Large companies buy software from "stable organizations" not because they're worried about the quality of the software, but because it's safe. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft or IBM (or, increasingly, Linux or Eclipse). You're part of a crowd -- safety in numbers.
A purchaser at a corporation might get *fired* (cutting his salary to zero) because he bought something that turns out to not be what the company wants, but he isn't going to get that much of a reward (say, doubling his salary) if he manages to save the company the cost of the purchase by finding a free alternative.
As a result, it's in everyone's best interest to keep their head down, run with the herd, and make maximally ass-covering decisions.
If I'm trying to solve an engineering problem, I'm more than happy to use all kinds of high-quality packages that aren't backed by a large company. But that's because I'm trying to solve an engineering problem.
A purchaser isn't trying to solve an engineering problem. A purchaser is trying to solve the problem of how to maximize his job safety and income. And today's corporate reward structure heavily penalizes risk-taking.
If you want to produce solutions more in line with actually solving the original engineering problem, you go work at a startup or other small company where people don't have any problem with risk-taking.
If you go to work at a large company, you're going to be working with a large collection of highly risk-adverse people. That may be perfectly reasonable for them -- if one is middle-aged and has a wife, kids, and a house, stability matters a hell of a lot to you. If that doesn't fit with your mindset, though, you might want to try out those smaller companies.
Yes, you can use MySQL legally in a commercial app without buying a license. You aren't linking to it. However, MySQL says that you *do* need a license. Enough people are going to be scared enough to buy a license. Open source people just see "GPL -- okay, must not be evil" and go ahead and use it.
This is why I use Postgres and avoid the whole ugly thing.
If Congress wants a revolution in China, great. I don't see why the hell they expect Google to fight their wars for them, though. I pay lots of tax money to fund the CIA so that *they* can start revolutions in various places.
A lot of people were pretty sure at one point that communism was a pretty enlightened and excellent idea. You can be damned sure that if the USSR started putting pressure on any organizations that they had influence over to spew communist ideology in the US, that people and government in the US would be pissy about it, and it would be considered "evil" by the people in the US.
Ultimately, revolutions come from within. If you don't have lots of discontented people, you aren't going to have an uprising. Maybe you can be the one to touch flame to tinder and accelerate things by a couple of years, but you can't build a revolution from nothing (but you can sure as hell antagonize people by trying). The folks in China clearly are not unhappy enough at the moment with the censorship going on to want to do something about it. All Google is doing is not trying to fight the social norms in China.
If Congress wants to run psyops, they can use the system that is already being paid for by my tax dollars -- Voice of America. As you can see in the table on WP, China is now the leading target of US propaganda. The end of the Cold War kind of terminated our interest in poking the Soviet Union.
China is a competitive market, and one in which Google is not dominant. If you try to force Google to leverage their market influence in the hopes of pushing your own culture on someone else, you're just going to kill Google in that market. That's a really stupid idea if you're trying to export services like Google.
Well, you may be looking at this from an American standpoint.
For example, the death penalty is considered by a lot of folks to be an atrocity.
The US makes it a hell of a lot easier for civilians to kill people than most other first-world countries. For example, in Texas, if you spot a sixteen-year-old kid about to spray graffiti on your house at night, you yell "stop" and they ignore you and you feel that it would be risky to use non-lethal force to stop them, you are allowed to kill them on the spot to prevent them from spraying the paint (Texas Penal Code 9.42 allows deadly force to prevent imminent commision of criminal mischief at night). This appalls a lot of folks in other countries.
It's all a matter of what your culture gets you used to accepting.
Placing a question mark or any sentence-terminating punctuation inside quotes if a quote is at the end of a sentence, depressingly, is actually the correct thing to do in American English.
In American English, you'd write:
Be sure to go to "http://www.apple.com/."
In British English, you'd write:
Be sure to go to "http://www.apple.com/".
Obviously, the American English convention is very unfortunate if you are doing any kind of quoting of content in which punctuation is not a metacharacter -- otherwise, the reader has no idea whether the period is part of the quotation or not. This directly impacts all kinds of tech writing.
While I'm normally a grammar stickler, I deliberately break this rule. I'm joined by many other people who need to write content in which a period is not a metacharacter. If enough people in the US deliberately use British punctuation, this usage will become official American English.
