Since I'm self-employed, nobody withholds from me, so I get to feel it when I write my two checks to Fed and State treasuries.
You've got to pay taxes either way--why make yourself feel bad about it? The less I have to think about it, the better. And given current interest rates, it's not like you are losing a lot of money.
Off-loading to I/O processors is a standard technique, and the ways you implement it is an application of common engineering principles. What exactly is supposed to be patentable about TCP off-loading?
There are plenty of excellent MP3 players that work really, really well: they just plug into USB, show up as drives, can read and organize things by MP3 tags (no need to create playlists), and charge through USB. The Rio Carbon is an example of that. For Flash based players, there are lots of them around. My3IA.com makes cheap ones that work well in my experience (you can pick up a 128M one for $35).
I think people who buy the big, popular consumer name brands just haven't done their homework: there are better deals than that around.
These questions are not new. Basically, in the long run, society has decided that everything should be open: food recipies, drug recipes, production techniques. That principle is an important part of a free market--if we guaranteed perpetual monopolies on stuff, then we'd never get competition.
However, in most cases, we don't force disclosure. We encourage people to disclose by giving them limited time patent protection. If they don't patent it, or after the patent runs out, anybody and everybody can reverse engineer and use/produce/sell the idea/process/drug.
In some cases, we do force disclosure. Recipes have to be partially disclosed (nutritional information), as do drugs (because of the way they get approved), and certain wireless devices (FCC approval).
For file formats and communications standards, we could require disclosure by law (unlikely), or we could simply achieve it by having government make it a requirement for government contracts. The latter is quite justifiable (government documents should be freely and publicly accessible), and some governments have started requiring exactly that.
1. Every window that has menus puts them in a separate menu bar inside the window. [...] Ubuntu is not entirely ignorant of Fitt's Law
What he neglects in his analysis is that (1) that's where most users expect menu bars to be, and familiarity usually trumps Fitt's law, and (2) Fitt's law is a red herring anyway. Designing a UI based on Fitt's law is like picking a car based on the size of its spoiler or picking a girlfriend based on the size of her boobs--someone may have enough of a fetish with it to do it, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
While a few of the comments suggest minor useful improvements (e.g., multiple new windows should be cascaded, not stacked), much of rest of the analysis is filled with many more similarly irrelevant comments. And many (most?) of those comments apply to proprietary desktops as well.
The question isn't how many nits one can pick with Ubuntu, the question is whether it is good enough for regular users, and I think it is. In fact, one can even argue that it is easier to use and more consistent than the proprietary alternatives.
Reverse engineering of file formats and protocols is a right, and it's an important one to ensure a competitive and free market. The real question is whether we shouldn't just force formats to be open. Legislatively, that's a dead end, but big (eg government) can just make open formats a requirement.
IANAA-p. I am not an astro-physicicst. Anyone see any flaw in my argument?
Yes: you didn't RTFA and you didn't write what I wrote.
What kills is not the gamma radiation (that may not even kill you on the ground), it's the stripping of the ozone layer over half the globe. And that will eventually kill life all over the planet.
Space travelers and people on space stations would probably get killed by the radiation. Earth-like planets nearby would be affected in the same way as earth. Just about the only place you wouldn't be affected would be on the far side of a barren planet or inside a hollow asteroid, but both of those are still far less hospitable places than the earth would be even after such a catastrophy.
People on earth would largely be protected from the radiation. Their problem is the stripping away of the ozone layer and the subsequent death of most food crops and resulting massive famine.
However, as a species, this probably wouldn't kill us. You'd still have a breathable atmosphere on earth, decent temperatures, and other favorable conditions compared to just about anywhere else in space. Deep sea fishing, hydroponics, UV-protected green houses, etc. would allow enough humans to survive on earth in order to repopulate the earth.
Given a number of confused responses to this, let's just remind everybody: it's not the gamma rays that kill (they would only get half of the globe anyway), it's the stripping away of the ozone layer followed by intense UV radiation. That's why it's a global effect.
