Relating to the first point, that depends on what identity means to you. Believe it or not, there are at least 3 theories of identity and in two of those theories, who you are you, even if your personality and memories are different. Have a look at this short quiz for more info: http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/identity.htm . It actually covers a case that's very similar to the one provided.
Relating to the second point, it depends again. If the part of the brain related to motor skills and other basic body functions is damaged, then after repair (or after a transplant), the appropriate memories can be transplanted (similar to you can re-install your OS without affecting your data files in Linux). In this case, you'd be as good as new after everything has been fixed.
But even in the worst case where you'd have to start again as a child and there was no way of transplanting other memories, some people *would* choose this option if they don't believe in an after life. This decision is very much up to the person involved, which is why a living will (either written down or by word of mouth) is very important. The last thing you want to do is to give your relatives the burden of deciding. If they guess *wrong*, both of you have to live (or die) with the consequences.
The key question is, does "no measurable measurable brain activity" mean the person is dead or simply as good as dead since we don't have a proper technology (yet) to create the appropriate cortical stimulator?
At one time it was thought that as long as the heart is beating, the person is alive. Now we know better and have an electrical jumpstarter for the heart. At one time it was throught that "even if you can restart the heart, it's too badly damanged or too defective". Now we know better and either have pace makers, artificial hearts (which are pretty hit or miss at the moment), or heart replacements.
So if someone is "brain dead" are they really dead? If someone's brain is "damanged beyond repair" are they really not worth saving? How would you feel like if you found out the day after they pulled the plug on someone you loved that the answer to those questions were "not necessarily" and that "almost full recovery is possible if you can keep the patient alive long enough for the necessary technology to pass clinical trials"?
Those are hard questions to answer.
The truth is that we have a good idea about when someone becomes alive and when someone becomes dead, but science doesn't *really* know where the boundary between life and non-life is on either extreme.
But regardless of this ignorance, we need to make decisions on what might possibly be murder each time we face this gray area.
It sucks but that's life and we just have to accept it.
> Which law exactly governs your continued ability to breach copyright over and over by copying Windows binaries into memory?
I've heard that argument but it's nonsense. When you listen to music on an old vinyl record player, a streaming copy is made and then translated into electical signals which is then copied into your brain (memory) as you listen. When you read a book, a temporary copy of the page is made at the back walls of your eye and a copy is made in your brain (memory).
None of those are copyright violations because it's implicit in fair use law that use of a book or record requires that a temporary copy be made in order for the book or record to be used. It would be useless otherwise.
The same can be said for software. You need to make a temporary copy into memory simply to use it. Otherwise, the CD it came on is a paperweight.
We don't need new cyber laws. The old ones work just fine. You just have to apply them properly and not get caught up in the smoke and mirrors of the BSA, *AA, and friends.
> A patent lawsuit may be the only option a small guy with an idea stolen by a big corp.
Can ideas be stolen? Seriously, I can't tell you the number of times I've come up with a unique idea "that could never be copied" only to find out a few years later that someone else has discovered and implemented exactly the same idea, down to the details.
Each of us builds on the knowledge of those that come before us and sometimes the time is just right for an idea to be discovered. Quantum mechanics, the air plane, and the telephone are all examples of unique innovative ideas that "couldn't possibly be independently discovered by anyone else" yet were.
In my own experience, if you have a great idea and tell everyone you know, most of them wouldn't do anything with it, even if they think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Instinctively, I believe it's because deep down we know that ideas are a dime a dozen, and that execution is key.
Edison wasn't the first to invent the light bulb, but before Edison, it was a just curiosity. What Edison recognized was that you needed electricity to power the thing, so he came up with the electric system and sold the two as a package. The same thing for the car. It was invented in the previous century, but it was a curiousity until Ford found a way of producing cars quickly and cheaply enough so that the average person could buy one. MP3 players were more geek toys than anything else until Apple recognized that you needed a quick and easy way to get new content and add it to the MP3 (CD rippers are dead simple, but for some reason most non-geeks balk at it.) The story repeats itself over and over again.
Note that it hurts the little guy a lot more than the big guys. The big guys have an extensive patent arsenal and it's almost certain that you're violating one of their patents, so if you sue them, they can sue you back for 10 times what you're demanding. The big guys also have patent swap agreements with other big guys which they can use to lock out anyone in their patent club. Finally, the big guys have entire departments that do patent searches to ensure that (as much as they can) they avoid patented ideas and are able to patent anything that could get by the patent office. The little guy just doesn't have the resources to do it.