A number of have started referring to the British English rule as "logical quoting" (as opposed to the illogical quoting used in American English).
I remember the War on Drugs slogan where marijuana was tagged as being dangerous not because of its own effects, but because it was a "gateway drug", and led to stronger recreational drug use.
Censorship to eliminate pornography makes me think of the same thing. Pornography censorship is a gateway to more severe censorship.
I spent a lot of time on the forums and on the irc channels back then and I never heard anyone call him a traitor or other shit like that. It made us sad, not angry -- those of us who are adults understand that you need a job that pays and sometimes that means not working on OSS all day long.
I think that an awful lot of people would be very surprised how many of the hackers that write open source software have a day job in which they write closed source software. If someone wants to attack those hackers as "selling out" or a "traitor", it'd be kind of silly. Lots of hackers (I suspect the majority of hackers) write open source software because they want to make something *good* for themselves and their fellow hackers. They want to enjoy a world time pressures, bad administrative-level ideas, language and platform requirements are all just a bad dream, and they can create truly nifty stuff. It's not because they consider themselves soldiers in some crusade -- sure, it's a fun idea to play with, but it's not really why people spend their time working on something neat. Open Source just allows hanging out and showing off with other hackers, and making it easier for other hacker-types to give a hand.
Maybe a good analogy for hackery would be the guy who is a commercial graphic designer by day and an artist by night. All day he has to churn out relatively boring things for people who often come up with absurd requirements. He has to work under time pressure and doesn't have the freedom he'd like to experiment with his ideas. However, at night, he can try out his ideas, do really interesting stuff, and so forth. Just because he has to churn out bread-and-butter stuff doesn't mean that he can't legitimately explore at night.
Put simply, the hacker is the artist of the computer world.
That's the problem I have with OSS purists. There is this sense of entitlement to free code and no notion of rewarding someone who works hard besides a pat on the back. I believe this hurts OSS as a whole. I don't think the openness of code, which is a good thing, should be tightly coupled with getting something for nothing.
I can't agree. Richard Stallman, which is about as Free purist as you can get, emphasizes very distinctly the difference between gratis and libre.
If you are working as a volunteer on a hobby project, yes, people are probably not going to spontaneously cough up money for you. If you are relying on them doing so, you are probably going to be disappointed. If, however, you are doing the project because you want to make something cool, then you will probably be happy.
OSS need not be volunteer work -- look at the engineers paid to work on Open Office by Sun. It's just works very well if you're planning to do volunteer projects, so many volunteer projects are open source.
Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft does hire lots of *nix people. But you aren't going to be doing cutting edge work. They don't even use C++. No, I don't mean they use C#. They use C and lots of reference-counted pointers. No STL at all. Windows is really pretty ugly inside. If you are programmer with very high standards, you aren't going to like it.
Uh...
You know, I have to say that there is just about zero necessary connection between the language you are using and whether or not your work is "cutting edge".
I suspect that if you're writing Java, you're more likely to be writing server-side code or front ends, and if you're writing C, more likely to be systems coding. Do you not think that systems coding has new and interesting ideas present? The residents of LKML would probably disagree.
I also can't figure out why the STL would be necessary to do "cutting edge work". It's a just a decent utility library. There are many libraries like it. You could write one yourself.
As for Windows being ugly inside -- Windows is ugly *outside*. Win32 is an ugly API. I would be rather surprised if Windows' internals were stunningly beautiful.
Only if you network your way into management does the work get creative or challenging.
That depends on what you consider creative and challenging.
Some people really enjoy figuring out how to take resources (in this case people) of limited complexity (at least in how you must work with them) that they have limited information about and use heuristics and experience to try to use them most effectively. I suspect that these folks tend to like working with a limited-knowledge situation.
I'm pretty happy using resources (software) that have a high degree of complexity that I have the ability to obtain whatever information I need about. The challenge comes in the fact that the complexity is high enough that I need to produce tools to bring that complexity down to a reasonable level.
It's a different set of problems, but I simply don't agree that you must be in management to have problems that require creativity or challenge you. There are probably workplaces where this is true, but I definitely do not agree with this as a blanket statement about the American software industry.
You've probably heard the quote, "BSD is for people that love Unix; Linux is for people that hate Windows."
Uh...I'm going to say "no" on that one.
