Re:Dvorak Predicts Death of Linux
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SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 1
As Mark Twain said: "Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.
What exactly does "death of Linux" mean? Any offending code will be removed, and Linus and Alan Cox and all the other hackers will keep writing more code.
It shouldn't even affect companies who want to invest in Linux -- once the offending code is removed everything is kosher.
Think of it this way: the *BSDs are guaranteed free of Unix(tm) contamination; a judge said so. All Dvorak is saying is "the law doesn't work the way you geeks think it does, losers! Either SCO will win, or IBM will drag things out and Linux will lose momentum." Oh yeah? And they sky will dawn green tomorrow.
Good, clean vinyl, coupled with a good needle, sounds better to me than CD.
Pretty much what I'm saying too: it's not the case that all experiences of listening to CDs are better than all LPs. They overlap -- a lot. I agree that good vinyl on a good turntable, with good speakers in a quiet room is fantastic. A poorly mastered CD on the same setup would be disappointing. But get an equivalent CD, well recorded and mastered -- it's my opinion that the CD is going to be better. I don't want to make an unfair comparison of crappy cartridges with a high-end CD player.
I listen to jazz. (I play the trumpet.) I listen to a lot of vinyl, and I know how wonderful it is. I think a CD can be better, but really, the difference is not huge. Far more important to get good speakers and listening room than worry about CD vs. LP.
One factor that's important for me, and why I like vinyl more than CDs: I like the experience. Since I have to get up and flip the side or put something else on every fifteen or twenty minutes, I end up sitting on the floor, surrounded by records, listening and reading the liner notes; completely immersed. With a CD, there's one hour of music ahead and it's easy to get distracted.
This whole article is complete bullshit. You are free to think whatever you want, but saying that everyone should believe your mumbo-jumbo unless they have audiophile equipment -- crap.
Unless you're comparing fifteen-year old listening to carefully mastered vinyl in a quiet environment, to thirty year old listening to a crappy CD on a cheapo boom-box in an average living room... for the same amount of money and care, CDs are much better than vinyl.
Most people can't hear above 16Khz but such signals create harmonics that extent down into the audible range.
Sorry, harmonics go up, not down. You can claim that the higher frequencies "somehow" add in to the experience and make for better listening, but you can't use fake science or math to back it up.
I listen to a lot of vinyl, and absolutely believe that good vinyl sounds amazingly good, better than most people know (because they've only heard crap). However a good CD sounds even better. (The dynamic range -- wow!) However, to experience these levels you need not just good vinyl and CDs and expensive hardware, but also a quiet room. Most listening environments are so noisy it doesn't really make much of a difference.
"Right to privacy"? If I'm not trespassing or violating copyright, I have the right to take a picture of anything. The Adelmans were following all laws: they were offshore, in the air, and the picture is clearly not "of" her house. As for "There was no reason for her name to be mentioned on that website" -- anyone can go and annotate a photograph on the website; it doesn't have to be anyone connected with the website. (If I post the address to Streisand's house, will Slashdot be liable?) All the spoiled brat has a right to do is request the caption be removed.
I have no opinion of her; if I kept track of every crappy actress and singer-wannabe I'd have no time for Slashdot. It's her hypocrisy that pisses me off. It pisses me off more that the rich fuckers can unleash lawyers at will. At least in this case she picked someone who also has money; I hope they sue her for all their legal costs, and possibly punitive damages. (And then I hope the damn house falls into the ocean because her neighbor built an illegal sea wall.)
I'm also a very paranoid and secretive individual; I'm going to sue NASA and the US Government for all those pictures they took of me (of me!!! not just my house!) from space.
Exactly! What kind of idiot would suggest this? What's next, we assign IP numbers based on physical location?
This sucks because addresses are used for routing in a human delivery system, not for targeting ICBMs. As long as the countries and cities we live in have wiggly lines (like rivers and mountains) for boundaries, postal addresses cannot be simplistic like this.