In the end, the key problem with patents is that they allow a person to claim credit for someone else's independently developed ideas. That's just plain wrong. If the patent law were changed such that someone who didn't do a patent search (as most people don't) and didn't look at the implementation (as most people don't), it would make patent law a lot more palatable since it would allow for independent reinvention.
Right now, it's little more than state sponsored theft.
> Source code is step-by-step instructions for building a product
No. I can look at the Linux kernel source code, but I wouldn't have a clue on the thought processes that went into it. There are no specs, blueprints, or design schematics provided with it. There's just code that's assembled for me in a particular configuration that I can modify to my hearts content (if I had the knowledge) or even combine it with other GPL code to create whatever I want. If I didn't have the knowledge, I could hire a consultant other than Linus to do it for me. That's what open source means. There's no vendor lock in.
Similarly with a car, there are no specs, blueprints, or design schematics provided. There are just parts that are assembled in a particular configuration. I can modify my car to my heart's content and even combine it with other parts. If I wanted to combine my car with a speed boat and a helicopter, I could do it if I had the knowledge, or hire a consultant (other than from the company whom I bought the car from) to do it . That's what open source in the real world means.
I don't know about you, but I'd never by a car that required me to go to the vendor's dealer to get even the smallest bug fix or modification done to my car. Why on earth should I chose to do the same for the software I use? Open source is not about money, it's about freedom.
Backwards compatibility is extremely important for Microsoft. It doesn't matter if VistaNG (the non-backwards compatible Vista) is 100 times better, if it's not 100% compatible with most applications, it's dead, simply because: * the demand for portable apps will grow (apps like OpenOffice and Firefox look a lot more attractive since they can be phased in slowly) * the demand for portability programmer skills will grow (programmers who know Vista, VistaNG, Linux, and Mac portability will have the edge) * the migration effort will be compareable to switching to a non-Microsoft alternative, so why not investigate them, especially if you're starting to use portable apps?
I'm not sure if you were around in the early 1990s, but back then Borland ruled to developer tools world. Microsoft wasn't even close. It wasn't just Turbo Pascal. It was also in the C++ arena with the OWL 1.0 framework that made Win32 programming a lot easier (although it used a proprietary C++ extension to get things done). Borland decided to make their next version of OWL standards compliant. It was a beautiful MVC architecture that was head and shoulders above thin kludgy MFC. However, OWL 2.0 was completely backwards incompatible with OWL 1.0 and the more standards compliant C++ compiler couldn't compile OWL 1.0 programs. At that point, companies revolted. OWL 2.0 was the right idea, but since companies had to migrate anyway, they chose to migrate to the inferior (though more API stable) MFC. VistaNG could face a similar revolt too if it make migratiting to it too painful.
Here's an alternative that's a lot more likely to me. * Microsoft ships Vista. * Microsoft starts writing a new high performance core from the ground up or takes the FreeBSD core or the Darwin core (since they can reuse the Mach experience) and adds its new and improved Windows API layer above it (that API might even be completely written in.NET so it can be backported to Vista to easy the migration) * Microsoft ports all their apps to the new VistaNG API * Microsoft writes a WINE-like app that uses their new cleaned up API layer in order to run Vista apps.
The consequence of this are: * VistaNG apps run fast and programming for VistaNG is a lot nicer than Vista * Most Vista apps run smoothly on VistaNG (at a slight performance and memory penalty) * People who want don't care about backwards compatibility will not have to deal with the bloat and cruft, while those who do, can get it. * At some point in the future, (2 releases after VistaNG), Microsoft can throw out the VistaNG layer or just let the code break over time, like they have with the Win16 API
Based on the assumption that perception and reality are correlated and the CPI measure accurately measures perceived corruption in a standardized way, the US is definitely far less corrupt than most countries of the world, but there are several countries that a significantly less corrupt than the US.
Back on topic, the "donation" might have a lot more to do with Google than ODF. The money seems to be geared towards web delevopment tools. One thing Microsoft has been pushing is XAML as a web standard to replace HTML. If Microsoft can succeed in getting children to be hooked on XAML and Microsoft specific tools instead of web standards, schools will pump out children without crossplatform skills. These children will bring their MS centric viewpoint into the workforce, and that may change company's intranet (or internet) policies. Let's face it, you can design much fancier applications in something like XAML or XUL with less headaches, but sacrifices have to be made if you want to be crossplatform, avoid vendor lock-in, and have added infrastructure flexibility. It's hard to convince with people with a "Microsoft is the only thing out there, they created web standards better than any crossplatform standard and everyone uses IE and MS is so big that it will last for ever and everyone else had better adapt or die out of being useless" view of the world that these things matter. That, IMO, is what Microsoft is counting on more than anything else.