While that would cause huge famines and disease and kill almost all humans, it is something that our species could survive given our technology.
b) IP loss. If we sat back and did nothing about Tridge then we are implicitly condoning reverse engineering.
They should "condone reverse engineering". Without reverse engineering, open source would be nearly impossible, because we need to be able to access proprietary protocols and proprietary file structures. Furthermore, reverse engineering is specifically permitted in many countries.
One can debate whether it is desirable from an open source perspective that companies claim copyrights or patents over their code. One can even debate whether it is desirable from an open source perspective that companies don't like their code to be reverse engineered.
But reverse engineering of protocols and functionality that are not protected by patents is simply non-negotiable for open source: any company that attempts to prohibit that is fundamentally in conflict with open source, and they should be avoided like the plague by any open source developer.
McVoy has no legal leg to stand on, and his claims that he is "open source friendly" are ridiculous. Give him and Bitkeeper the boot.
It's their right to come up with strategies and plans for succeeding economically. Neither the US nor Europe have a god-given entitlement to economic dominance, nor does the rest of the world owe us any particular standard of living or minimum wage. Either we figure out how to compete at our current standard of living, or we will have to accept getting poorer.
Having said that, I'm not worried: I don't see China or India achieving the level of innovation that the US and Europe continue to achieve until they are achieving a comparable level of leisure, economic security, and prosperity.
The way to get a sterile keyboard is to use a flat membrane keyboard encased in silicone: they are easy to wipe down. In some cases, you can remove the silicone and sterilize it separately. In a pinch, you can put a wireless keyboard (flat membrane or regular) in a plastic bag.
Another choice is keyboards like these. You can disinfect those with alcohol, although they still have lots of places for bugs to hide. But they may be a reasonable compromise in some environments.
What distinguishes the Mac Mini is not its hardware (there is plenty of equivalent x86 hardware around), but its marketing and pricing as a mass market desktop machine. Hats off to Jobs--he knows his marketing. But PC manufacturers were already standardizing on smaller and smaller form factors before the Mac Mini even appeared. The PC world is going to come out with similar machines, and at a lower price point. Until then, you are better off with a Shuttle or something similar--less expensive and you can use standard parts to add memory, disk space, and other features.
The collar measures the activity of muscles ("electromyographic sensors"), not the activity of nerves. So, you actually have to move muscles in order for this thing to fire.
But you can move your vocal cords without making a sound--the presence of sound depends on pushing air over them. No air--no sound. People usually don't move their vocal cords when they don't also make a sound, so this may give you all the information you need. Even if it doesn't, you don't need complete information to recognize speech.
Re:Mindshare and image bloodbath for BitKeeper
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 1
You do know that BK is tired of people trying to reverse engineer their software, right? That's where this all started.
Who the hell cares what they are "tired off"? Reverse engineering is legal in many countries and it is an essential part of an efficient free market economy. The only exception to reverse engineering is patent protection, and that is temporary. And if you don't have that, it is completely acceptable if a cheaper copycat product drives you out of business tomorrow.
With the GPL, you are never at the mercy of anybody: you can continue to use GPL'ed code no matter what its original author decides to do.
With a license like the Bitkeeper license, you are at the mercy of the copyright holder: when he decides that he has no use for you anymore or that he doesn't like you anymore, you are in trouble. It's his legal right, it's your stupidity to have agreed to such a license in the first place.
I have two words for RMS in this case: Fuck You, RMS. I will write all the non-free software I wish and no-one is going to stop me.
I myself don't actually fully agree with RMS's statement: I think whether writing non-free software is anti-social depends on the circumstances. And not all anti-social activities are necessarily to be avoided (they may be the lesser of two evils).
But "fuck you, I can get away with doing whatever I want" is not an appropriate response, in particular to someone like RMS, who has consistently stood for his views and made a lot more personal sacrifices than you are likely ever to make for any cause in your life.
There are logical responses one can make to RMS, and one can disagree with him. But you have merely proven yourself to be quarrelsome and insulting--bad qualities in a commercial programmer. I hope your future commercial employers will take notice.
