And the Xbox3? It's also kind of confusing that they're moving back 357 versions of the Xbox in the naming convention. Makes one wonder if they are still working on those other 357 prototypes. Fail early, fail often I guess.
Your company presumably has one. You know damned well it's a waste getting any legal advice from/. so why bother?
TALK TO YOUR DAMNED PATENT LAWYER!
I quite frankly disagree.
If this guy is legit and he owns the rights to this and his company is backing him, do it. People need to get it through their heads that you don't need an army of lawyers to donate to the community. That's an old dead Microsoft/SCO way of thinking. If you want to open source something that is originally yours, it does not--I REPEAT DOES NOT--cost you anything or require a law degree!
I don't even think he needed to file for a patent unless he had the intention of selling this protocol at a later date. Just release the documentation with the GPL and date it!
You don't need a "damned patent lawyer" to write code and distribute it!
Best Approach To Keeping a Virtual World Protocol Free to All?
Document it well. Do you have a javadoc style reference for it? What about example or sample code showing how to use it?
Promote it. Ninety percent of GPL code I use is recommended to me by coworkers & coleagues.
Support it (if possible). Feature f is seriously not working for me, is anyone going to help?
Let the community own it. Don't be afraid to let contributors add/request new directions.
... filed a provisional patent application on it March 20 of last year
But I'm guessing you haven't been awarded the patent? I think you've done more than most people would have. If you're worried about someone suing you for using a protocol, why not just upload all the documentation for it to a SourceForge Project or make it available on your site and date it? I'm guessing it's a bit more tricky than software as you need the required documentation to define a protocol but why shouldn't that be releasable under the GPL? If you really wanted to ask for help, you could seek help from the EFF in establishing prior art now.
Also, what kind of document would I need to make official the public-domaining of the app?
If you have the source code, just drop it on SourceForge or make it available for download on your site with a copy of the GPL as a license file. Frankly, I'd be more concerned about it being adopted and supported widely rather than having it be a GPL protocol. I wish you the best of luck--I think something very neat could come of this!
Starter Edition: A lightweight version for netbook computers, that will only be capable of running three applications concurrently.
Maybe someone can educate me here: are EeePCs and subnotebooks so underpowered that they can only run three programs at a time? It seems like a purely artificial limit repackaged as a "performance" feature.
Yeah, I don't know where they got that data point in the article. From the original source, Mike Ybarra mentions netbooks twice:
The second change is that we have designed Windows 7 so different editions of Windows 7 can run on a very broad set of hardware, from small-notebook PCs (sometimes referred to as netbooks) to full gaming desktops. This way, customers can enable the scenarios they want across the broad hardware choices they have.
Ybarra: At beta we've had a lot of people running our most premium, full-featured offering on small-notebook PCs (netbooks) with good experiences and good results. So we're pleased to see that on this class of hardware Windows 7 is running well. And of course we will continue to tune Windows 7 for performance as we move through the engineering cycle.
Nowhere does he say anything about the 3 app limitation and you'll note he mentions that in beta their most full featured offering runs on netbooks.
I do not know where PCPro got their information but I think this Q&A session is what started it. He seems optimistic about all versions of Windows 7 being usable on netbooks but who knows without getting field results (Vista capable, anyone)?
I would hesitate to use the strong language of "confirmed" as the sites in the summary just link to other PCPro articles and it's all PCPro. I can't seem to find any really formal news release or website with Microsoft's official stance on this. I think this is a bad decision but they know their business better than I do.
From Paul Thurrott's site (which breaks each version down by feature--don't ask me how he got them).
Here's the most reliable source I can find where it is revealed in a Q&A with the general manager for Windows at Microsoft.
The AP has picked it and quotes passages from the Q&A session. So I think the majority of this is coming from a Q&A session with Mike Ybarra, general manager for Windows.
Which gives me pause and causes me to wonder... are they really going to use the same marketing strategy they did with Vista?
He will never give up. The reason is simple - every time he goes off on one of his insane ramblings, news sites and services cover it and give his voice an audience. Until people stop caring what he has to say, he'll keep saying things. Unfortunately.
As the submitter of this story, I think it's important we keep pointing out his actions because (1) he has lost (2) although I'm not a lawyer I believe it sets precedence for future cases and (3) even the general public can see through to his attacks on our freedom. I believe there are more lawyers masquerading in our legal system as legit when they're really just Jack Thompsons at heart and I hope the public learns about them by observing the obvious cases of dementia. In my opinion a good example is John Ashcroft.
Sometimes Jack Thompson's arguments are so laughably false that I suspect he was installed by gamers, the entertainment industry and liberties advocates as a physical straw man!
To me, that makes it all the more important that ones work is distributed as widely as possible so that others may build upon it.
Hey man, my heart is behind you 100% in this respect. Unfortunately, ideals/maxims/truth are not what create change/progress in today's world. Money/greed/market have replaced them. He was a great leader but Gandhi would not be a CEO today. I don't think it's a bad thing. Sure is unfortunate in some respects. But modern day people operating on the former usually get laughed at/written off. Look at Stallman!