Besides, [insert Micros**t joke here].
Re:A serious question - i'm not trolling, honest!
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Twin Prime Proof Erroneous
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I can understand calculating pi to the nth point as it is used in calculations...
That is not a very good reason! Let's say we use pi = 355/113 -- an approximation that's been known for many centuries -- to calculate the circumference of the earth. Using that value of pi our estimate will be off by about 30 feet (about 0.00003%). Even 22/7 is only off by 0.1%.
No; we calculate the umpty-bazillionth digit of pi for the same reason Mallory wanted to climb Everest: because it's there -- and there's cool shit to see along the way.
President Bush has a pilot's license and flew F-102 Delta Darts in the Air National Guard---have you ever flown a plane from Texas to Washington DC? (Bush did that once for a date w/ Pres. Nixon's daughter Pat;)
What the hell is the big deal with getting a pilot's license? Any idiot can get one -- I know, I have (am!) one. But I didn't get a cushy National Guard pilot job instead of being sent to Vietnam; and I didn't follow that up by deserting from -- er, I mean just not being there -- even that sinecure. (I wish I could have spent thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money to get laid.) As to the rest of your little political rant: come on! Everyone believes he's an idiot, even people who think he has done a good job as president. I don't want a "man of his word" if that only means "not lying about illicit sex on national TV" -- I just want the damn country running better than it has been the last couple of years.
"As regards India's president [something much worse that they should work on instead]" -- my mom told me to watch out when you hear something like that, it's a ploy to distract. India, like any rational society, should work on all its problems -- different amounts based on resources and importance. I think that assuring India's technological future so that future riches would allow solving other problems is a reasonable stance for him to take. Why not invest in the future too, instead of getting obsessed by the present?
You're thinking of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), which matches your description ("foremost institution," "equivalent of MIT" etc.). This is IIIT -- three I's. There are five IITs (Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Madras, Kharagpur) and there are courses of study (undergraduate and postgraduate) for all engineering disciplines and physical sciences, and it includes the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Not "IT."
The IIIT (three I's) is in Software Technology Park, Hinjewadi Pune.
Re:Liquid that really flows uphill...kind of
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Water Flows Uphill
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· Score: 2, Interesting
... turns out back in 1996 some scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering a liquid that actually flows uphill, some sort of special property about temperatures approaching absolute zero...
Superfluidity of liquid helium (He4) below about 2K (that's 2 kelvin above absolute zero) has been known for a very long time -- since around 1952 or '53 I think. Helium had been liquefied in 1927, but superfluidity wasn't noticed till the 50s.It's a quantum phenomenon. These 1996 Nobel laureates showed it in He3.
[The GPL] requires any derivative works to also be GPL. That's a restriction, because it means you can never make software that is available for sale from anything that has been opened as GPL. Pretty serious restriction, if you ask a professional programmer. I am one, I know.
As a result, the GPL has proven itself to be an excellent source for back-office proprietary, offline tools that never see the light of day and are never intended for release to the public in any form.
Whoa there, sonny! Easy with your "professional programmer" dealio. Of course it's a restriction. Even before reading the GPL, you might pay attention that that last letter: the "L" stands for License. As in, these are not works in the public domain; they are copyrighted works. What exactly are you saying? That if a programmer chose to not release source code instead of making it GPL, somehow there'd be more free tools out there? I'm having trouble swallowing this. I guess I can't call myself a "professional programmer" then, I've just been hacking for money for the last couple of decades.
"As a result" implies causality; you can't just use Proof By Assertion. Perhaps you should go back to your "professional programming."
...no contract was created by the act of clicking your mouse over a group of pixels that say "I agree".
What if I say that no contract was created by the act of causing some pigment to be deposited in a particular way over a line printed on a piece of paper?
Does anyone know of any statistics on how many developers actually get away with using Open Source Software (more specifically GPLed) code within their closed source products.