BSD is maybe less usable as a desktop, but Linux is awesome because it's a really, really good Unix replacement. The GNU POSIX utilities beat the hell out of the traditional Unix utilities, and Linux is fast. More people are hacking software for and testing for Linux than BSD.
Linux is nothing amazing as a drop-in Windows replacement. If you just want an OS that lets you double-click on an icon and start up your office applications, if you have no interest in scripting or software development or running servers, then you can use Linux, but it's hardly going to revolutionize your world. Linux is maybe more stable and faster than Windows, but that doesn't mean that the same is true of all the productivity-type apps, and that doesn't affect a productivity application user all that much. You save the price of Windows and commercial software, but have to learn different applications and have fewer commercial-style games. Octave instead of MATLAB, Open Office instead of MS Office, Gimp instead of Photoshop.
I'd never substitute a Windows box for my Linux desktop, but that's because I use Linux like a Unix, not like Windows. Aside from a web browser, almost everything I do is in an xterm. If you've got the time and technical knowledge to learn Unix, I think that it's a damned incredible environment to work in, and a very worthwhile investment for anyone involved in the tech world. However, all that doesn't matter much if you just want a tool that lets you delete files and launch your office application.
Actually, the same goes for Mac OS X. If all you want is an application-launching shell with icons, then it doesn't really matter all that much whether you're using Mac OS X or Windows. Mac OS X has more alpha fading in the shell, and Windows has more commercial software. [shrug] Big deal.
Besides, most of the good Free software that you'd use under Linux if you wanted to just use Linux like a Windows is also available (in my experience, usually in a somewhat slower and less stable form, but still available) under Windows. Firefox, GIMP, Open Office, etc.
The article is a little short on technical specifics, but it's hard to imagine how a watermarking system would work with a lossy compression format.
Well, see, this is Fraunhoffer. The people that, y'know, developed MP3. So, presumably, they're pretty familiar with MP3's failings, places where it encodes less-useful data. And they can exploit some of those to stuff watermark data.
The big problem with watermarking is that if you use it in a lossless format, someone will come along with a new compression format, and the watermark data will go away in a couple years with all the people using the latest, sexiest lossless format.
However, nobody wants to recompress lossily-compressed data into another lossily-compressed format -- nobody's going to recompress MP3 into Vorbis. So, presumably, as long as the vendors *only* ship lossy data and nobody tries coming up with a lossy compression scheme specifically designed to re-encode from MP3 well, the watermark data stays.
I don't see how you could squeeze much more from watermarking.
The enemy of this scheme is increasing storage capacity and lossless players. At some point, someone's going to start marketing lossless quality portable players to get an edge over the competition, and then you have demand for losslessly compressed audio data...and then this all goes away.
4. After Linux achieves World Domination, Linus intends to start several Crusades and an Inquisition against enemies of Linux.
5. Richard Stallman does not recognize his own fallibility.
Of course, there are some differences:
1. Linux fans have never burned books in the name of Linux.
2. Linux is heavily used to conduct research rather than to oppose research.
3. Linux incorporates new ideas, instead of demanding that everyone conform to the scribblings of some long-dead types (Linux even ignores POSIX on points that LKML thinks POSIX is crack-smoking).
Would you send your 12 year old daughter camping with a 35 year old man, or your 12 year old son camping with a 35 year old woman? Well, this is slashdot and a lot of readers don't have a lot of common sense, but I'd wager most people wouldn't.
Good *Lord*. I mean, are you afraid of your own shadow?
What the hell happened to common sense?
I think the problem has to be disproportionate media coverage. Mass media likes the most frightening, disturbing stories, so people get bombarded with horrific stories today. I know some people who are scared to walk outside of their houses after dark (despite living in an area with nonexistant crime). It's insane. People are scared silly over nothing.
Look, the thing that's statistically most likely to happen to a kid is that they get hit by a car or fall down stairs or something utterly mundane and unnewsworthy like that. People don't worry about those things because those aren't exciting.
I swear, if every parent that told their kid "don't get in a car with strangers" spent the time saying "don't run out into the street without looking", there'd probably be a lot more lives saved.
Worry about the real risks, not the scary phantoms.