So I unfortunately have to point out that if you approach your boss (or one of these companies) with a business proposal yielding a net gain of karma or helping society without a tax write off... you might be written off from that point on. No one needs that discouragement. Approach this from the point of what you can offer people that will bring them closer to their goals and not just yours that--in my opinion--is how a lot of the successful open source products work and is--again, in my opinion--core to the idea of open source.
Realistically, these products are these company's bread and butter. Leave 'em alone if you can't offer them anything. Ask them to support open source plugins or provide an API but don't ask them to shoot themselves in the foot. Instead, look at your lab that (might not) have the sole objective of making money. Turn it into a directive of your lab, then show how other projects benefit from a community, then exercise all your community contacts asking for contributions and pray. Or you can throw your lot in with an existing successful product like R, GNU Plot or Octave or where ever you think it most applicable.
Does anybody know of any open source software intended for scientific research? Does anybody work in a lab that makes an effort to use open source software?
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering,...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.
One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.
While it's not geared specifically towards experimental physics, that's probably going to be your most fruitful endeavor.
GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.
Octave has extensive tools for solving common numerical linear algebra problems, finding the roots of nonlinear equations, integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations. It is easily extensible and customizable via user-defined functions written in Octave's own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran, or other languages.
I'm surprised you're surprised that you only find proprietary software in the highly specialized realm of "experimental physics." I mean, you have to be like a PhD in physics with a good deal of programming knowledge to make something accurate & useful (and there's probably gotta be like 50 failed projects before you get a good successful one).
You're probably wondering why there's not a project of Firefox or OO.o quality for experimental physics but I'll tell you why: it's too specialized and your user base is ridiculously small. You're not going to find a company that is going to benefit greatly (or at all maybe) by releasing their product into the wild for a community to grow. There's probably not a community for it to grow in.
You should tell us what specifically you are looking for something to do... I have no idea what Labview, Igor, Inventor, or Eagle do. Ask yourself why these programs are standards and then maybe add to Octave's wish list or contribute to it even! Unfortunately, this isn't easy--I myself started to implement proper handling of sparse matrices in Octave but gave up as I was trying to form low level requirements... You probably already know though that this is going to have to be done in C or another very low level, very quick language.
If you're looking for something specific or outline some high level
"We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity. Our programmers are some of the best in the world. No one would contest that here -- not even our Indian colleagues."
Failure to address the real issues (corruption, economy, etc) plaguing your society? Check.
Playing up a sense of extreme national pride, isolation and bullheadedness? Double check.
Burning a bridge? Triple check.
Putin, you would have made a fine leader during the Cold War for either side.
For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore's law...
I guess that's what happens when you cut and paste computer science terms from an Economist article. In the next sentence, you state correctly that Moore's "Law" is an observation not a law! It's not that the computer industry (and I think we're only talking hardware here) follows this observation, it's that historically it has held true. No one's going to make a huge leap in R&D to be able to put 10x the number of transistors on a chip only to have engineers come down on them to stop it saying "no one has ever broken Moore's Law and we're not going to start now!" That idea is preposterous. We're limited by our own technology that happens to follow an ok model, it's not a choice!
Another example of 'good enough' computing is supplying 'software as a service,' via the web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway.
I don't see how SaaS supports the idea of consumer demand for yesterday's computer cheaper today. SaaS is a new business model for software, not a response to us settling on "good enough" computers--and it's been growing for a lot longer than just recently. The software of yesterday can still run on this hardware. Google Docs, online CRM & accounting tools are SaaS but they are not evidence of consumers wanting cheaper netbooks with less computing power. I think you will find that OO.o runs just as well on a netbook as Google docs, I know my older machines have a hard time with the amount of memory my browser sucks up when looking at a large Google spreadsheet or Google doc. Again, I don't think the logic behind SaaS is we need to cope with weaker client machines, I think SaaS has other more important benefits like netting more money, avoiding piracy, easier to patch, etc.
Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.
Aside from how ridiculous that statement sounds to me ("Vista makes your computer run faster?"), it is my opinion that the Vista Capable debacle drove this more than consumer demand. Microsoft is notorious for ignoring customer desires to fix what they have and offering unprompted additions and UI changes.
I think what you are witnessing is consumers and businesses hurting because of the shrinking economy and a $250 netbook is looking mighty affordable to them. This isn't going to stop any of the companies doing R&D to keep pace with Moore's observation.
it looks as though the UK government has now decided to back down on the plan, saying that it hopes it won't have to apply 'the heavy hand of legislation'.
Call me stupid but I was kind of hoping they would pass legislation and attempt to arrest a 100,000 people--flooding their legal system with 'guilty' file sharers and stealing valuable time from police officers who should be focusing on real threats to society.
