But that is a violation of the spirit of the GPL. The GPL is about securing some fundamental rights for the user (like the ability to modify free software on your own hardware). Linus doesn't really care that much for the users and that will probably come back to bite him.
No. There can't be an open standard for DRM. DRM relies on obfuscation. If there was, someone would just write a program that could read/write the format and simply 'forget' the restrictions.
That's how DRM works in PDF. It's utterly pointless and only serves to give the authors the illusion that their content is protected.
Actually, it's still arbitrary because there's no intrinsic connection between 360 and a circle. It might be a very convenient arbitrary number, but it's still arbitrary. That said, arbitrary constants are pretty common, even in the sciences. There aren't many people who would contest the widespread usage of base 10.
A more interesting question, I think, is whether "true AI," should it come to pass, will be derived from basic principles (i.e. math) or based on heuristics (i.e. not math)
Actually, many heuristic solutions involve at least as much mathematics as the so-called "basic principles". Part of speech tagging is one of the areas where heuristic solutions using things like the Hidden Markov Model are quite effective.
Because flat files are simple. There are no hidden surprises like comments or empty elements. The only thing you have to watch out for is are the tabs mistaken for spaces (and the occasional brain-dead editor that sticks a BOM in the file, or uses something other than ASCII/UTF-8, and those are problems that all text-based formats have).
Moreover, markup is not the way to fix bad source code. Even regular pen-and-paper authors will acknowledge that styling text should be the last resort and that conveying the intended emphasis or meaning should be done with the author's proper tools: a careful choice of words, sentence structure, and overall flow.
Now we are authors of computer code. Our tool are different, but the principles are the same. Straightforward variable names, one statement per line, functions to structure the code: these are just a few of the tools we have to make are code easy for humans to understand.
And by the way, HTML should not be a presentation language, that's what CSS is for.
Gnome will do that with it's important processes like nautilus and the menu and such. Even Xorg will restart at least 3 times. At some point, however, this artificial resuscitation isn't going to do you any good no mater what OS you use.
Does the ODF specification support each and every Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2007 feature?
Thank goodness no. "Auto Space like Word 95"? That's in the OOXML spec (and there's no explanation on how Word 95 does spacing either).
If not, is it extensible?
Yeah, it's XML. Also, unlike OOXML, ODF uses namespaces, so you can create a separate standard if you don't want to muck around with ODF.
If it is extensible, do changes have to go through some sort of committee to be incorporated? How frequently are changes incorporated? How long is the process?
It would depend. The thing about changing standards is that it causes problems for all sorts of people. There is a real need for a stable and standardized document format that just doesn't change, or if it does, very slightly.
I can't speak for the GP, but I haven't bought an iPhone; however, that's not a sufficient solution. The problem is that while you and I may be educated enough to know the issue at stake here, most consumers are not.
If you will forgive an analogy, the situation here bears some relation to the situation in the food and drug industry. There are very few people who are willing to educate themselves enough so they can make reasonable food choices. Therefore, the Americans (I don't know what we Canadians do) have the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that monitors the products that corporations want to put on the market to make sure that they are reasonably safe. Had this been left to regular people to sort out, the market would be full of all sorts of crazy chemicals (worse that it already is!) because regular people don't understand their long term effects.
I don't think it would be entirely out-of-place to say that the FSF is somewhat like the FDA; only what the FDA does for foods and drugs, the FSF does for software. The FSF is there to protect users to make sure that they get the freedoms that they ought to have. You may not agree with what freedoms those are or why their important; and I can't convince you either. Eben Moglen gave an awfully good lecture that might explain their point of view.
They want your money if you're lucky. Or they want you off the market if you're not.
I call flamebait. They want your source code, and they want it Free. Free software has never been about money, and there are several large companies who profit off that business market. Closed source is the one that (normally) will demand money (and usually they don't care for source code either).
You can write CPython modules in C. It's not as easy as coding in Python (of course) and there would be a slight performance hit (I don't know how much exactly, but I don't think it would be significant).
I don't know what you mean. Why would you do shell scripting in NVU? If you're talking about writing straight HTML code that's quite different. That's pretty much how all serious HTML editing is done. All WYSIWYG HTML editors are for "simple" users.