It'll have to disagree with you. Here's a point by point refutation: (1) So was BeOS and it died. (2) So was BeOS and it died. Beside, Windows if "free" if you get most new computers and you actually have to throw it away if you want to install Linux. It's also "free" if you "have a friend who knows stuff about computers" (i.e. most people) and you're okay with pirating. (3) Neither are BeOS, MacOS, QNX, etc. (4) Ditto for MacOS, BeOS, QNX. (5) Ditto for MacOS, BeOS, QNX.
When it comes down to it, living outside the "normal world" is a pain (e.g. glash 8 doesn't exist for Linux. no iTunes, etc), so there has to be better incentive than free. People's time is just too expensive.
IMO, the reasons the most of current crop of Linux users choose Linux is because: (1) It's open source, so even if you don't look at the source code, you know someone is, so you can be more certain that you don't have to deal with corporate spyware like the Sony CD. (2) It's open source, so you know it will still be there even and be maintained (even if you have to pay for support) if everyone abandons it. (3) It's open source, so you don't have to feel guilty about pirating stuff. (4) It's open source, so it's non-proprietary and thus you don't have to deal with the crap of vendors forcing planned obsolence changes on you in an effort to get you to pay for an upgrade. (E.g. Microsoft file formats) (5) It's open source, so it's likely that your files are in a standard format or are convertable to a standard format. (There's less need to put up proprietary roadblocks) (6) It's open source, so things like the Debian package repository and Synaptic allow you to gain a huge collection of programs simply without any proprietary barriers. (7) It's open source, so vendor lock-in just can't happen.
Yes free factors into it, but even if there was a charge (as is the case for corporate Linux), the advantages are just too big to ignore.
It's actually *not* a stupid policy. I've worked at places without this policy and the attitude is "If there's an emergency or deadline or we're short staffed, then you really should postpone your vacation. After all, you can change the vacation. We can't change our crisis, so it would be irresponsible and unprofessional to go on vacation now."
In places with the use it or lose it policy, the attitude tends to be "Okay, there's a crisis that can't be rescheduled, but your vacation can't be postponed either. So we'll either make due without you with some stop gap measures until you return or apologize for being in such a mess and try to bribe you into forgoing your vacation."
I don't know about you, but I prefer the later environment. Even though I *love* my work and tend to regularily go above and beyond the call of duty. the latter environment is just plain more respectful.
> No. It can identify people who have calling patterns associated with terrorist activity,
I don't think it can even do that. If a terror network really is loose, then the "one international call followed by a flood of local calls" may be completely out to lunch, simply because the head sleeper will just call 2 next important sleepers, each of which would call 2 other next important sleepers, and so on, until they call the cogs actually doing the dirty work. At no point is there any flood, just a cascading trickle that hides the more important sleepers from the cogs.
They could look for that pattern (which is pretty popular, especially with companies that try to create a "buzz"), but they would also miss the case where the announcement of the go-ahead is hiding in plain sight. The sleepers above the cogs could simply say "listen to the radio's request line. When you hear someone request '"The safety dance" for my wife Alice who never plays it safe' we attack." or "watch Slashdot for the following User Name and read every second word for final instructions.".
"Is your business model similar to the ones at mainstream open-source vendors, such as Red Hat?
In a sense, but not completely. We believe software should be free to anyone. If you want to buy a support contract, it is there for you. [But] there is no premium version [of Ubuntu] that costs money. We're also happy for you to get support from someone besides us. We list companies on our site that provide that -- we're up to 200 around the world. Some customers buy support just from [another] firm, others buy it with escalation support from Canonical. That way, a local company will provide front-line support. But for really hard problems, they can escalate trouble tickets back up to us."
Basically, the advantage of Ubuntu over Debian (besides having a 6 month release time if you want it) is that Ubuntu is focused on providing a support infrastructure for OEMs (Canonical has devoted a lot of time in this area). While you can OEM Debian, you're pretty much on your own if you do (unless the DCC Alliance takes off). With Ubuntu, you can created your custom version with your branding, add your special packages, and support as much or as little as you want to support. If there's a question you can't answer (or don't want to waste resources answering because you only want to support your customization), you can always escalate it to Canonical or other support companies in your area and take credit (your customers won't care as long as you give them unified support and don't get them involved in the messy details). If you want some OEM specific feature to get into the distro, it's more likely that you'll be able to get it into Ubuntu than Debian since Debian is not as focused on OEMs.