You know, it's not until they actually try to rigidly enforce this that they'll realize that the premise of "stealing from the IFPI/MPAA/RIAA" is utter bullshit. They'll be arresting (hopefully Brazil style) large numbers of students that have no money and finding that the file sharing they were doing did not supplant an imaginary source of spending. They'll also cripple their legal system to try to reprimand people from "stealing" something that isn't physical.
I'm not supporting illegal file sharing, I'm not condoning it, I am just hoping that they try to enforce something this stupid so they realize they are in no way providing a solution to a fix an archaic business model threatened by amazing new communications technology.
Who knows, you may actually produce the next Memento, Reservoir Dogs, or Slumdog Millionaire.
You list three good original movies but I counter that there is so much more to them than just needed money to make. Look at the directors/writers: Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino & Danny Boyle respectively. Now look at those three directors/writers names and notice how they rarely--if ever--attach themselves to bad projects. I think the three movies you listed were kind of like pet projects of these directors and there's not a lot of these great movies laying around just waiting to receive funding with the vision that these three movies you listed had.
You think you have a better idea but these studios have one directive: make money. And that's what they'll do & they'll do it better than you would. This isn't art, this is business. You aren't going to be taken seriously if you point Resevoir Dogs that made $147,839 on opening weekend in the states or Momento that made $235,488 on opening weekend in the states. Those amounts of money are a blip on the radar to what a franchise name makes them within three days.
Disclaimers: I'm not an economist, I love Philip K. Dick & I could care less for Blade Runner the movie.
I see it as there being finite number of movies Hollywood has the money to make each year. I'd rather see a Blade Runner Sequel than the fourth or fifth Austin Powers movie (can you believe that Myers is on contract to make two more?) so why not? I mean, like the article says, the novel is out there, it's not like if they transform that story into a movie or make their own script it's going to affect my perception of the original Blade Runner or Philip K. Dick novel. What the article fails to mention is there are actually four Blade Runner novels (Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996), Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon (2000)). Go ahead, turn them all into movies, you know the fans will reward you for it with piles of cash. It's better than Legally Blonde: Supreme Court Captain!
I think there have been other movies based on this novel--what of Spielberg's AI? Was that not a butchered version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also?
I don't see this as quite cut and dried as CmdrTaco ("don't-ruin-perfect?"--I would hardly call any of this material perfect). I mean, I bitch and moan about movies like Snakes on a Plane & The Transporter 8 as I read great novels by great sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (which, although controversial, I opine would make a fine movie)--why not use these great stories that are already out there to allow good directors to create (potentially) great films?
I like to watch original movies from Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight Pictures but the public and I seem to disagree about where the money in Hollywood should be spent so why do I care that they rehash old crap and dilute brand names when that's how the market rewards them? Can you be critical of them making money? Is that not why they're in that business? Whore yourselves out for all I care, I'm not going to watch it unless there's a Rifftrax for it.
And let's not forget that there are good examples of this actually working out there like The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, The Lord of the Rings, even Batman Begins & The Dark Knight grossly overshadow Batman Forever & Batman & Robin.
So I ask you, why do you care? You aren't forced to see the movie and if you do, it's going to give you something you love and cherish the most: something to bitch vindictively about.
One word: agnostic. It becomes agnostic in C as opposed to ASM.
Alright, at the risk of further revealing my stupidity--what does this matter? I mean, isn't the BIOS tied to the architecture of the chipset anyway? It's not like I'm going to write a C program that compiles into the BIOS for an x86 chipset and--oh, by the way--thank god I can also compile that down to a PowerPC binary! I don't think that any piece of that integrated circuit is going to be developed in a mirror fashion on a PPC architecture... or is that common practice?
Doesn't each BIOS target one particular machine assembly language anyway?
What is the benefit of writing a BIOS in C over assembly code? Is it for transparency? Easier to catch bugs? Does compiling from C to machine assembly protect you from obvious errors in assembly? Is it for reusability of procedures, modules & packages?
Oftentimes I have wished I knew more assembly so I could rewrite often used or expensive procedures to fit the target machine and try to optimize it. I don't know assembly well, however, and therefore don't mess with this. Doesn't handwritten assembly have the potential to be much faster than assembly compiled from C? I thought often run pieces of the Linux kernel were being rewritten into common architecture assembly languages because of this?
I'm confused why mainboard companies don't write their BIOS in C if this is an obvious benefit--or is it that they do and all we ever get to see of it is the assembly that results from it?
Can anyone more knowledgeable in this department answer these questions?
The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs.
Don't forget to also bundle my browser, MSBlastWorm32.exe! Tell all the naive people that it's the hip new botnet way to see the interweb!
The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs.
I think you're kind of riding a slippery slope with this mentality--how could another browser (like Firefox's rise to marketshare) ever make it now that the top few are being bundled? You're not fixing anything. I would argue that they shouldn't release it with any browsers default installed and instead give them a package manager (similar to many Linux distributions) that allows them to step through a wizard process to download browsers from trusted sources based on an ever changing list (or conf file if they really want to change that).