1. Its been used in games for two decades now with nary a lawsuit. You have to actually defend a trademark to keep it.
Yes, but this is guaranteed by the First Geneva Convention (Article 44):
With the exception of the cases mentioned in the following paragraphs of the present Article, the emblem of the red cross on a white ground and the words " Red Cross" or " Geneva Cross " may not be employed, either in time of peace or in time of war, except to indicate or to protect the medical units and establishments, the personnel and material protected by the present Convention and other Conventions dealing with similar matters. The same shall apply to the emblems mentioned in Article 38, second paragraph, in respect of the countries which use them. The National Red Cross Societies and other societies designated in Article 26 shall have the right to use the distinctive emblem conferring the protection of the Convention only within the framework of the present paragraph.
Furthermore, National Red Cross (Red Crescent, Red Lion and Sun) Societies may, in time of peace, in accordance with their rational legislation, make use of the name and emblem of the Red Cross for their other activities which are in conformity with the principles laid down by the International Red Cross Conferences. When those activities are carried out in time of war, the conditions for the use of the emblem shall be such that it cannot be considered as conferring the protection of the Convention; the emblem shall be comparatively small in size and may not be placed on armlets or on the roofs of buildings.
The international Red Cross organizations and their duly authorized personnel shall be permitted to make use, at all times, of the emblem of the red cross on a white ground.
As an exceptional measure, in conformity with national legislation and with the express permission of one of the National Red Cross (Red Crescent, Red Lion and Sun) Societies, the emblem of the Convention may be employed in time of peace to identify vehicles used as ambulances and to mark the position of aid stations exclusively assigned to the purpose of giving free treatment to the wounded or sick.
And I'm pretty sure that the argument that "someone ignored the Geneva Convention in the past, so we get to ignore it too" doesn't hold water.
Sun always gets griped at every time it does anything nice for the open source world.
It's not just OO. Take Java.
I don't have a problem with Sun merely making the Java spec open and freely available. If open source is the panacea that ESR claims it is, then it could produce a good JVM. Instead, I kept hearing him attacking Sun for not also giving up their Java *implementation*.
Same thing with OpenOffice.
If it's really in Sun's interest to back off, then Sun can probably figure that out.
My take is that OO and Java are both slow, RAM-hungry things that I can happily do without, so I may be more than a little biased -- my life is not badly impacted by either not being maximally free. However, if I was an exec at Sun, I'd be getting awfully annoyed with the constant begging for free software.
Frankly, I've got a much more convincing reason why people don't hack on OO -- it's a big project. It's a pain to drop in and do a little work on a large codebase unless it's heavily modularized (a la emacs). It's the same reason that Netscape had to do most of the work on Mozilla and why XFree86 doesn't get tons of volunteers writing code. They're overwhelming enough that you can't just drop in, add a little feature, and leave.
On the other hand, there are scads of CPAN modules, because each module is a little kingdom unto itself.
The more modular the software, the better it works with OSS. Break out the spellchecker and let people who like trying out spellchecker algorithms play with it. Break out the font rendering engine. Break out everything possible....enough rambling for one night...
Because "more exciting" versions of stories to suck in readers are occasionally used in the articles that are linked to, in Slashdot summaries, often used in posts, and so forth.
Since the very beginning, Google has said that it's just providing a search service. Unless you're going to somehow find out that a single quote is in a book and plan to buy the book to get that one quote, Google is not costing publishers any money.
I can understand that publishers are leery of this being "the beginning of the end" -- after all, if they let Google get away with this, who knows what will happen tomorrow, with this used as prescedent? Still, though, the ability to have a free text search of all published works is phenomenally valuable for society, and not something that has been available to us before now.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is not that Microsoft can be held accountable -- it's that the purchaser cannot be held responsible.
Corporations are highly risk-adverse in culture.
Large companies buy software from "stable organizations" not because they're worried about the quality of the software, but because it's safe. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft or IBM (or, increasingly, Linux or Eclipse). You're part of a crowd -- safety in numbers.
A purchaser at a corporation might get *fired* (cutting his salary to zero) because he bought something that turns out to not be what the company wants, but he isn't going to get that much of a reward (say, doubling his salary) if he manages to save the company the cost of the purchase by finding a free alternative.
As a result, it's in everyone's best interest to keep their head down, run with the herd, and make maximally ass-covering decisions.
If I'm trying to solve an engineering problem, I'm more than happy to use all kinds of high-quality packages that aren't backed by a large company. But that's because I'm trying to solve an engineering problem.