> What the industry needs is good, common-sense DRM. Today's > DRM doesn't allow for things going public domain. It's not > flexible enough to allow users to do what they want (and is > legal) with what they paid for. They are presently erring on > the side of profit...that's not going to work with consumers long-term
You're making a few critical assumptions. You're assuming that the music companies: * want to let go of cash cows through expiration * want to allow others to use their work (even excepts) without paying royalties * want to allow competitors to use their work (even excepts) without paying royalties * want to forgo profits that they could get by forcing you to pay for the same song over and over again (e.g. replacements, new formats, etc)
You're also assuming that it's technically possible to: * Allow for DRM-free fair use excepts without allowing for these excepts to be recombined to create a DRM-free copy * ALlow device portability without also allowing copying. * Allow mixing without opening up the format. * Allow for expiration to happen without having DRM fall apart completely.
Before the entertainment conceeds on any of the nontechnical issues, they'd offer the following * Promise to release their works in a DRM-free format after copyright expires (Honest! You can believe us!) * Provide liberal licensing for people who want to make derivative works * Provide a service that allows you to purchase DRM-encumbered fair use clips (At a low low price) * Give you the ability to copy the songs a limitted number of times (there's no way you'd ever upgrade your machine more than twice anyway)
None of these options seem very satisfying, so it's best to just avoid any DRM encumbered entertainment.
Lispire's Carmony called it called the "all you can eat" business model. When a restaurant has an all you can eat buffet, it knows that some sumo wrestler is going to just camp out there and gorge, but that's okay on average because statistically the next 10 will ask for a small salad. You just have to find the right price to charge for the average. The "Unix fork" model works the same way and allows you to fork off more processes than you have memory for, yet 99% of the time nothing bad happens because most of the forks are "small salid eaters".
The problem comes when you have a month long sumo wrester's convention in town. More than likely, they'll choose an all you can eat place and if your restaurant is unfortunate enough to get their business, you may go bankrupt or face shortages for both the sumos and the "small salad" eaters.
Personally, I don't know what the answer is. People want to maximize utilization and they won't if they assume the worst case for all people. They'll have to charge more and dedicate than their competitors and provide their customers with service 99% wouldn't care for (or even notice) 99% of the time. That's the surest way to go backrupt.
The only thing I can say, is that if you live in sumo country and your ISP thinks that it's living in "small salad" eaterville, then pick another more realistic ISP.
Remember we're talking about "geological time" not "web time", so big changes like this happen a lot slower. According to Wikipedia: "At present, the overall geomagnetic field is becoming weaker at a rate which would, if it continues, cause the dipole field to temporarily collapse by 3000-4000 AD."
So it'll be a bit of time before that happens. If I understand it correctly, it'll slowly get weaker and weaker until it just disappears before slowly coming back on the flip side. Hopefully the slowness will give us time to migrate off of a dependence on magnetic fields to tell us where we are, and hopefully animals will also have time to readjust and find alternative ways of knowing where they are.
Actually, you don't have to use SED. Unix has a "rename" command that accommodates SED expression renames. It's a real godsent, so if you don't have it installed on your distro, do yourself a favour and use this PERL replacement: http://www.greenfly.org/rename
* Remember what happened when Netscape 4.7 decided to do a complete rewrite instead of incremental improvements over a longer period of time? Netscape went from 90% market share to 1%. A complete rewrite would be just as damaging to Linux.
* Bugs are bugs, no matter where they are. Most of Linux's "million lines of code" are drivers. If no-one is doing bug fixes in the kernel drivers, moving them out of the kernel wouldn't help.
* Linux *has* moved most things to modules and the core is pretty well understood and not a likely source of bugs because it has the most eyeballs on it. So the added modularity of Microkernels wouldn't buy you anything.
* Linux scales from super computers to the Linux watch using the same code base. Supercomputers might not care about the added microkernel layer but low resource environments definitely *would*.
* Buffer overflows are generally not the reason most well designed kernels go down, it's hidden race conditions, starvation, and other NP complete problems that go hidden for years. Moving these problems to user space wouldn't solve them. In fact, it may aggravate them unless intimate knowledge of global state is available to user space (which is in itself a security risk and thus a source of bugs)
Maybe, but don't forget that Microsoft is in an Anti-Trust investigation in Europe. Suppose the EU decided that the only way MS Word would be available is if MS Word support the ODF file format and saved files *by default* in ODF format. That would pretty much level the Word Processing playing field and allow Microsoft to "innovate" freely since the only reason for chosing Microsoft the would be that you like their software.