Are you serious? That would be like if I was introduced to my friend's new girlfriend and I said "Hey, Al, I see Peter and you have moved to dating girls that don't have herpes!"
Maybe more like saying "eldavojohn, I hear you've moved to dating girls who don't have herpes!" and you replying, "I never dated women with herpes before! I've only dated men with herpes!" You'd have a valid objection there, but one could argue that my statement wasn't "misleading" so much as "ambiguous".
Thank you for the ad hominem attack there. Much appreciated. I used herpes to compare it to DRM (which I thought to be a fitting analogy), you used herpes to describe my sexual partners. I'm glad you brought up my sexuality too, that's the ultimate signifier of someone who is excels in intelligent discussions. I eagerly await your next reference--will it be about my mother?
Yeah, sorry about the bitchy rant but you asked me about it.
Well... actually I didn't ask you whether you liked iTunes. I really only asked whether you might be touchy about Apple. But you know, it's fine. I can appreciate that you don't like iTunes. I wouldn't ask you to use it.
I have no problem with Apple. I have no problem with Apple employees. I have problems with several Apple products and services. To say that I am out of line to discuss Amazon's only music selling technology--when that is what the topic of this discussion is--is downright confusing to me. I do not hate everyone who works at Apple, I do not know them. I do not hate Steve Jobs, I find him charismatic and a brilliant man as far as human/machine interaction is concerned. I would love to be able to install OSX--I find it to be a superior product but I do not think it worth the amount of money it costs. iTunes originally was a DRM laden resource hog--that is what I have issue with here! It is superior graphically and from usability standpoints but those are not my concerns here.
When I say that I hate Microsoft, I do not mean that I hate all their employees. I hate problems that their products have and their marketing tactics. I would not hate someone just for working at a company that makes--what is in my opinion--an inferior product.
But I'll say it seems to me like some people are just very angry that people like Apple products, and will rant and rage, virtually unprompted, against Apple and all Apple products.
How is it "virtually unprompted?!" Apple's music service is mentioned in the summary! If I am not supposed to attack the products and services of a company, how am I to form a positive/negative opinion about them!?
Drop the fifth grade attacks about sexual orientation and grow up.
Well if you want to pick nits, nobody explicitly said Amazon ever had DRM on their music download store. You could argue that Amazon has "moved to music download services free of copy protection" in that they moved into music download services, and those services don't use DRM.
Are you serious? That would be like if I was introduced to my friend's new girlfriend and I said "Hey, Al, I see Peter and you have moved to dating girls that don't have herpes!"
Oh, if anyone wanted to nitpick I could just say that I mean Al is now dating women and Peter is the one who used to date someone with herpes. Ridiculous. That sentence makes it sound like Amazon used to have DRM and they got smart and moved away from it. To my knowledge, they've always offered me DRM free MP3s. I don't even think you can have DRM on MP3s making Amazon MP3 DRM free!
Is it possible that you're just a bit touchy about people hyping Apple?
Is it possible that I have a personal bias against iTunes? Yes. Yes it is. No Linux support (Amazon runs fine on it), a bloated program that makes me install QuickTime, it reindexes, doesn't let me transfer songs on iPods, wastes CPU, installs a Windows Service, etc. I could go on for hours. And then a family member calls me wondering why her computer runs so damned slow and why she can't have 1000+ songs in iTunes.
iTunes is horrible in my opinion and it gets all the press and love and there are other options out there (like Amazon + Amarok). Yeah, sorry about the bitchy rant but you asked me about it.
Xbox bomb? The XBox and 360 are actually doing pretty well. Now the Zune... Well now that ITunes is going DRM free the Zune is even less interesting.
Too bad really. Competition is usually a good thing.
I was talking about how if any other company had entered the console market in the fashion that Microsoft did, they would have sank faster than the Titanic. Microsoft threw it's weight around and took losses heavily. You may argue that all console makers do but not on this level. Let me quote the BBC for you:
For the first time Microsoft is revealing how much money it is losing on its Xbox game console.
Documents filed with the US financial watchdog show that Microsoft's Home and Entertainment division, which includes the Xbox, lost $177m in the three months to 30 September.
Since the Xbox was launched Microsoft has been forced to cut its price twice to boost sales.
The documents also reveal that four of the seven divisions of the company are operating at a loss.
For a while they were just burning money there. I'm not saying it's a bad or inferior console, I am impressed with the Xbox360 but I will stand by my statement that the initial offering of the Xbox was a horrible move that lost them hundreds of millions--almost instantly! And for what? Entrance into another market, that's what. And they'll muscle their bullheaded ideas into this market too and shove it down your throat just like the Zune and Xbox. Wait long enough and the Zune will be forced to be part of the market just like the Xbox.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Wii2
Sheesh - The proper term is WiiAlso.
And the Xbox3? It's also kind of confusing that they're moving back 357 versions of the Xbox in the naming convention. Makes one wonder if they are still working on those other 357 prototypes. Fail early, fail often I guess.