A purchaser isn't trying to solve an engineering problem. A purchaser is trying to solve the problem of how to maximize his job safety and income. And today's corporate reward structure heavily penalizes risk-taking.
If you want to produce solutions more in line with actually solving the original engineering problem, you go work at a startup or other small company where people don't have any problem with risk-taking.
If you go to work at a large company, you're going to be working with a large collection of highly risk-adverse people. That may be perfectly reasonable for them -- if one is middle-aged and has a wife, kids, and a house, stability matters a hell of a lot to you. If that doesn't fit with your mindset, though, you might want to try out those smaller companies.
Ah, but, see, MySQL AB makes its revenue by spreading exactly that FUD.
Yes, you can use MySQL legally in a commercial app without buying a license. You aren't linking to it. However, MySQL says that you *do* need a license. Enough people are going to be scared enough to buy a license. Open source people just see "GPL -- okay, must not be evil" and go ahead and use it.
This is why I use Postgres and avoid the whole ugly thing.
That's facinating. Thanks. I had no idea that Berkely DB was under such a restrictive license...I kind of assumed that it was LGPL.
If Congress wants a revolution in China, great. I don't see why the hell they expect Google to fight their wars for them, though. I pay lots of tax money to fund the CIA so that *they* can start revolutions in various places.
A lot of people were pretty sure at one point that communism was a pretty enlightened and excellent idea. You can be damned sure that if the USSR started putting pressure on any organizations that they had influence over to spew communist ideology in the US, that people and government in the US would be pissy about it, and it would be considered "evil" by the people in the US.
Ultimately, revolutions come from within. If you don't have lots of discontented people, you aren't going to have an uprising. Maybe you can be the one to touch flame to tinder and accelerate things by a couple of years, but you can't build a revolution from nothing (but you can sure as hell antagonize people by trying). The folks in China clearly are not unhappy enough at the moment with the censorship going on to want to do something about it. All Google is doing is not trying to fight the social norms in China.
If Congress wants to run psyops, they can use the system that is already being paid for by my tax dollars -- Voice of America. As you can see in the table on WP, China is now the leading target of US propaganda. The end of the Cold War kind of terminated our interest in poking the Soviet Union.
China is a competitive market, and one in which Google is not dominant. If you try to force Google to leverage their market influence in the hopes of pushing your own culture on someone else, you're just going to kill Google in that market. That's a really stupid idea if you're trying to export services like Google.
This is a *geek* website. We *automate* things!
1) Go get Greasemonkey.
2) Go get the CoralCache Slashdot Greasemonkey plugin.
3) Profit!
Well, you may be looking at this from an American standpoint.
For example, the death penalty is considered by a lot of folks to be an atrocity.
The US makes it a hell of a lot easier for civilians to kill people than most other first-world countries. For example, in Texas, if you spot a sixteen-year-old kid about to spray graffiti on your house at night, you yell "stop" and they ignore you and you feel that it would be risky to use non-lethal force to stop them, you are allowed to kill them on the spot to prevent them from spraying the paint (Texas Penal Code 9.42 allows deadly force to prevent imminent commision of criminal mischief at night). This appalls a lot of folks in other countries.
It's all a matter of what your culture gets you used to accepting.
Those are enforced because compelling a minor to strip naked and fuck a dog or whatever is illegal.
On the other hand, a seventeen-year-old sitting around in the nude is legal. Taking a picture, however, is a felony.
This is clearly a case of using the wrong tool for the job.
Placing a question mark or any sentence-terminating punctuation inside quotes if a quote is at the end of a sentence, depressingly, is actually the correct thing to do in American English.
In American English, you'd write:
Be sure to go to "http://www.apple.com/."
In British English, you'd write:
Be sure to go to "http://www.apple.com/".
Obviously, the American English convention is very unfortunate if you are doing any kind of quoting of content in which punctuation is not a metacharacter -- otherwise, the reader has no idea whether the period is part of the quotation or not. This directly impacts all kinds of tech writing.
While I'm normally a grammar stickler, I deliberately break this rule. I'm joined by many other people who need to write content in which a period is not a metacharacter. If enough people in the US deliberately use British punctuation, this usage will become official American English.