We need to develop better FOSS games. Sure, it's going to take time, but it's gonna happen. Good libraries and tools are starting to appear, and all the work that currently goes into producing free add-ons for proprietary games could go into producing free open game content.
Not as lousy as most commercial programs. Just have a look at disasters like MS Office, or Photoshop. The one thing I will give you: commercial software usually has sexier icons. Woohoo.
and Documentation.
Proprietary software these days comes with the same kind of documentation as open source software: the bookstore. You buy your "For Dummies", "Idiot's Guide", Oreilly, "... in 24h", "The... Cookbook", "... Annoyances", and whatever books according to your needs. Exactly the same for open source and proprietary software.
Why? Did your old software suddenly stop working?
Yes: commercial software stops working suddenly; that's a huge problem with commercial software. Like when my old hardware dies and the new hardware only comes with a new OS, which requires upgrades to all the applications because the promised backwards compatibility isn't working quite right.
Installations are a pain point for LUA in Windows, because they require files to be written to different areas of the Windows file system and configuration changes in the Windows Registry that often are inaccessible to ordinary user accounts.
This isn't a problem if the installer is at all reasonable: the installer should be a privileged program that performs the installation based on a declarative file that ships with the software package. No package code ever needs to run as root in most cases (and, no, not all Linux package formats get this right either).
Coming from Unix, you're used to asking 'Does this run under root or not?' But Windows operators have never had to consider that. LUA will force that choice on people," he said.
As usual, Microsoft is about 20-30 years behind the state of the art, and about 5 years behind Apple.
To encourage adoption of LUA features and principles, Microsoft has been working closely with Macrovision
Macrovision??? Sounds like the insane are running the asylum.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I'm self-employed, nobody withholds from me, so I get to feel it when I write my two checks to Fed and State treasuries.
You've got to pay taxes either way--why make yourself feel bad about it? The less I have to think about it, the better. And given current interest rates, it's not like you are losing a lot of money.
Off-loading to I/O processors is a standard technique, and the ways you implement it is an application of common engineering principles. What exactly is supposed to be patentable about TCP off-loading?
This paper provides information about a new innovation in Microsoft networking--TCP Chimney protocol stack offload.
As I suspected, most of innovation they have been producing so far may have been of the old kind...
There are plenty of excellent MP3 players that work really, really well: they just plug into USB, show up as drives, can read and organize things by MP3 tags (no need to create playlists), and charge through USB. The Rio Carbon is an example of that. For Flash based players, there are lots of them around. My3IA.com makes cheap ones that work well in my experience (you can pick up a 128M one for $35).
I think people who buy the big, popular consumer name brands just haven't done their homework: there are better deals than that around.
I should have said that it depends on where you live. But if you can do it legally in some jurisdictions, then it can be done legally.
These questions are not new. Basically, in the long run, society has decided that everything should be open: food recipies, drug recipes, production techniques. That principle is an important part of a free market--if we guaranteed perpetual monopolies on stuff, then we'd never get competition.
However, in most cases, we don't force disclosure. We encourage people to disclose by giving them limited time patent protection. If they don't patent it, or after the patent runs out, anybody and everybody can reverse engineer and use/produce/sell the idea/process/drug.
In some cases, we do force disclosure. Recipes have to be partially disclosed (nutritional information), as do drugs (because of the way they get approved), and certain wireless devices (FCC approval).
For file formats and communications standards, we could require disclosure by law (unlikely), or we could simply achieve it by having government make it a requirement for government contracts. The latter is quite justifiable (government documents should be freely and publicly accessible), and some governments have started requiring exactly that.