Photoshop and Illustrator, sure (I don't know enough about Fireworks to comment on it). I'm a professional web developer though, and Dreamweaver is not the top of the line. It's good if you're comparing it to something like Frontpage, but that's like calling a two-year-old kid big because he's bigger than the newborn.
As a WYSIWYG editor Dreamweaver is complex; confusing; at many points, downright buggy; and generates code that only a mother could love. Nvu beats it hands down on this feature, and Nvu is Free Software.
Most half/serious developers that I've talked to who use it, only use it in code mode. In that case it's a glorified text editor that would make emacs jealous of its code bloat. There are many better options out there for that kind of work. Some are Free, some are not.
Note: I have used Dreamweaver a fair amount and worked with teams who used the software, so I'm not just trolling. Dreamweaver is nice for people who are tied into Adobe's other tools because it tries very much to be consistent with those tools (that's also why it sucks). If the Gimp is an ugly, toy pixel editor, than Dreaweaver certainly an ugly, toy IDE.
Compare: The number of features on Google homepage to the number of features on the average Linux desktop
A bad metaphor is like a leaky screwdriver. Seriously, there are significant differences between how those two are used. Google's homepage *might* be comparable to something like the Beagle UI, in which case I think Beagle beats Google (slightly) for the minimalism award.
It's not so much a pretty installation as much as it is an automated installation that is important here. While the Gentoo installer isn't perfect, it's probably the best around for this kind of thing. You can make installation profiles and then copy them over to get rid of the most tedious parts of the Gentoo installation process.
I'm not knocking the manual installation. It's great, certainly a good place to learn. But after you've gone through it a couple dozen times, you already understand the whole thing and you're just wearing out your keyboards.
It's their network, why shouldn't they ban people that don't play by their rules?
Grace. You don't ban a kid from using computers because he was a bit mischievous one day. You might not allow him to use the computer for a week or something, but banning altogether is a bit harsh.
Another thing is that they've thinned the line between 'their network' and 'my Xbox' (note: I don't actually own one). The Xbox automatically signs in to Xbox live if there's a network connection. Think about it this way, if MS Windows stopped working if you had a motherboard without that Trusted Computing nonsense, you could say "It's their OS, why shouldn't it stop working when the users don't play by their rules?" (i.e. TPM and DRM).
I understand the problem is more complicated that this, and I've heard that modders take advantage of their modding to cheat and ruin the gameplay for others. I'm not sure it I think MS did the wrong thing, but I'm just pointing out that things aren't so black and white.
That's probably a lot of it, but you shouldn't underestimate the importance of that. The end result of it is that you have a browser that looks 'relatively natural' on a wide variety of platforms and can be easily extended and themed. For me, the looking natural is a big thing because Opera looks atrocious on my Gnome desktop (I never liked how it looked it Windows either, it doesn't fit).
Firefox also has better support of a number of standards (MathML, SVG, Javascript 1.7) that Opera has little/no support for (they support SVG tiny, but that doesn't seem to do too much).
Good point, I should be more careful in the future. However, there's still a significant difference between answering such a question in private and answering it in a public forum.
Methinks slashdot would do good to provide a "-10 on first post" option.
I wonder if even a car analogy could be worse than this one. The two situations are different on so many levels. In the story, the man offered information that nobody asked for, it was in a public forum, and the the information made the provocative material very accessible. In your example, one would expect the guy was explicitly asked, it was in a private conversation, and the stuff probably requires a bit of effort to get to (at least a decent stroll or a short car ride).
A more apt analogy would be someone going into a store and intentionally leaving a pornographic magazine were everyone can see. People didn't ask for it, it's public, and while your not actually showing it to them, it doesn't take to much effort to pick it up and read it.
You jest, but that's actually pretty accurate. People don't spell the same way they used to (from The Canterbury Tales):
Eke thereto was he right a merry man,
And after supper playen he began,
And spake of mirth amonges other things,
When that we hadde made our reckonings;
Since morality is defined by the desire to limit human suffering
Really? I won't say that human suffering is good or anything, but I think that's a pretty short-sighted definition. I mean, if I just killed everyone there would be no more suffering.