I go home only to find my wife and four triplets ...
You are a computer programmer!
Always remembering to zero reference your kids.
Releasing bugs into the wild while complaining about viruses.
Although this time around, I'm on his side.
Your company presumably has one. You know damned well it's a waste getting any legal advice from /. so why bother?
TALK TO YOUR DAMNED PATENT LAWYER!
I quite frankly disagree.
If this guy is legit and he owns the rights to this and his company is backing him, do it. People need to get it through their heads that you don't need an army of lawyers to donate to the community. That's an old dead Microsoft/SCO way of thinking. If you want to open source something that is originally yours, it does not--I REPEAT DOES NOT--cost you anything or require a law degree!
I don't even think he needed to file for a patent unless he had the intention of selling this protocol at a later date. Just release the documentation with the GPL and date it!
You don't need a "damned patent lawyer" to write code and distribute it!
Best Approach To Keeping a Virtual World Protocol Free to All?
But I'm guessing you haven't been awarded the patent? I think you've done more than most people would have. If you're worried about someone suing you for using a protocol, why not just upload all the documentation for it to a SourceForge Project or make it available on your site and date it? I'm guessing it's a bit more tricky than software as you need the required documentation to define a protocol but why shouldn't that be releasable under the GPL? If you really wanted to ask for help, you could seek help from the EFF in establishing prior art now.
Also, what kind of document would I need to make official the public-domaining of the app?
If you have the source code, just drop it on SourceForge or make it available for download on your site with a copy of the GPL as a license file. Frankly, I'd be more concerned about it being adopted and supported widely rather than having it be a GPL protocol. I wish you the best of luck--I think something very neat could come of this!
From TFA:
Starter Edition: A lightweight version for netbook computers, that will only be capable of running three applications concurrently.
Maybe someone can educate me here: are EeePCs and subnotebooks so underpowered that they can only run three programs at a time? It seems like a purely artificial limit repackaged as a "performance" feature.
Yeah, I don't know where they got that data point in the article. From the original source, Mike Ybarra mentions netbooks twice:
The second change is that we have designed Windows 7 so different editions of Windows 7 can run on a very broad set of hardware, from small-notebook PCs (sometimes referred to as netbooks) to full gaming desktops. This way, customers can enable the scenarios they want across the broad hardware choices they have.
Ybarra: At beta we've had a lot of people running our most premium, full-featured offering on small-notebook PCs (netbooks) with good experiences and good results. So we're pleased to see that on this class of hardware Windows 7 is running well. And of course we will continue to tune Windows 7 for performance as we move through the engineering cycle.
Nowhere does he say anything about the 3 app limitation and you'll note he mentions that in beta their most full featured offering runs on netbooks.
I do not know where PCPro got their information but I think this Q&A session is what started it. He seems optimistic about all versions of Windows 7 being usable on netbooks but who knows without getting field results (Vista capable, anyone)?
I would hesitate to use the strong language of "confirmed" as the sites in the summary just link to other PCPro articles and it's all PCPro. I can't seem to find any really formal news release or website with Microsoft's official stance on this. I think this is a bad decision but they know their business better than I do.
... are they really going to use the same marketing strategy they did with Vista?
From Paul Thurrott's site (which breaks each version down by feature--don't ask me how he got them).
Here's the most reliable source I can find where it is revealed in a Q&A with the general manager for Windows at Microsoft.
The AP has picked it and quotes passages from the Q&A session. So I think the majority of this is coming from a Q&A session with Mike Ybarra, general manager for Windows.
Which gives me pause and causes me to wonder
He will never give up. The reason is simple - every time he goes off on one of his insane ramblings, news sites and services cover it and give his voice an audience. Until people stop caring what he has to say, he'll keep saying things. Unfortunately.
As the submitter of this story, I think it's important we keep pointing out his actions because (1) he has lost (2) although I'm not a lawyer I believe it sets precedence for future cases and (3) even the general public can see through to his attacks on our freedom. I believe there are more lawyers masquerading in our legal system as legit when they're really just Jack Thompsons at heart and I hope the public learns about them by observing the obvious cases of dementia. In my opinion a good example is John Ashcroft.
Sometimes Jack Thompson's arguments are so laughably false that I suspect he was installed by gamers, the entertainment industry and liberties advocates as a physical straw man!
inb4 lame blue screen of death jokes
Aw, dude, why'd you have to go stealing my one-trick-pony thunder like that? It's all I've got ...
To me, that makes it all the more important that ones work is distributed as widely as possible so that others may build upon it.
Hey man, my heart is behind you 100% in this respect. Unfortunately, ideals/maxims/truth are not what create change/progress in today's world. Money/greed/market have replaced them. He was a great leader but Gandhi would not be a CEO today. I don't think it's a bad thing. Sure is unfortunate in some respects. But modern day people operating on the former usually get laughed at/written off. Look at Stallman!