1. Every window that has menus puts them in a separate menu bar inside the window. [...] Ubuntu is not entirely ignorant of Fitt's Law
What he neglects in his analysis is that (1) that's where most users expect menu bars to be, and familiarity usually trumps Fitt's law, and (2) Fitt's law is a red herring anyway. Designing a UI based on Fitt's law is like picking a car based on the size of its spoiler or picking a girlfriend based on the size of her boobs--someone may have enough of a fetish with it to do it, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
While a few of the comments suggest minor useful improvements (e.g., multiple new windows should be cascaded, not stacked), much of rest of the analysis is filled with many more similarly irrelevant comments. And many (most?) of those comments apply to proprietary desktops as well.
The question isn't how many nits one can pick with Ubuntu, the question is whether it is good enough for regular users, and I think it is. In fact, one can even argue that it is easier to use and more consistent than the proprietary alternatives.
Reverse engineering of file formats and protocols is a right, and it's an important one to ensure a competitive and free market. The real question is whether we shouldn't just force formats to be open. Legislatively, that's a dead end, but big (eg government) can just make open formats a requirement.
IANAA-p. I am not an astro-physicicst. Anyone see any flaw in my argument?
Yes: you didn't RTFA and you didn't write what I wrote.
What kills is not the gamma radiation (that may not even kill you on the ground), it's the stripping of the ozone layer over half the globe. And that will eventually kill life all over the planet.
Space travelers and people on space stations would probably get killed by the radiation. Earth-like planets nearby would be affected in the same way as earth. Just about the only place you wouldn't be affected would be on the far side of a barren planet or inside a hollow asteroid, but both of those are still far less hospitable places than the earth would be even after such a catastrophy.
People on earth would largely be protected from the radiation. Their problem is the stripping away of the ozone layer and the subsequent death of most food crops and resulting massive famine.
However, as a species, this probably wouldn't kill us. You'd still have a breathable atmosphere on earth, decent temperatures, and other favorable conditions compared to just about anywhere else in space. Deep sea fishing, hydroponics, UV-protected green houses, etc. would allow enough humans to survive on earth in order to repopulate the earth.
Given a number of confused responses to this, let's just remind everybody: it's not the gamma rays that kill (they would only get half of the globe anyway), it's the stripping away of the ozone layer followed by intense UV radiation. That's why it's a global effect.
While that would cause huge famines and disease and kill almost all humans, it is something that our species could survive given our technology.
b) IP loss. If we sat back and did nothing about Tridge then we are implicitly condoning reverse engineering.
They should "condone reverse engineering". Without reverse engineering, open source would be nearly impossible, because we need to be able to access proprietary protocols and proprietary file structures. Furthermore, reverse engineering is specifically permitted in many countries.
One can debate whether it is desirable from an open source perspective that companies claim copyrights or patents over their code. One can even debate whether it is desirable from an open source perspective that companies don't like their code to be reverse engineered.
But reverse engineering of protocols and functionality that are not protected by patents is simply non-negotiable for open source: any company that attempts to prohibit that is fundamentally in conflict with open source, and they should be avoided like the plague by any open source developer.
McVoy has no legal leg to stand on, and his claims that he is "open source friendly" are ridiculous. Give him and Bitkeeper the boot.
It's their right to come up with strategies and plans for succeeding economically. Neither the US nor Europe have a god-given entitlement to economic dominance, nor does the rest of the world owe us any particular standard of living or minimum wage. Either we figure out how to compete at our current standard of living, or we will have to accept getting poorer.
Having said that, I'm not worried: I don't see China or India achieving the level of innovation that the US and Europe continue to achieve until they are achieving a comparable level of leisure, economic security, and prosperity.
The way to get a sterile keyboard is to use a flat membrane keyboard encased in silicone: they are easy to wipe down. In some cases, you can remove the silicone and sterilize it separately. In a pinch, you can put a wireless keyboard (flat membrane or regular) in a plastic bag.
Another choice is keyboards like these. You can disinfect those with alcohol, although they still have lots of places for bugs to hide. But they may be a reasonable compromise in some environments.
Use one of these. No, you don't have to open the case, although you may need to work a little harder if you don't.
More seriously, you can use one of these.