Slashdot Mirror
But that is a violation of the spirit of the GPL. The GPL is about securing some fundamental rights for the user (like the ability to modify free software on your own hardware). Linus doesn't really care that much for the users and that will probably come back to bite him.
You could say the same thing about Theo de Raadt.
No. There can't be an open standard for DRM. DRM relies on obfuscation. If there was, someone would just write a program that could read/write the format and simply 'forget' the restrictions.
That's how DRM works in PDF. It's utterly pointless and only serves to give the authors the illusion that their content is protected.
Actually, it's still arbitrary because there's no intrinsic connection between 360 and a circle. It might be a very convenient arbitrary number, but it's still arbitrary. That said, arbitrary constants are pretty common, even in the sciences. There aren't many people who would contest the widespread usage of base 10.
Actually, many heuristic solutions involve at least as much mathematics as the so-called "basic principles". Part of speech tagging is one of the areas where heuristic solutions using things like the Hidden Markov Model are quite effective.
I'm not quite sure I understand. Can you please restate that as a car analogy for me?
Because flat files are simple. There are no hidden surprises like comments or empty elements. The only thing you have to watch out for is are the tabs mistaken for spaces (and the occasional brain-dead editor that sticks a BOM in the file, or uses something other than ASCII/UTF-8, and those are problems that all text-based formats have).
Moreover, markup is not the way to fix bad source code. Even regular pen-and-paper authors will acknowledge that styling text should be the last resort and that conveying the intended emphasis or meaning should be done with the author's proper tools: a careful choice of words, sentence structure, and overall flow.
Now we are authors of computer code. Our tool are different, but the principles are the same. Straightforward variable names, one statement per line, functions to structure the code: these are just a few of the tools we have to make are code easy for humans to understand.
And by the way, HTML should not be a presentation language, that's what CSS is for.
No, in Java it would have been:
( ).getLength()
int lengthOfCustomerFirstAndLastName = customerDetails.getCustomer().getFirstAndLastName
And you had better hope to God that it won't want to throw something.
Gnome will do that with it's important processes like nautilus and the menu and such. Even Xorg will restart at least 3 times. At some point, however, this artificial resuscitation isn't going to do you any good no mater what OS you use.
Yeah, it's XML. Also, unlike OOXML, ODF uses namespaces, so you can create a separate standard if you don't want to muck around with ODF.
It would depend. The thing about changing standards is that it causes problems for all sorts of people. There is a real need for a stable and standardized document format that just doesn't change, or if it does, very slightly.
I can't speak for the GP, but I haven't bought an iPhone; however, that's not a sufficient solution. The problem is that while you and I may be educated enough to know the issue at stake here, most consumers are not.
If you will forgive an analogy, the situation here bears some relation to the situation in the food and drug industry. There are very few people who are willing to educate themselves enough so they can make reasonable food choices. Therefore, the Americans (I don't know what we Canadians do) have the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that monitors the products that corporations want to put on the market to make sure that they are reasonably safe. Had this been left to regular people to sort out, the market would be full of all sorts of crazy chemicals (worse that it already is!) because regular people don't understand their long term effects.
I don't think it would be entirely out-of-place to say that the FSF is somewhat like the FDA; only what the FDA does for foods and drugs, the FSF does for software. The FSF is there to protect users to make sure that they get the freedoms that they ought to have. You may not agree with what freedoms those are or why their important; and I can't convince you either. Eben Moglen gave an awfully good lecture that might explain their point of view.
I call flamebait. They want your source code, and they want it Free. Free software has never been about money, and there are several large companies who profit off that business market. Closed source is the one that (normally) will demand money (and usually they don't care for source code either).
At any rate, best of luck to these endeavours.
You can write CPython modules in C. It's not as easy as coding in Python (of course) and there would be a slight performance hit (I don't know how much exactly, but I don't think it would be significant).
Where is this knowledge you speak of? I see information, but knowledge, not so much
One person's hacker is another person's security programmer.