A number of have started referring to the British English rule as "logical quoting" (as opposed to the illogical quoting used in American English).
We all want porn. But we're all too embarrassed to say so.
Or, rather, we have a social structure that indoctrinates us to be embarassed to say so.
I remember the War on Drugs slogan where marijuana was tagged as being dangerous not because of its own effects, but because it was a "gateway drug", and led to stronger recreational drug use.
Censorship to eliminate pornography makes me think of the same thing. Pornography censorship is a gateway to more severe censorship.
I spent a lot of time on the forums and on the irc channels back then and I never heard anyone call him a traitor or other shit like that. It made us sad, not angry -- those of us who are adults understand that you need a job that pays and sometimes that means not working on OSS all day long.
I think that an awful lot of people would be very surprised how many of the hackers that write open source software have a day job in which they write closed source software. If someone wants to attack those hackers as "selling out" or a "traitor", it'd be kind of silly. Lots of hackers (I suspect the majority of hackers) write open source software because they want to make something *good* for themselves and their fellow hackers. They want to enjoy a world time pressures, bad administrative-level ideas, language and platform requirements are all just a bad dream, and they can create truly nifty stuff. It's not because they consider themselves soldiers in some crusade -- sure, it's a fun idea to play with, but it's not really why people spend their time working on something neat. Open Source just allows hanging out and showing off with other hackers, and making it easier for other hacker-types to give a hand.
Maybe a good analogy for hackery would be the guy who is a commercial graphic designer by day and an artist by night. All day he has to churn out relatively boring things for people who often come up with absurd requirements. He has to work under time pressure and doesn't have the freedom he'd like to experiment with his ideas. However, at night, he can try out his ideas, do really interesting stuff, and so forth. Just because he has to churn out bread-and-butter stuff doesn't mean that he can't legitimately explore at night.
Put simply, the hacker is the artist of the computer world.
That's the problem I have with OSS purists. There is this sense of entitlement to free code and no notion of rewarding someone who works hard besides a pat on the back. I believe this hurts OSS as a whole. I don't think the openness of code, which is a good thing, should be tightly coupled with getting something for nothing.
I can't agree. Richard Stallman, which is about as Free purist as you can get, emphasizes very distinctly the difference between gratis and libre.
If you are working as a volunteer on a hobby project, yes, people are probably not going to spontaneously cough up money for you. If you are relying on them doing so, you are probably going to be disappointed. If, however, you are doing the project because you want to make something cool, then you will probably be happy.
OSS need not be volunteer work -- look at the engineers paid to work on Open Office by Sun. It's just works very well if you're planning to do volunteer projects, so many volunteer projects are open source.
Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft does hire lots of *nix people. But you aren't going to be doing cutting edge work. They don't even use C++. No, I don't mean they use C#. They use C and lots of reference-counted pointers. No STL at all. Windows is really pretty ugly inside. If you are programmer with very high standards, you aren't going to like it.
Uh...
You know, I have to say that there is just about zero necessary connection between the language you are using and whether or not your work is "cutting edge".
I suspect that if you're writing Java, you're more likely to be writing server-side code or front ends, and if you're writing C, more likely to be systems coding. Do you not think that systems coding has new and interesting ideas present? The residents of LKML would probably disagree.
I also can't figure out why the STL would be necessary to do "cutting edge work". It's a just a decent utility library. There are many libraries like it. You could write one yourself.
As for Windows being ugly inside -- Windows is ugly *outside*. Win32 is an ugly API. I would be rather surprised if Windows' internals were stunningly beautiful.
Only if you network your way into management does the work get creative or challenging.
That depends on what you consider creative and challenging.
Some people really enjoy figuring out how to take resources (in this case people) of limited complexity (at least in how you must work with them) that they have limited information about and use heuristics and experience to try to use them most effectively. I suspect that these folks tend to like working with a limited-knowledge situation.
I'm pretty happy using resources (software) that have a high degree of complexity that I have the ability to obtain whatever information I need about. The challenge comes in the fact that the complexity is high enough that I need to produce tools to bring that complexity down to a reasonable level.
It's a different set of problems, but I simply don't agree that you must be in management to have problems that require creativity or challenge you. There are probably workplaces where this is true, but I definitely do not agree with this as a blanket statement about the American software industry.
SuSE has always been KDE-centric, and Red Hat always GNOME-centric.