In about fifteen years of hacking, I've seen one instance of borderline violation: it was code meant for internal use only -- not distributed, so the conditions of the GPL didn't apply -- but the copyrights had been stripped. I removed the file from CVS and notified the developer of his error.
I think companies for the most part really don't want to borrow GPL-ed code. They don't want the legal hassles regardless of whether or not the GPL is enforceable, and it's impossible to keep a violation a secret -- all it takes is one disgruntled ex-employee. It's only lazy and unscrupulous programmers that tend to do this.
Re:Don't like the GPL? Don't rip-off GPL-ed code.
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OSI vs SCO
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· Score: 1
actually, the linux kernel isn't *that* big,...
not checking all 3rd party apps that comes with their dist, but rather relying on MD5 checksums
Hey! I said don't read that paragraph!
I don't see how you can use MD5 sums of packages to identify "code that shouldn't be there" -- the whole point of MD5 is that a small change in the file will cause a large change in its signature.
I think it's reasonable that SCO wasn't checking -- they could claim in good faith they didn't think their trusted partner would behave so heinously. But that's all academic, of course... until we see this "actual evidence of SCO IP in Linux!" it's all bullshit anyway.
Don't like the GPL? Don't rip-off GPL-ed code.
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OSI vs SCO
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It really is as simple as that. If you don't believe in the goals of the Gnu project, don't incorporate GPL-ed code into yours! No one is forcing you to even use GPL-ed code.
All this stuff about "irrevocably infect your code without your express wishes" is just FUD. Whining about "programmer took some 'free' code to incorporate into our precious corporate product" is just whining -- no one else is responsible for your clueless employees. "GPL" is not a synonym for "public domain."
SCO distributing a Linux distribution doesn't necessarily affect the case since they can reasonably claim they didn't look through all the billions and billions of lines of code in the kernel. But I'm not a lawyer, and my unfounded speculations are just that. Don't read this paragraph.
Re:a good explanation from....
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OSI vs SCO
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· Score: 1
stolen...property... burn in hell like the theiving [sic] dog that it is... plain criminal...... plain theft!
Bullshit!
Just because you'd like it to be so doesn't make it so. Repeat after me: this is copyright violation. Not theft. Words mean things. "Theft," "thieving" [I'm fixing your atrocious spelling], "property" -- all these words have specific meanings. Copyright violation is a civil matter, not criminal. Since copyright is by definition and by law of a limited duration, it cannot be called "property" -- ownership is by definition for all time. (We won't even talk about your underhanded implications about "the underlying problem"... have you stopped beating your wife and kids yet?)
You wouldn't happen to be a SCO or Micros**t employee, would you?
On the Via Arena Forum for EPIA-M Linux support the outlook is bleak. Via seem reluctant to fully support Linux, in particular with the MPEG hardware and the EHCI USB. One person trying to develop a distribution for EPIA-M says:
The EPIA-M's aren't very well supported on Linux at all. The bare minimum will work, but there is a lot of work to be done, especially on VIA's part.
... VIA should not claim that the EPIA-M is Linux compatible, unless it is actively supporting the Linux community by improving support to at least a level of being able to take advantage of most of the hardware's features. I hope VIA becomes more actively involved in the future.
Here's the complete summary of hardware support for EPIA-M by "jonthorpe" on March 10, 2003:
USB 2.0: I have been in contact with David Brownwell for the past two months in an attempt to resolve the issues with the VT8235's EHCI support in general. Most people will experience system hangs when they attempt to use the EHCI controller, although it is improving. VIA has apparently provided David with hardware, but with little support. As of late, the problem seems to extend beyond the VT8235's EHCI - on another VT8235 based board, it was revealed that there are IRQ/PCI issues causing any USB 2.0 card (e.g. an NEC which is usually stable) to hang.
