use. Hell, use emacs or vi or vim or notepad or editplus or anything else, as long as it works for you, its all good.
I didn't use Open Office 1.x, so I can't say anything about what was or wasn't there. I just am not impressed with 2.0, when a) I already have MS Office, and b) I get MS Office as part of the MSDN subscription that work is paying for, so the "cost savings" is a non-issue for me. I'll admit that my preference might be different if I was forking over $400+ for each version of office, but then again I'd probably fork the money over once, and then not upgrade for a long time, which is kind of the point of the article.
Oh, you tried to make a funny, how cute. Except you're thinking of Masochism, which is pleasure from recieving pain, not sadomasochism, being an activity between two (usually consenting, though there are some extremists you usually end up reading about in the news) adults that combines sadism (pleasure from giving pain) and masochism.
Considering the ideas behind the interface ("toolstrips" that change based on what mode you're in) have been in use elsewhere (Alias|Wavefront's Maya, for instance) and its not the "normal" method of hiding hundreds (thousands?) of options under a half-dozen root menus, I say its an improvement.
Not entirely true.
There are those that are in windows-only shops with a very strict IT policy that would like the features, but are not ALLOWED to use OpenOffice.
And then there are those, like me, that actually prefer MS Office over OpenOffice -- especially the new interface.
I had a good friend that had The Complete Blacksmith, Artistry in Iron, and The Pattern Welded Blade, so I have had the chance to look through all of them. They're all good books, and I'm waitingo n Artistry in Iron to arrive. The Pattern Welded Blade is what I would aspire to, but I know I don't have the time it would take to get to that level.
Should mention I'm not a swordsman and not really much of a blacksmith to be honest -- though I do enjoy 'smithing I haven't had as much time as I'd like to devote to that hobby.
I'm basing my guess on examples I've seen, and descriptions and photos from Jim Hrisoulas' books. If you're interested in knife and swordmaking, I'd highly recommend his books, if you can find them (amazon has the first of his, the others are backordered, STILL)
While its hard to tell from that angle without more of the blade being in focus, it *looks* like it might be what's referred to as "cable damascus" or "wire damascus".
Take chunk of steel cable, weld ends to keep it together. Heat, flux, and heat to welding temp, forge into billet (twisting while heated but before forge-welding to tighten up pattern if you'd like). Forge billet into blade.
Look, I'm responding to a post urging everyone to "shop around", saying that doing so isn't an option for some (most?) people in the US. The idealist in me wants to use nuclear-generated power only, but I'm not going to make any blanket statements about which way is the best way to run utilities simply because I do not work in that field, and can honestly say I don't know what the impact would be. I just know that "shopping around" for who you get your electricity from isn't always possible.
As for California, I don't live there, I don't follow their politics, and we all know what a wonderful job the "news" does of reporting anything more than a 10 second clip, so I can't even begin to give an opinion on wether or not their problems have anything to do with my point about people not being able to shop around for their electric provider.
In addition to what you wrote I would urge everybody to ask their electric provider how they produce the energy you buy and look around for companies in the grid that produces energy in a sustainable way.
That'd be great, if large portions of the population were not serviced by government approved, and sometimes government run, monopolies. I'd love to be able to get all my electricity from nuclear power, but with the local city-run monopoly on power service, I don't have that choice.
Thats because there's a very small but very vocal group of socialists on slashdot, who think that anything that results in profit is inheriently bad and must be stopped.
At which point, PC and Mac are both at the pub past the finish line having a post-race pint while LinuxBox is still recompiling his new legs.
Of course, the rematch would be a different story, since LinuxBox would already be configured.
And universal binaries are coming in the near future.
But they're not here NOW. Its hard to compare "now" to "future" in time for a publication deadline. Given what's here NOW (non-Intel-native executables for OSX), WindowsXP (and thus Intel-native) won.
In 6 months (or whever the Intel-native OSX versions are available) the numbers may very well change, and OSX might end up on top like history says it should be.
The post I was replying to claimed the cop had ahold of the guy's hand. I also used a nice little qualifying word, you might have heard of it. The word is "if" -- sounds like you might need to look it up.
Reading comprehension is important.
that they'd spend so much time on something that I, and many others will go out of their way to avoid ever hearing.