The problem with DRM is a fundamental problem in DRM itself. The Emperor has no clothes. Everything else is marketing nonsense.
command-line style coding
I don't know what you mean. Why would you do shell scripting in NVU? If you're talking about writing straight HTML code that's quite different. That's pretty much how all serious HTML editing is done. All WYSIWYG HTML editors are for "simple" users.
Photoshop and Illustrator, sure (I don't know enough about Fireworks to comment on it). I'm a professional web developer though, and Dreamweaver is not the top of the line. It's good if you're comparing it to something like Frontpage, but that's like calling a two-year-old kid big because he's bigger than the newborn.
As a WYSIWYG editor Dreamweaver is complex; confusing; at many points, downright buggy; and generates code that only a mother could love. Nvu beats it hands down on this feature, and Nvu is Free Software.
Most half/serious developers that I've talked to who use it, only use it in code mode. In that case it's a glorified text editor that would make emacs jealous of its code bloat. There are many better options out there for that kind of work. Some are Free, some are not.
Note: I have used Dreamweaver a fair amount and worked with teams who used the software, so I'm not just trolling. Dreamweaver is nice for people who are tied into Adobe's other tools because it tries very much to be consistent with those tools (that's also why it sucks). If the Gimp is an ugly, toy pixel editor, than Dreaweaver certainly an ugly, toy IDE.
A bad metaphor is like a leaky screwdriver. Seriously, there are significant differences between how those two are used. Google's homepage *might* be comparable to something like the Beagle UI, in which case I think Beagle beats Google (slightly) for the minimalism award.
It's not so much a pretty installation as much as it is an automated installation that is important here. While the Gentoo installer isn't perfect, it's probably the best around for this kind of thing. You can make installation profiles and then copy them over to get rid of the most tedious parts of the Gentoo installation process.
I'm not knocking the manual installation. It's great, certainly a good place to learn. But after you've gone through it a couple dozen times, you already understand the whole thing and you're just wearing out your keyboards.
Grace. You don't ban a kid from using computers because he was a bit mischievous one day. You might not allow him to use the computer for a week or something, but banning altogether is a bit harsh.
Another thing is that they've thinned the line between 'their network' and 'my Xbox' (note: I don't actually own one). The Xbox automatically signs in to Xbox live if there's a network connection. Think about it this way, if MS Windows stopped working if you had a motherboard without that Trusted Computing nonsense, you could say "It's their OS, why shouldn't it stop working when the users don't play by their rules?" (i.e. TPM and DRM).
I understand the problem is more complicated that this, and I've heard that modders take advantage of their modding to cheat and ruin the gameplay for others. I'm not sure it I think MS did the wrong thing, but I'm just pointing out that things aren't so black and white.
That's probably a lot of it, but you shouldn't underestimate the importance of that. The end result of it is that you have a browser that looks 'relatively natural' on a wide variety of platforms and can be easily extended and themed. For me, the looking natural is a big thing because Opera looks atrocious on my Gnome desktop (I never liked how it looked it Windows either, it doesn't fit).
Firefox also has better support of a number of standards (MathML, SVG, Javascript 1.7) that Opera has little/no support for (they support SVG tiny, but that doesn't seem to do too much).
Good point, I should be more careful in the future. However, there's still a significant difference between answering such a question in private and answering it in a public forum.
Methinks slashdot would do good to provide a "-10 on first post" option.
I wonder if even a car analogy could be worse than this one. The two situations are different on so many levels. In the story, the man offered information that nobody asked for, it was in a public forum, and the the information made the provocative material very accessible. In your example, one would expect the guy was explicitly asked, it was in a private conversation, and the stuff probably requires a bit of effort to get to (at least a decent stroll or a short car ride).
A more apt analogy would be someone going into a store and intentionally leaving a pornographic magazine were everyone can see. People didn't ask for it, it's public, and while your not actually showing it to them, it doesn't take to much effort to pick it up and read it.
You jest, but that's actually pretty accurate. People don't spell the same way they used to (from The Canterbury Tales):
Really? I won't say that human suffering is good or anything, but I think that's a pretty short-sighted definition. I mean, if I just killed everyone there would be no more suffering.