Actually, it's an old tradition. Court Jesters ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_jester ) have been able tell the kings things no-one else would dare say, in the guise of comedy for centuries.
Actually, humanity was not designed to be idle, as you believe. If it were the case then idle people would have perfect health instead of getting all sorts of obesity related illnesses and the idle rich wouldn't be killing themselves with drugs instead of enjoying their life the way the active rich (who have jobs they created) seem to do.
You want want robot cashiers, surgeons, auto mechanics, chefs, soldiers, aircraft mechanics, software programmers, CEOs, but you're forgetting that there are enthusists in all these fields. Why is Mark Shuttleworth programming when he has so much money? Because he enjoys it. Why do hobbyist chefs cook on their own and take pride when they're able to cook for a large audience (even if they have to bust their butt for weeks to prepare)? Because they enjoy it. Why do hobbyist mechanics spend their weekends turning a bucket of bolts into a race car? Because they enjoy it. In each of these cases, turning their hobby into their job would enhance their lives. Many slashdotters love their jobs. Sure there are some annoyances, but that's life. You get just as many annoyances even on your dream vacation.
Perhaps you've never found that one job that you can treat as a hobby. Perhaps you found it but you chose to go for money and security and being a cog in the great beaurocracy instead of going for a good living (at less pay) with a little adventure and a lot more freedom. Perhaps you outgrew your dream job and you have a new dream job. I've switched careers a few times (and may do it again in the future). I still enjoyed my old career, but I realized that I won't in the future and that I had different dreams now. There's always a period of adjustment and some sacrifices, but if you've made the right choice, you'll eventually enjoy it.
Face it. You hate your job. Why are you *still* doing what you're doing? Why not take some time each day to try to figure out how to get out of your hell hole into something you enjoy doing? Do you really want to spend the next 20 to 40 years suffering? Do you really want to look back at the end of your life and curse? You know you deserve better than that.
> At the top of the list, I see the need for an enterprise-grade versioning and repository server. One that is connectable > from anywhere in the enterprise, with flexible security and controls that integrates into the enterprise architecture. > That might seem like a lot of buzzwords jammed into one little sentence, so I'll expand on that. Instead of saving your > document to a file, it will save it into a server. The server will save the document, and save subsequent changes. It > will have the ability to give you the old version if you've bunged up completely.....
Isn't this called Subversion/Clearcase/CVS/Bitkeeper/....?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there are CD-writers that plug into high end stereos (e.g. Panasonic).
The poor SAP probably likely bought the wrong model and assumed that it was still possible to use.
Relating to the first point, that depends on what identity means to you. Believe it or not, there are at least 3 theories of identity and in two of those theories, who you are you, even if your personality and memories are different. Have a look at this short quiz for more info: http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/identity.htm . It actually covers a case that's very similar to the one provided.
Relating to the second point, it depends again. If the part of the brain related to motor skills and other basic body functions is damaged, then after repair (or after a transplant), the appropriate memories can be transplanted (similar to you can re-install your OS without affecting your data files in Linux). In this case, you'd be as good as new after everything has been fixed.
But even in the worst case where you'd have to start again as a child and there was no way of transplanting other memories, some people *would* choose this option if they don't believe in an after life. This decision is very much up to the person involved, which is why a living will (either written down or by word of mouth) is very important. The last thing you want to do is to give your relatives the burden of deciding. If they guess *wrong*, both of you have to live (or die) with the consequences.
The key question is, does "no measurable measurable brain activity" mean the person is dead or simply as good as dead since we don't have a proper technology (yet) to create the appropriate cortical stimulator?
At one time it was thought that as long as the heart is beating, the person is alive. Now we know better and have an electrical jumpstarter for the heart. At one time it was throught that "even if you can restart the heart, it's too badly damanged or too defective". Now we know better and either have pace makers, artificial hearts (which are pretty hit or miss at the moment), or heart replacements.
So if someone is "brain dead" are they really dead? If someone's brain is "damanged beyond repair" are they really not worth saving? How would you feel like if you found out the day after they pulled the plug on someone you loved that the answer to those questions were "not necessarily" and that "almost full recovery is possible if you can keep the patient alive long enough for the necessary technology to pass clinical trials"?
Those are hard questions to answer.
The truth is that we have a good idea about when someone becomes alive and when someone becomes dead, but science doesn't *really* know where the boundary between life and non-life is on either extreme.