Red Hat is the most popular distro in the US, and SuSE the most popular in Germany.
I would expect that there are more German KDE users and more US GNOME users.
Of the graphical apps I use, all are gtk+, but my desktop doesn't have the GNOME bar, icons on the desktop, etc.
I *do* dislike SuSE, which is rather less ideologically Free than the other major distros. To be fair, Red Hat is rather less Free than Debian...
You've probably heard the quote, "BSD is for people that love Unix; Linux is for people that hate Windows."
Uh...I'm going to say "no" on that one.
BSD is maybe less usable as a desktop, but Linux is awesome because it's a really, really good Unix replacement. The GNU POSIX utilities beat the hell out of the traditional Unix utilities, and Linux is fast. More people are hacking software for and testing for Linux than BSD.
Linux is nothing amazing as a drop-in Windows replacement. If you just want an OS that lets you double-click on an icon and start up your office applications, if you have no interest in scripting or software development or running servers, then you can use Linux, but it's hardly going to revolutionize your world. Linux is maybe more stable and faster than Windows, but that doesn't mean that the same is true of all the productivity-type apps, and that doesn't affect a productivity application user all that much. You save the price of Windows and commercial software, but have to learn different applications and have fewer commercial-style games. Octave instead of MATLAB, Open Office instead of MS Office, Gimp instead of Photoshop.
I'd never substitute a Windows box for my Linux desktop, but that's because I use Linux like a Unix, not like Windows. Aside from a web browser, almost everything I do is in an xterm. If you've got the time and technical knowledge to learn Unix, I think that it's a damned incredible environment to work in, and a very worthwhile investment for anyone involved in the tech world. However, all that doesn't matter much if you just want a tool that lets you delete files and launch your office application.
Actually, the same goes for Mac OS X. If all you want is an application-launching shell with icons, then it doesn't really matter all that much whether you're using Mac OS X or Windows. Mac OS X has more alpha fading in the shell, and Windows has more commercial software. [shrug] Big deal.
Besides, most of the good Free software that you'd use under Linux if you wanted to just use Linux like a Windows is also available (in my experience, usually in a somewhat slower and less stable form, but still available) under Windows. Firefox, GIMP, Open Office, etc.
The article is a little short on technical specifics, but it's hard to imagine how a watermarking system would work with a lossy compression format.
Well, see, this is Fraunhoffer. The people that, y'know, developed MP3. So, presumably, they're pretty familiar with MP3's failings, places where it encodes less-useful data. And they can exploit some of those to stuff watermark data.
The big problem with watermarking is that if you use it in a lossless format, someone will come along with a new compression format, and the watermark data will go away in a couple years with all the people using the latest, sexiest lossless format.
However, nobody wants to recompress lossily-compressed data into another lossily-compressed format -- nobody's going to recompress MP3 into Vorbis. So, presumably, as long as the vendors *only* ship lossy data and nobody tries coming up with a lossy compression scheme specifically designed to re-encode from MP3 well, the watermark data stays.
I don't see how you could squeeze much more from watermarking.
The enemy of this scheme is increasing storage capacity and lossless players. At some point, someone's going to start marketing lossless quality portable players to get an edge over the competition, and then you have demand for losslessly compressed audio data...and then this all goes away.
If anything, Christianity is more like Linux:
4. After Linux achieves World Domination, Linus intends to start several Crusades and an Inquisition against enemies of Linux.
5. Richard Stallman does not recognize his own fallibility.
Of course, there are some differences:
1. Linux fans have never burned books in the name of Linux.
2. Linux is heavily used to conduct research rather than to oppose research.
3. Linux incorporates new ideas, instead of demanding that everyone conform to the scribblings of some long-dead types (Linux even ignores POSIX on points that LKML thinks POSIX is crack-smoking).
Unless you want your kids to end up being like those crazy cat ladies, with brain-damaging cysts, get rid of your cat!
:-) )
(Buy a dog instead.
Would you send your 12 year old daughter camping with a 35 year old man, or your 12 year old son camping with a 35 year old woman? Well, this is slashdot and a lot of readers don't have a lot of common sense, but I'd wager most people wouldn't.
Good *Lord*. I mean, are you afraid of your own shadow?
What the hell happened to common sense?