Audio: ALSA should work for the EPIA-Ms with their ALC650, but the OSS drivers are still a better option in my opinion. The original EPIAs will experience problems with ALSA (crackly sound on new versions of ALSA, no sound at all on previous). The OSS driver in newer kernels (e.g. 2.4.21-pre5-acX) works well with OSS playback, but there are two major problems:
ESound does not work. This limits the user to only one stream to pass through the sound card. This can generate problems with applications such as web browsers which use the Flash plugin (especially if another sound application is already running - e.g. XMMS)
Recording does not work whatsoever. This is a major problem that I am yet to talk to Alan about, but there is absolutely no recording with OSS drivers. ALSA drivers have more success with this, but the audio quality is poor.
VGA: This will work nicely if you're running one of VIA's supported distribution versions. This is not good for people like myself who insist on using updated kernels to work with other features of their hardware. This limits us to using the Slim driver for the CLE266, removing MPEG2 hardware acceleration. I am developing a distribution that is to be bundled with EPIA-M systems, and even after mentioning that, sending two emails to VIA and signing up on the driver request page has proven fruitless and are completely ignored.
I haven't tested this myself, but I believe there are problems with VIA's CLE266 drivers when it comes to virtual screens. The driver simply cannot handle them.
NIC: This works flawlessly, with the via-rhine driver. There are no problems to report.
FireWire: I have no idea about this one either, but I can say that the host controller is at least recognised by the Linux driver. I'd love to hear from anyone who has tested the EPIA-M's firewire on Linux.
What kind of mickey-mouse operation is it that allows someone's (whether management or developer) mistake to take down their web site? Have they heard of QA and testing? You'd have to be insane to allow any changes to a production system without it being tested on the test system first. In all the places I've worked at (I'm a back-end hacker, using C/C++ and java) anyone who made a change to the production system without following all the test procedures (regression tests and QA signoff) would be canned in a second. (Unless it's the VP of Engineering -- but that's another story.)
Or these personal sites they're talking about?
They're artifacts caused by the supports for the secondary mirror.
You know when you're watching a movie, if the lens points close to the sun, you see a sequence of little polygons move across the field? That's the image of the actual aperture being reflected off the many glass/glass and glass/air surfaces in the lens. (Modern lenses are complex, and are made of many "simple" lenses stacked together.)
Since the secondary mirror is in the "opening" of the telescope, it needs to be supported. The supports cause those artifacts.
[Sun] had SunOS which had a BSD style init system I think, and then moved to Solaris which has a SysV init system.
SunOS 4.x was BSD. As in, Bill Joy was the graduate student who brought that Unix magtape from NJ to Berkeley, wrote vi, and then went around universities proselytizing the Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix with cool new features like virtual memory.
The next major OS release from Sun was to be SunOS 5. Then they got a little marketing-happy and decided to rename their OS Solaris. They said SunOS 4.n == Solaris 1.n, and the new! improved! OS would be Solaris 2.n, and SunOS 5.n == Solaris 2.n. Running uname -a on my Solaris 2.8 box, SunOS rhonadler 5.8 Generic_108528-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2
(And then the Solaris 2.8 == Solaris 8 madness.)
So SunOS is Real Unix (TM) -- whatever that counts for these days. SunOS 4.x is the "Real" BSD, a direct descendant of the Berkeley CSRG's "4.n BSD" on the VAX-11, and has no connection to any of the free BSDs.
So yes, Ballmer doesn't know shit about Unix, but we already knew that.
You, a programmer, create some wonderful technology. It's so wonderful, in fact, that it spreads all over the world and is used by nearly everyone on a daily basis. Would you not want some measure of control on this technology that you labored over for so many hours?
What you want has nothing to do with how things should be, or I want a million dollars a month for the rest of my life.
What have you "created"? If I see someone wearing an interesting color combination and think "that looks cool!" and buy or make clothes with that color combination, do you have the right to sue me? Or if I see that you ordered a pizza with an unusual combination of toppings that I hadn't seen before -- do I have to pay you to have my neighborhood pizzeria make me one with that combination? What if I hadn't seen your pizza and independently came up with that topping combination after you did?