Not counting the Mac/Linux/Anything-but-windows crowd, there's a bunch that will leave volume turned down or speakers unplugged from beginning of install until they've had a chance to disable ALL sounds.
We don't live in a 70s sci-fi show, we don't need our computer to beep, chime, ding, or otherwise make noise to let us know something happened.
If the cop has the guys hand, then why the hell is he pounding the guys face? Sounds like retribution, not self defense at that point.
Of the moon having a still-molten core. Interesting.
Just to play devil's advocate...
What if they were merely using the lower species to improve themselves?
I submitted a story about this lawsuit agains target, and the press release from NFB that was the source for the story, over a month ago.
It was rejected.
Way to go slashdot! Keep everyone up to date! You're at least a month behind, but who cares, its news! Except its not "NEW" at all at this point.
Oh c'mon. That's called humor, not being off topic. In case you missed it, "Sins of the father" was a ST:TNG episode.
Well, with as many trekkies as slashdot has....more than a few are bound to be Klingon, so sins of the father being visited on the son wouldn't be out of place for them.
:)
And before you all flame me, I'm a trekkie too, though I'm more like Morn than any Klingon. I'd be perfectly happy to sit at the bar and drink all day.
I guess the crux of it comes down to this:
The argument "supported hardware is easy to find if you check compatability lists first" is bullshit when you're trying to get people to convert. If you were building a new system to run linux, sure, you can build one you won't have any issues with. But when you're dealing with what people already have, the choice they have is "spend money on hardware to use a free OS" or "fight with the free OS to try to hack something together to make it work". Neither of which are acceptable to some people, especially when what they have works, and you're trying to get them to switch to something better.
Anyway, I'm done with you. I'll keep trying linux distros every couple years, but until they WORK with what I ALREADY HAVE, linux is not an acceptable choice.
Nice of you to leave out the bit where I mentioned the problems I had were with Ubuntu 6.06
Your arguments are full of contradictions "SANE is well supported....be careful, only some canon scanners are supported", so on and so forth. There's more to digital camera support than reading files off the memory card. Webcams, for instance. Hell, my 20d (Hardly a 1995 0.5 megapixel camera) has the ability to have a computer control everything, but will linux let me do that? No. Because Canon doesn't want to play nicely with open source.
1998 has indeed come and gone. Which is a pity for linux, because at least in 1998 the linux zealots would admit there was still work to do instead of insisting that any problems people ran into aren't important. Then again, in 1998 the linux zealots were true geeks, not wannabe fanboys running ubuntu / knoppix because "its cool".
I could go on, but I won't, because there's no point arguing with you, your mind is made up already and you refuse to consider anything else. I at least tried a recent distro before deciding that linux isn't quite ready.
Ah, the old "I haven't run into any problems that I consider important, so none exist" argument. Its bullshit.
The scanner issue would be showstopper for many people, though most of them that it would affect don't know and don't care about linux anyway. Digital camera support is flaky at best. Video cards have horrid support, because the chipmakers aren't willing to cooperate, and therefore require hacks that most people don't put up with. Same with wireless (specifically the broadcom stuff - having to use ndiswrapper to make a laptop's wireless card work is again something a typical user won't put up with, especially when its flaky on top of being a pain in the ass -- and all of this was with that "easy" version of linux -- Ubuntu 6.06 -- and a mid-range HP notebook). Laptop support is still hell, because it uses hardware that is "niche market", yet not specific to industry.
And speaking of industry, if the linux community is so willing to say "well, you're not important enough to even try to support and just use a windows box for that piece of equipment" why the hell should a business NOT turn their back on linux? "Oh, we need to move files to and from the windows machine thats running that piece of equipment?" options are what, fight with getting samba to play nicely with windows, teach everyone to use ftp, or just buy another windows machine? "Oh, and that CAD system could be a windows box too, and make it even easier to get stuff from design to production?" Your attitude towards industry just relagated linux back to the IT geeks to play with in the server room, where it can be the companies webserver, and maybe hold a database that the windows machines use, but the rest of the business just went to windows because it was easier for the idiots outside of IT to deal with.
Linux Zealots are their own worst enemy. Those that cry the loudest about how its ready are also the first to say "you're not important enough to matter" when people have problems.
I think the point is that the stumbling block for progress is the various linux programmers' egos getting in the way of progress.