I think the problem has to be disproportionate media coverage. Mass media likes the most frightening, disturbing stories, so people get bombarded with horrific stories today. I know some people who are scared to walk outside of their houses after dark (despite living in an area with nonexistant crime). It's insane. People are scared silly over nothing.
Look, the thing that's statistically most likely to happen to a kid is that they get hit by a car or fall down stairs or something utterly mundane and unnewsworthy like that. People don't worry about those things because those aren't exciting.
I swear, if every parent that told their kid "don't get in a car with strangers" spent the time saying "don't run out into the street without looking", there'd probably be a lot more lives saved.
Worry about the real risks, not the scary phantoms.
1. Its been used in games for two decades now with nary a lawsuit. You have to actually defend a trademark to keep it.
Yes, but this is guaranteed by the First Geneva Convention (Article 44):
With the exception of the cases mentioned in the following paragraphs of the present Article, the emblem of the red cross on a white ground and the words " Red Cross" or " Geneva Cross " may not be employed, either in time of peace or in time of war, except to indicate or to protect the medical units and establishments, the personnel and material protected by the present Convention and other Conventions dealing with similar matters. The same shall apply to the emblems mentioned in Article 38, second paragraph, in respect of the countries which use them. The National Red Cross Societies and other societies designated in Article 26 shall have the right to use the distinctive emblem conferring the protection of the Convention only within the framework of the present paragraph.
Furthermore, National Red Cross (Red Crescent, Red Lion and Sun) Societies may, in time of peace, in accordance with their rational legislation, make use of the name and emblem of the Red Cross for their other activities which are in conformity with the principles laid down by the International Red Cross Conferences. When those activities are carried out in time of war, the conditions for the use of the emblem shall be such that it cannot be considered as conferring the protection of the Convention; the emblem shall be comparatively small in size and may not be placed on armlets or on the roofs of buildings.
The international Red Cross organizations and their duly authorized personnel shall be permitted to make use, at all times, of the emblem of the red cross on a white ground.
As an exceptional measure, in conformity with national legislation and with the express permission of one of the National Red Cross (Red Crescent, Red Lion and Sun) Societies, the emblem of the Convention may be employed in time of peace to identify vehicles used as ambulances and to mark the position of aid stations exclusively assigned to the purpose of giving free treatment to the wounded or sick.
And I'm pretty sure that the argument that "someone ignored the Geneva Convention in the past, so we get to ignore it too" doesn't hold water.
Sun always gets griped at every time it does anything nice for the open source world.
...enough rambling for one night...
It's not just OO. Take Java.
I don't have a problem with Sun merely making the Java spec open and freely available. If open source is the panacea that ESR claims it is, then it could produce a good JVM. Instead, I kept hearing him attacking Sun for not also giving up their Java *implementation*.
Same thing with OpenOffice.
If it's really in Sun's interest to back off, then Sun can probably figure that out.
My take is that OO and Java are both slow, RAM-hungry things that I can happily do without, so I may be more than a little biased -- my life is not badly impacted by either not being maximally free. However, if I was an exec at Sun, I'd be getting awfully annoyed with the constant begging for free software.
Frankly, I've got a much more convincing reason why people don't hack on OO -- it's a big project. It's a pain to drop in and do a little work on a large codebase unless it's heavily modularized (a la emacs). It's the same reason that Netscape had to do most of the work on Mozilla and why XFree86 doesn't get tons of volunteers writing code. They're overwhelming enough that you can't just drop in, add a little feature, and leave.
On the other hand, there are scads of CPAN modules, because each module is a little kingdom unto itself.
The more modular the software, the better it works with OSS. Break out the spellchecker and let people who like trying out spellchecker algorithms play with it. Break out the font rendering engine. Break out everything possible.
Because "more exciting" versions of stories to suck in readers are occasionally used in the articles that are linked to, in Slashdot summaries, often used in posts, and so forth.
Since the very beginning, Google has said that it's just providing a search service. Unless you're going to somehow find out that a single quote is in a book and plan to buy the book to get that one quote, Google is not costing publishers any money.
I can understand that publishers are leery of this being "the beginning of the end" -- after all, if they let Google get away with this, who knows what will happen tomorrow, with this used as prescedent? Still, though, the ability to have a free text search of all published works is phenomenally valuable for society, and not something that has been available to us before now.