There is no such thing as intellectual "property" -- property and ownership are not time-limited, as copyrights and patents are. Copyrights and patents are just copyrights and patents, not property.
One more detail that's important: Sagarmatha is the Nepali name for Mt. Everest.
Why does the "Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee" need to exist? Because all those goddamn mountaineers have trashed the mountain. There's a hundred years of discarded tents, oxygen bottles, and just plain trash there. It's fitting that when the CEO pays for his little Everest adventure, he puts in a couple of thousand to clean up the mess.
This seems to be an idea that's good wherever you look at it from.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly does "death of Linux" mean? Any offending code will be removed, and Linus and Alan Cox and all the other hackers will keep writing more code.
It shouldn't even affect companies who want to invest in Linux -- once the offending code is removed everything is kosher.
Think of it this way: the *BSDs are guaranteed free of Unix(tm) contamination; a judge said so. All Dvorak is saying is "the law doesn't work the way you geeks think it does, losers! Either SCO will win, or IBM will drag things out and Linux will lose momentum." Oh yeah? And they sky will dawn green tomorrow.
I listen to jazz. (I play the trumpet.) I listen to a lot of vinyl, and I know how wonderful it is. I think a CD can be better, but really, the difference is not huge. Far more important to get good speakers and listening room than worry about CD vs. LP.
One factor that's important for me, and why I like vinyl more than CDs: I like the experience. Since I have to get up and flip the side or put something else on every fifteen or twenty minutes, I end up sitting on the floor, surrounded by records, listening and reading the liner notes; completely immersed. With a CD, there's one hour of music ahead and it's easy to get distracted.
Unless you're comparing fifteen-year old listening to carefully mastered vinyl in a quiet environment, to thirty year old listening to a crappy CD on a cheapo boom-box in an average living room... for the same amount of money and care, CDs are much better than vinyl.
I listen to a lot of vinyl, and absolutely believe that good vinyl sounds amazingly good, better than most people know (because they've only heard crap). However a good CD sounds even better. (The dynamic range -- wow!) However, to experience these levels you need not just good vinyl and CDs and expensive hardware, but also a quiet room. Most listening environments are so noisy it doesn't really make much of a difference.
I have no opinion of her; if I kept track of every crappy actress and singer-wannabe I'd have no time for Slashdot. It's her hypocrisy that pisses me off. It pisses me off more that the rich fuckers can unleash lawyers at will. At least in this case she picked someone who also has money; I hope they sue her for all their legal costs, and possibly punitive damages. (And then I hope the damn house falls into the ocean because her neighbor built an illegal sea wall.)
I'm also a very paranoid and secretive individual; I'm going to sue NASA and the US Government for all those pictures they took of me (of me!!! not just my house!) from space.
This sucks because addresses are used for routing in a human delivery system, not for targeting ICBMs. As long as the countries and cities we live in have wiggly lines (like rivers and mountains) for boundaries, postal addresses cannot be simplistic like this.
Besides, [insert Micros**t joke here].
No; we calculate the umpty-bazillionth digit of pi for the same reason Mallory wanted to climb Everest: because it's there -- and there's cool shit to see along the way.
"As regards India's president [something much worse that they should work on instead]" -- my mom told me to watch out when you hear something like that, it's a ploy to distract. India, like any rational society, should work on all its problems -- different amounts based on resources and importance. I think that assuring India's technological future so that future riches would allow solving other problems is a reasonable stance for him to take. Why not invest in the future too, instead of getting obsessed by the present?
The IIIT (three I's) is in Software Technology Park, Hinjewadi Pune.
Phew! Now that big business is suffering in a direct way, we'll see some action on making spam illegal!
"As a result" implies causality; you can't just use Proof By Assertion. Perhaps you should go back to your "professional programming."