But regardless of this ignorance, we need to make decisions on what might possibly be murder each time we face this gray area.
It sucks but that's life and we just have to accept it.
> Which law exactly governs your continued ability to breach copyright over and over by copying Windows binaries into memory?
I've heard that argument but it's nonsense. When you listen to music on an old vinyl record player, a streaming copy is made and then translated into electical signals which is then copied into your brain (memory) as you listen. When you read a book, a temporary copy of the page is made at the back walls of your eye and a copy is made in your brain (memory).
None of those are copyright violations because it's implicit in fair use law that use of a book or record requires that a temporary copy be made in order for the book or record to be used. It would be useless otherwise.
The same can be said for software. You need to make a temporary copy into memory simply to use it. Otherwise, the CD it came on is a paperweight.
We don't need new cyber laws. The old ones work just fine. You just have to apply them properly and not get caught up in the smoke and mirrors of the BSA, *AA, and friends.
> A patent lawsuit may be the only option a small guy with an idea stolen by a big corp.
Can ideas be stolen? Seriously, I can't tell you the number of times I've come up with a unique idea "that could never be copied" only to find out a few years later that someone else has discovered and implemented exactly the same idea, down to the details.
Each of us builds on the knowledge of those that come before us and sometimes the time is just right for an idea to be discovered. Quantum mechanics, the air plane, and the telephone are all examples of unique innovative ideas that "couldn't possibly be independently discovered by anyone else" yet were.
In my own experience, if you have a great idea and tell everyone you know, most of them wouldn't do anything with it, even if they think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Instinctively, I believe it's because deep down we know that ideas are a dime a dozen, and that execution is key.
Edison wasn't the first to invent the light bulb, but before Edison, it was a just curiosity. What Edison recognized was that you needed electricity to power the thing, so he came up with the electric system and sold the two as a package. The same thing for the car. It was invented in the previous century, but it was a curiousity until Ford found a way of producing cars quickly and cheaply enough so that the average person could buy one. MP3 players were more geek toys than anything else until Apple recognized that you needed a quick and easy way to get new content and add it to the MP3 (CD rippers are dead simple, but for some reason most non-geeks balk at it.) The story repeats itself over and over again.
Note that it hurts the little guy a lot more than the big guys. The big guys have an extensive patent arsenal and it's almost certain that you're violating one of their patents, so if you sue them, they can sue you back for 10 times what you're demanding. The big guys also have patent swap agreements with other big guys which they can use to lock out anyone in their patent club. Finally, the big guys have entire departments that do patent searches to ensure that (as much as they can) they avoid patented ideas and are able to patent anything that could get by the patent office. The little guy just doesn't have the resources to do it.
In the end, the key problem with patents is that they allow a person to claim credit for someone else's independently developed ideas. That's just plain wrong. If the patent law were changed such that someone who didn't do a patent search (as most people don't) and didn't look at the implementation (as most people don't), it would make patent law a lot more palatable since it would allow for independent reinvention.
Right now, it's little more than state sponsored theft.
> Source code is step-by-step instructions for building a product
No. I can look at the Linux kernel source code, but I wouldn't have a clue on the thought processes that went into it. There are no specs, blueprints, or design schematics provided with it. There's just code that's assembled for me in a particular configuration that I can modify to my hearts content (if I had the knowledge) or even combine it with other GPL code to create whatever I want. If I didn't have the knowledge, I could hire a consultant other than Linus to do it for me. That's what open source means. There's no vendor lock in.
Similarly with a car, there are no specs, blueprints, or design schematics provided. There are just parts that are assembled in a particular configuration. I can modify my car to my heart's content and even combine it with other parts. If I wanted to combine my car with a speed boat and a helicopter, I could do it if I had the knowledge, or hire a consultant (other than from the company whom I bought the car from) to do it . That's what open source in the real world means.
I don't know about you, but I'd never by a car that required me to go to the vendor's dealer to get even the smallest bug fix or modification done to my car. Why on earth should I chose to do the same for the software I use? Open source is not about money, it's about freedom.
Backwards compatibility is extremely important for Microsoft. It doesn't matter if VistaNG (the non-backwards compatible Vista) is 100 times better, if it's not 100% compatible with most applications, it's dead, simply because:
.NET so it can be backported to Vista to easy the migration)
* the demand for portable apps will grow (apps like OpenOffice and Firefox look a lot more attractive since they can be phased in slowly)
* the demand for portability programmer skills will grow (programmers who know Vista, VistaNG, Linux, and Mac portability will have the edge)
* the migration effort will be compareable to switching to a non-Microsoft alternative, so why not investigate them, especially if you're starting to use portable apps?