... you might be written off from that point on. No one needs that discouragement. Approach this from the point of what you can offer people that will bring them closer to their goals and not just yours that--in my opinion--is how a lot of the successful open source products work and is--again, in my opinion--core to the idea of open source.
So I unfortunately have to point out that if you approach your boss (or one of these companies) with a business proposal yielding a net gain of karma or helping society without a tax write off
Realistically, these products are these company's bread and butter. Leave 'em alone if you can't offer them anything. Ask them to support open source plugins or provide an API but don't ask them to shoot themselves in the foot. Instead, look at your lab that (might not) have the sole objective of making money. Turn it into a directive of your lab, then show how other projects benefit from a community, then exercise all your community contacts asking for contributions and pray. Or you can throw your lot in with an existing successful product like R, GNU Plot or Octave or where ever you think it most applicable.
Does anybody know of any open source software intended for scientific research? Does anybody work in a lab that makes an effort to use open source software?
We discussed R which describes itself as:
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.
...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering,
One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.
While it's not geared specifically towards experimental physics, that's probably going to be your most fruitful endeavor.
Then there's the Matlab knock-off of Octave which describes itself as:
GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.
Octave has extensive tools for solving common numerical linear algebra problems, finding the roots of nonlinear equations, integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations. It is easily extensible and customizable via user-defined functions written in Octave's own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran, or other languages.
I'm surprised you're surprised that you only find proprietary software in the highly specialized realm of "experimental physics." I mean, you have to be like a PhD in physics with a good deal of programming knowledge to make something accurate & useful (and there's probably gotta be like 50 failed projects before you get a good successful one).
... I have no idea what Labview, Igor, Inventor, or Eagle do. Ask yourself why these programs are standards and then maybe add to Octave's wish list or contribute to it even! Unfortunately, this isn't easy--I myself started to implement proper handling of sparse matrices in Octave but gave up as I was trying to form low level requirements ... You probably already know though that this is going to have to be done in C or another very low level, very quick language.
You're probably wondering why there's not a project of Firefox or OO.o quality for experimental physics but I'll tell you why: it's too specialized and your user base is ridiculously small. You're not going to find a company that is going to benefit greatly (or at all maybe) by releasing their product into the wild for a community to grow. There's probably not a community for it to grow in.
You should tell us what specifically you are looking for something to do
If you're looking for something specific or outline some high level
"We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity. Our programmers are some of the best in the world. No one would contest that here -- not even our Indian colleagues."
Failure to address the real issues (corruption, economy, etc) plaguing your society? Check.
Playing up a sense of extreme national pride, isolation and bullheadedness? Double check.
Burning a bridge? Triple check.
Putin, you would have made a fine leader during the Cold War for either side.
I think we discussed this a week ago.
For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore's law ...
I guess that's what happens when you cut and paste computer science terms from an Economist article. In the next sentence, you state correctly that Moore's "Law" is an observation not a law! It's not that the computer industry (and I think we're only talking hardware here) follows this observation, it's that historically it has held true. No one's going to make a huge leap in R&D to be able to put 10x the number of transistors on a chip only to have engineers come down on them to stop it saying "no one has ever broken Moore's Law and we're not going to start now!" That idea is preposterous. We're limited by our own technology that happens to follow an ok model, it's not a choice!
Another example of 'good enough' computing is supplying 'software as a service,' via the web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway.
I don't see how SaaS supports the idea of consumer demand for yesterday's computer cheaper today. SaaS is a new business model for software, not a response to us settling on "good enough" computers--and it's been growing for a lot longer than just recently. The software of yesterday can still run on this hardware. Google Docs, online CRM & accounting tools are SaaS but they are not evidence of consumers wanting cheaper netbooks with less computing power. I think you will find that OO.o runs just as well on a netbook as Google docs, I know my older machines have a hard time with the amount of memory my browser sucks up when looking at a large Google spreadsheet or Google doc. Again, I don't think the logic behind SaaS is we need to cope with weaker client machines, I think SaaS has other more important benefits like netting more money, avoiding piracy, easier to patch, etc.
Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.
Aside from how ridiculous that statement sounds to me ("Vista makes your computer run faster?"), it is my opinion that the Vista Capable debacle drove this more than consumer demand. Microsoft is notorious for ignoring customer desires to fix what they have and offering unprompted additions and UI changes.
I think what you are witnessing is consumers and businesses hurting because of the shrinking economy and a $250 netbook is looking mighty affordable to them. This isn't going to stop any of the companies doing R&D to keep pace with Moore's observation.
it looks as though the UK government has now decided to back down on the plan, saying that it hopes it won't have to apply 'the heavy hand of legislation'.
Call me stupid but I was kind of hoping they would pass legislation and attempt to arrest a 100,000 people--flooding their legal system with 'guilty' file sharers and stealing valuable time from police officers who should be focusing on real threats to society.
You know, it's not until they actually try to rigidly enforce this that they'll realize that the premise of "stealing from the IFPI/MPAA/RIAA" is utter bullshit. They'll be arresting (hopefully Brazil style) large numbers of students that have no money and finding that the file sharing they were doing did not supplant an imaginary source of spending. They'll also cripple their legal system to try to reprimand people from "stealing" something that isn't physical.