I think companies for the most part really don't want to borrow GPL-ed code. They don't want the legal hassles regardless of whether or not the GPL is enforceable, and it's impossible to keep a violation a secret -- all it takes is one disgruntled ex-employee. It's only lazy and unscrupulous programmers that tend to do this.
I don't see how you can use MD5 sums of packages to identify "code that shouldn't be there" -- the whole point of MD5 is that a small change in the file will cause a large change in its signature.
I think it's reasonable that SCO wasn't checking -- they could claim in good faith they didn't think their trusted partner would behave so heinously. But that's all academic, of course... until we see this "actual evidence of SCO IP in Linux!" it's all bullshit anyway.
All this stuff about "irrevocably infect your code without your express wishes" is just FUD. Whining about "programmer took some 'free' code to incorporate into our precious corporate product" is just whining -- no one else is responsible for your clueless employees. "GPL" is not a synonym for "public domain."
SCO distributing a Linux distribution doesn't necessarily affect the case since they can reasonably claim they didn't look through all the billions and billions of lines of code in the kernel. But I'm not a lawyer, and my unfounded speculations are just that. Don't read this paragraph.
Just because you'd like it to be so doesn't make it so. Repeat after me: this is copyright violation. Not theft. Words mean things. "Theft," "thieving" [I'm fixing your atrocious spelling], "property" -- all these words have specific meanings. Copyright violation is a civil matter, not criminal. Since copyright is by definition and by law of a limited duration, it cannot be called "property" -- ownership is by definition for all time. (We won't even talk about your underhanded implications about "the underlying problem"... have you stopped beating your wife and kids yet?)
You wouldn't happen to be a SCO or Micros**t employee, would you?
What kind of mickey-mouse operation is it that allows someone's (whether management or developer) mistake to take down their web site? Have they heard of QA and testing? You'd have to be insane to allow any changes to a production system without it being tested on the test system first. In all the places I've worked at (I'm a back-end hacker, using C/C++ and java) anyone who made a change to the production system without following all the test procedures (regression tests and QA signoff) would be canned in a second. (Unless it's the VP of Engineering -- but that's another story.) Or these personal sites they're talking about?
You know when you're watching a movie, if the lens points close to the sun, you see a sequence of little polygons move across the field? That's the image of the actual aperture being reflected off the many glass/glass and glass/air surfaces in the lens. (Modern lenses are complex, and are made of many "simple" lenses stacked together.)
Since the secondary mirror is in the "opening" of the telescope, it needs to be supported. The supports cause those artifacts.
The next major OS release from Sun was to be SunOS 5. Then they got a little marketing-happy and decided to rename their OS Solaris. They said SunOS 4.n == Solaris 1.n, and the new! improved! OS would be Solaris 2.n, and SunOS 5.n == Solaris 2.n. Running uname -a on my Solaris 2.8 box,
SunOS rhonadler 5.8 Generic_108528-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2
(And then the Solaris 2.8 == Solaris 8 madness.)
So SunOS is Real Unix (TM) -- whatever that counts for these days. SunOS 4.x is the "Real" BSD, a direct descendant of the Berkeley CSRG's "4.n BSD" on the VAX-11, and has no connection to any of the free BSDs.
So yes, Ballmer doesn't know shit about Unix, but we already knew that.
What have you "created"? If I see someone wearing an interesting color combination and think "that looks cool!" and buy or make clothes with that color combination, do you have the right to sue me? Or if I see that you ordered a pizza with an unusual combination of toppings that I hadn't seen before -- do I have to pay you to have my neighborhood pizzeria make me one with that combination? What if I hadn't seen your pizza and independently came up with that topping combination after you did?
There is no such thing as intellectual "property" -- property and ownership are not time-limited, as copyrights and patents are. Copyrights and patents are just copyrights and patents, not property.
This seems to be an idea that's good wherever you look at it from.
Since the flight happened in November, that's when the NOTAM will have been issued. I haven't yet been able to find any sites that have old NOTAMs.