I'm not sure if you were around in the early 1990s, but back then Borland ruled to developer tools world. Microsoft wasn't even close. It wasn't just Turbo Pascal. It was also in the C++ arena with the OWL 1.0 framework that made Win32 programming a lot easier (although it used a proprietary C++ extension to get things done). Borland decided to make their next version of OWL standards compliant. It was a beautiful MVC architecture that was head and shoulders above thin kludgy MFC. However, OWL 2.0 was completely backwards incompatible with OWL 1.0 and the more standards compliant C++ compiler couldn't compile OWL 1.0 programs. At that point, companies revolted. OWL 2.0 was the right idea, but since companies had to migrate anyway, they chose to migrate to the inferior (though more API stable) MFC. VistaNG could face a similar revolt too if it make migratiting to it too painful.
Here's an alternative that's a lot more likely to me.
* Microsoft ships Vista.
* Microsoft starts writing a new high performance core from the ground up or takes the FreeBSD core or the Darwin core (since they can reuse the Mach experience) and adds its new and improved Windows API layer above it (that API might even be completely written in
* Microsoft ports all their apps to the new VistaNG API
* Microsoft writes a WINE-like app that uses their new cleaned up API layer in order to run Vista apps.
The consequence of this are:
* VistaNG apps run fast and programming for VistaNG is a lot nicer than Vista
* Most Vista apps run smoothly on VistaNG (at a slight performance and memory penalty)
* People who want don't care about backwards compatibility will not have to deal with the bloat and cruft, while those who do, can get it.
* At some point in the future, (2 releases after VistaNG), Microsoft can throw out the VistaNG layer or just let the code break over time, like they have with the Win16 API
For the record, here's a slightly less objective measure of the relative (perceived) corruption between countries:n _Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptio
Based on the assumption that perception and reality are correlated and the CPI measure accurately measures perceived corruption in a standardized way, the US is definitely far less corrupt than most countries of the world, but there are several countries that a significantly less corrupt than the US.
Back on topic, the "donation" might have a lot more to do with Google than ODF. The money seems to be geared towards web delevopment tools. One thing Microsoft has been pushing is XAML as a web standard to replace HTML. If Microsoft can succeed in getting children to be hooked on XAML and Microsoft specific tools instead of web standards, schools will pump out children without crossplatform skills. These children will bring their MS centric viewpoint into the workforce, and that may change company's intranet (or internet) policies. Let's face it, you can design much fancier applications in something like XAML or XUL with less headaches, but sacrifices have to be made if you want to be crossplatform, avoid vendor lock-in, and have added infrastructure flexibility. It's hard to convince with people with a "Microsoft is the only thing out there, they created web standards better than any crossplatform standard and everyone uses IE and MS is so big that it will last for ever and everyone else had better adapt or die out of being useless" view of the world that these things matter. That, IMO, is what Microsoft is counting on more than anything else.
For the record, as far as Argentina goes, there are more women Debian Developers then men:0 078.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2006/06/msg0
GNOME might want to look into what Debian is doing.
It'll have to disagree with you. Here's a point by point refutation:
(1) So was BeOS and it died.
(2) So was BeOS and it died. Beside, Windows if "free" if you get most new computers and you actually have to throw it away if you want to install Linux. It's also "free" if you "have a friend who knows stuff about computers" (i.e. most people) and you're okay with pirating.
(3) Neither are BeOS, MacOS, QNX, etc.
(4) Ditto for MacOS, BeOS, QNX.
(5) Ditto for MacOS, BeOS, QNX.
When it comes down to it, living outside the "normal world" is a pain (e.g. glash 8 doesn't exist for Linux. no iTunes, etc), so there has to be better incentive than free. People's time is just too expensive.
IMO, the reasons the most of current crop of Linux users choose Linux is because:
(1) It's open source, so even if you don't look at the source code, you know someone is, so you can be more certain that you don't have to deal with corporate spyware like the Sony CD.
(2) It's open source, so you know it will still be there even and be maintained (even if you have to pay for support) if everyone abandons it.
(3) It's open source, so you don't have to feel guilty about pirating stuff.