What distinguishes the Mac Mini is not its hardware (there is plenty of equivalent x86 hardware around), but its marketing and pricing as a mass market desktop machine. Hats off to Jobs--he knows his marketing. But PC manufacturers were already standardizing on smaller and smaller form factors before the Mac Mini even appeared. The PC world is going to come out with similar machines, and at a lower price point. Until then, you are better off with a Shuttle or something similar--less expensive and you can use standard parts to add memory, disk space, and other features.
The collar measures the activity of muscles ("electromyographic sensors"), not the activity of nerves. So, you actually have to move muscles in order for this thing to fire.
But you can move your vocal cords without making a sound--the presence of sound depends on pushing air over them. No air--no sound. People usually don't move their vocal cords when they don't also make a sound, so this may give you all the information you need. Even if it doesn't, you don't need complete information to recognize speech.
You do know that BK is tired of people trying to reverse engineer their software, right? That's where this all started.
Who the hell cares what they are "tired off"? Reverse engineering is legal in many countries and it is an essential part of an efficient free market economy. The only exception to reverse engineering is patent protection, and that is temporary. And if you don't have that, it is completely acceptable if a cheaper copycat product drives you out of business tomorrow.
The situation is not at all symmetric.
With the GPL, you are never at the mercy of anybody: you can continue to use GPL'ed code no matter what its original author decides to do.
With a license like the Bitkeeper license, you are at the mercy of the copyright holder: when he decides that he has no use for you anymore or that he doesn't like you anymore, you are in trouble. It's his legal right, it's your stupidity to have agreed to such a license in the first place.
If you are going to put a full time administrator on your source code control system, just about any reasonable system is going to work like a charm.
I myself don't actually fully agree with RMS's statement: I think whether writing non-free software is anti-social depends on the circumstances. And not all anti-social activities are necessarily to be avoided (they may be the lesser of two evils).
But "fuck you, I can get away with doing whatever I want" is not an appropriate response, in particular to someone like RMS, who has consistently stood for his views and made a lot more personal sacrifices than you are likely ever to make for any cause in your life.
There are logical responses one can make to RMS, and one can disagree with him. But you have merely proven yourself to be quarrelsome and insulting--bad qualities in a commercial programmer. I hope your future commercial employers will take notice.
If the movie studios piss off enough important people, maybe people will be less quick to sign over their rights and let them run the show.
We need to develop better FOSS games. Sure, it's going to take time, but it's gonna happen. Good libraries and tools are starting to appear, and all the work that currently goes into producing free add-ons for proprietary games could go into producing free open game content.
And are lousy at GUI's
... Cookbook", "... Annoyances", and whatever books according to your needs. Exactly the same for open source and proprietary software.
Not as lousy as most commercial programs. Just have a look at disasters like MS Office, or Photoshop. The one thing I will give you: commercial software usually has sexier icons. Woohoo.
and Documentation.
Proprietary software these days comes with the same kind of documentation as open source software: the bookstore. You buy your "For Dummies", "Idiot's Guide", Oreilly, "... in 24h", "The
Why? Did your old software suddenly stop working?
Yes: commercial software stops working suddenly; that's a huge problem with commercial software. Like when my old hardware dies and the new hardware only comes with a new OS, which requires upgrades to all the applications because the promised backwards compatibility isn't working quite right.
Installations are a pain point for LUA in Windows, because they require files to be written to different areas of the Windows file system and configuration changes in the Windows Registry that often are inaccessible to ordinary user accounts.
This isn't a problem if the installer is at all reasonable: the installer should be a privileged program that performs the installation based on a declarative file that ships with the software package. No package code ever needs to run as root in most cases (and, no, not all Linux package formats get this right either).
Coming from Unix, you're used to asking 'Does this run under root or not?' But Windows operators have never had to consider that. LUA will force that choice on people," he said.
As usual, Microsoft is about 20-30 years behind the state of the art, and about 5 years behind Apple.
To encourage adoption of LUA features and principles, Microsoft has been working closely with Macrovision
Macrovision??? Sounds like the insane are running the asylum.