I'm not supporting illegal file sharing, I'm not condoning it, I am just hoping that they try to enforce something this stupid so they realize they are in no way providing a solution to a fix an archaic business model threatened by amazing new communications technology.
Who knows, you may actually produce the next Memento, Reservoir Dogs, or Slumdog Millionaire.
You list three good original movies but I counter that there is so much more to them than just needed money to make. Look at the directors/writers: Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino & Danny Boyle respectively. Now look at those three directors/writers names and notice how they rarely--if ever--attach themselves to bad projects. I think the three movies you listed were kind of like pet projects of these directors and there's not a lot of these great movies laying around just waiting to receive funding with the vision that these three movies you listed had.
You think you have a better idea but these studios have one directive: make money. And that's what they'll do & they'll do it better than you would. This isn't art, this is business. You aren't going to be taken seriously if you point Resevoir Dogs that made $147,839 on opening weekend in the states or Momento that made $235,488 on opening weekend in the states. Those amounts of money are a blip on the radar to what a franchise name makes them within three days.
Please No, Net a Blade Runner Sequel
Who cares at this point, really?
Disclaimers: I'm not an economist, I love Philip K. Dick & I could care less for Blade Runner the movie.
I see it as there being finite number of movies Hollywood has the money to make each year. I'd rather see a Blade Runner Sequel than the fourth or fifth Austin Powers movie (can you believe that Myers is on contract to make two more?) so why not? I mean, like the article says, the novel is out there, it's not like if they transform that story into a movie or make their own script it's going to affect my perception of the original Blade Runner or Philip K. Dick novel. What the article fails to mention is there are actually four Blade Runner novels ( Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996), Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon (2000)). Go ahead, turn them all into movies, you know the fans will reward you for it with piles of cash. It's better than Legally Blonde: Supreme Court Captain!
I think there have been other movies based on this novel--what of Spielberg's AI? Was that not a butchered version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also? I don't see this as quite cut and dried as CmdrTaco ("don't-ruin-perfect?"--I would hardly call any of this material perfect). I mean, I bitch and moan about movies like Snakes on a Plane & The Transporter 8 as I read great novels by great sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (which, although controversial, I opine would make a fine movie)--why not use these great stories that are already out there to allow good directors to create (potentially) great films?
I like to watch original movies from Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight Pictures but the public and I seem to disagree about where the money in Hollywood should be spent so why do I care that they rehash old crap and dilute brand names when that's how the market rewards them? Can you be critical of them making money? Is that not why they're in that business? Whore yourselves out for all I care, I'm not going to watch it unless there's a Rifftrax for it.
And let's not forget that there are good examples of this actually working out there like The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, The Lord of the Rings, even Batman Begins & The Dark Knight grossly overshadow Batman Forever & Batman & Robin.
So I ask you, why do you care? You aren't forced to see the movie and if you do, it's going to give you something you love and cherish the most: something to bitch vindictively about.
One word: agnostic. It becomes agnostic in C as opposed to ASM.
Alright, at the risk of further revealing my stupidity--what does this matter? I mean, isn't the BIOS tied to the architecture of the chipset anyway? It's not like I'm going to write a C program that compiles into the BIOS for an x86 chipset and--oh, by the way--thank god I can also compile that down to a PowerPC binary! I don't think that any piece of that integrated circuit is going to be developed in a mirror fashion on a PPC architecture ... or is that common practice?
Doesn't each BIOS target one particular machine assembly language anyway?
Written in C, contains virtually no assembly code
What is the benefit of writing a BIOS in C over assembly code? Is it for transparency? Easier to catch bugs? Does compiling from C to machine assembly protect you from obvious errors in assembly? Is it for reusability of procedures, modules & packages?
Oftentimes I have wished I knew more assembly so I could rewrite often used or expensive procedures to fit the target machine and try to optimize it. I don't know assembly well, however, and therefore don't mess with this. Doesn't handwritten assembly have the potential to be much faster than assembly compiled from C? I thought often run pieces of the Linux kernel were being rewritten into common architecture assembly languages because of this?
I'm confused why mainboard companies don't write their BIOS in C if this is an obvious benefit--or is it that they do and all we ever get to see of it is the assembly that results from it?
Can anyone more knowledgeable in this department answer these questions?
... computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs.
And also Lynx, I would bring me great joy to see a video of an average Windows user trying to use Lynx.
The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs.
Don't forget to also bundle my browser, MSBlastWorm32.exe! Tell all the naive people that it's the hip new botnet way to see the interweb!
The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs.
What about Maxthon, Flock, Amaya, SeaMonkey or Avant Browser? And that's just to name a few ...
I think you're kind of riding a slippery slope with this mentality--how could another browser (like Firefox's rise to marketshare) ever make it now that the top few are being bundled? You're not fixing anything. I would argue that they shouldn't release it with any browsers default installed and instead give them a package manager (similar to many Linux distributions) that allows them to step through a wizard process to download browsers from trusted sources based on an ever changing list (or conf file if they really want to change that).
Are you serious? That would be like if I was introduced to my friend's new girlfriend and I said "Hey, Al, I see Peter and you have moved to dating girls that don't have herpes!"
Maybe more like saying "eldavojohn, I hear you've moved to dating girls who don't have herpes!" and you replying, "I never dated women with herpes before! I've only dated men with herpes!" You'd have a valid objection there, but one could argue that my statement wasn't "misleading" so much as "ambiguous".
Thank you for the ad hominem attack there. Much appreciated. I used herpes to compare it to DRM (which I thought to be a fitting analogy), you used herpes to describe my sexual partners. I'm glad you brought up my sexuality too, that's the ultimate signifier of someone who is excels in intelligent discussions. I eagerly await your next reference--will it be about my mother?
Yeah, sorry about the bitchy rant but you asked me about it.
Well... actually I didn't ask you whether you liked iTunes. I really only asked whether you might be touchy about Apple. But you know, it's fine. I can appreciate that you don't like iTunes. I wouldn't ask you to use it.
I have no problem with Apple. I have no problem with Apple employees. I have problems with several Apple products and services. To say that I am out of line to discuss Amazon's only music selling technology--when that is what the topic of this discussion is--is downright confusing to me. I do not hate everyone who works at Apple, I do not know them. I do not hate Steve Jobs, I find him charismatic and a brilliant man as far as human/machine interaction is concerned. I would love to be able to install OSX--I find it to be a superior product but I do not think it worth the amount of money it costs. iTunes originally was a DRM laden resource hog--that is what I have issue with here! It is superior graphically and from usability standpoints but those are not my concerns here.
When I say that I hate Microsoft, I do not mean that I hate all their employees. I hate problems that their products have and their marketing tactics. I would not hate someone just for working at a company that makes--what is in my opinion--an inferior product.
But I'll say it seems to me like some people are just very angry that people like Apple products, and will rant and rage, virtually unprompted, against Apple and all Apple products.
How is it "virtually unprompted?!" Apple's music service is mentioned in the summary! If I am not supposed to attack the products and services of a company, how am I to form a positive/negative opinion about them!?
Drop the fifth grade attacks about sexual orientation and grow up.
Well if you want to pick nits, nobody explicitly said Amazon ever had DRM on their music download store. You could argue that Amazon has "moved to music download services free of copy protection" in that they moved into music download services, and those services don't use DRM.
Are you serious? That would be like if I was introduced to my friend's new girlfriend and I said "Hey, Al, I see Peter and you have moved to dating girls that don't have herpes!"
Oh, if anyone wanted to nitpick I could just say that I mean Al is now dating women and Peter is the one who used to date someone with herpes. Ridiculous. That sentence makes it sound like Amazon used to have DRM and they got smart and moved away from it. To my knowledge, they've always offered me DRM free MP3s. I don't even think you can have DRM on MP3s making Amazon MP3 DRM free!
Is it possible that you're just a bit touchy about people hyping Apple?
Is it possible that I have a personal bias against iTunes? Yes. Yes it is. No Linux support (Amazon runs fine on it), a bloated program that makes me install QuickTime, it reindexes, doesn't let me transfer songs on iPods, wastes CPU, installs a Windows Service, etc. I could go on for hours. And then a family member calls me wondering why her computer runs so damned slow and why she can't have 1000+ songs in iTunes.
iTunes is horrible in my opinion and it gets all the press and love and there are other options out there (like Amazon + Amarok). Yeah, sorry about the bitchy rant but you asked me about it.
Xbox bomb? The XBox and 360 are actually doing pretty well. Now the Zune... Well now that ITunes is going DRM free the Zune is even less interesting. Too bad really. Competition is usually a good thing.
I was talking about how if any other company had entered the console market in the fashion that Microsoft did, they would have sank faster than the Titanic. Microsoft threw it's weight around and took losses heavily. You may argue that all console makers do but not on this level. Let me quote the BBC for you:
For the first time Microsoft is revealing how much money it is losing on its Xbox game console.
Documents filed with the US financial watchdog show that Microsoft's Home and Entertainment division, which includes the Xbox, lost $177m in the three months to 30 September.
Since the Xbox was launched Microsoft has been forced to cut its price twice to boost sales.
The documents also reveal that four of the seven divisions of the company are operating at a loss.
For a while they were just burning money there. I'm not saying it's a bad or inferior console, I am impressed with the Xbox360 but I will stand by my statement that the initial offering of the Xbox was a horrible move that lost them hundreds of millions--almost instantly! And for what? Entrance into another market, that's what. And they'll muscle their bullheaded ideas into this market too and shove it down your throat just like the Zune and Xbox. Wait long enough and the Zune will be forced to be part of the market just like the Xbox.
It's the one Microsoft way.