(4) It's open source, so it's non-proprietary and thus you don't have to deal with the crap of vendors forcing planned obsolence changes on you in an effort to get you to pay for an upgrade. (E.g. Microsoft file formats)
(5) It's open source, so it's likely that your files are in a standard format or are convertable to a standard format. (There's less need to put up proprietary roadblocks)
(6) It's open source, so things like the Debian package repository and Synaptic allow you to gain a huge collection of programs simply without any proprietary barriers.
(7) It's open source, so vendor lock-in just can't happen.
Yes free factors into it, but even if there was a charge (as is the case for corporate Linux), the advantages are just too big to ignore.
It's actually *not* a stupid policy. I've worked at places without this policy and the attitude is "If there's an emergency or deadline or we're short staffed, then you really should postpone your vacation. After all, you can change the vacation. We can't change our crisis, so it would be irresponsible and unprofessional to go on vacation now."
In places with the use it or lose it policy, the attitude tends to be "Okay, there's a crisis that can't be rescheduled, but your vacation can't be postponed either. So we'll either make due without you with some stop gap measures until you return or apologize for being in such a mess and try to bribe you into forgoing your vacation."
I don't know about you, but I prefer the later environment. Even though I *love* my work and tend to regularily go above and beyond the call of duty. the latter environment is just plain more respectful.
> No. It can identify people who have calling patterns associated with terrorist activity,
I don't think it can even do that. If a terror network really is loose, then the "one international call followed by a flood of local calls" may be completely out to lunch, simply because the head sleeper will just call 2 next important sleepers, each of which would call 2 other next important sleepers, and so on, until they call the cogs actually doing the dirty work. At no point is there any flood, just a cascading trickle that hides the more important sleepers from the cogs.
They could look for that pattern (which is pretty popular, especially with companies that try to create a "buzz"), but they would also miss the case where the announcement of the go-ahead is hiding in plain sight. The sleepers above the cogs could simply say "listen to the radio's request line. When you hear someone request '"The safety dance" for my wife Alice who never plays it safe' we attack." or "watch Slashdot for the following User Name and read every second word for final instructions.".
Sorry, the top line of the above message got cut off. Here is is:
m mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111188 ) :
Here's my theory ( from http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
=111188
"Is your business model similar to the ones at mainstream open-source vendors, such as Red Hat?
In a sense, but not completely. We believe software should be free to anyone. If you want to buy a support contract, it is there for you. [But] there is no premium version [of Ubuntu] that costs money. We're also happy for you to get support from someone besides us. We list companies on our site that provide that -- we're up to 200 around the world. Some customers buy support just from [another] firm, others buy it with escalation support from Canonical. That way, a local company will provide front-line support. But for really hard problems, they can escalate trouble tickets back up to us. "
Basically, the advantage of Ubuntu over Debian (besides having a 6 month release time if you want it) is that Ubuntu is focused on providing a support infrastructure for OEMs (Canonical has devoted a lot of time in this area). While you can OEM Debian, you're pretty much on your own if you do (unless the DCC Alliance takes off). With Ubuntu, you can created your custom version with your branding, add your special packages, and support as much or as little as you want to support. If there's a question you can't answer (or don't want to waste resources answering because you only want to support your customization), you can always escalate it to Canonical or other support companies in your area and take credit (your customers won't care as long as you give them unified support and don't get them involved in the messy details). If you want some OEM specific feature to get into the distro, it's more likely that you'll be able to get it into Ubuntu than Debian since Debian is not as focused on OEMs.
> What the industry needs is good, common-sense DRM. Today's
> DRM doesn't allow for things going public domain. It's not
> flexible enough to allow users to do what they want (and is
> legal) with what they paid for. They are presently erring on
> the side of profit...that's not going to work with consumers long-term
You're making a few critical assumptions. You're assuming that the music companies:
* want to let go of cash cows through expiration
* want to allow others to use their work (even excepts) without paying royalties
* want to allow competitors to use their work (even excepts) without paying royalties
* want to forgo profits that they could get by forcing you to pay for the same song over and over again (e.g. replacements, new formats, etc)
You're also assuming that it's technically possible to:
* Allow for DRM-free fair use excepts without allowing for these excepts to be recombined to create a DRM-free copy
* ALlow device portability without also allowing copying.
* Allow mixing without opening up the format.
* Allow for expiration to happen without having DRM fall apart completely.
Before the entertainment conceeds on any of the nontechnical issues, they'd offer the following
* Promise to release their works in a DRM-free format after copyright expires (Honest! You can believe us!)
* Provide liberal licensing for people who want to make derivative works
* Provide a service that allows you to purchase DRM-encumbered fair use clips (At a low low price)
* Give you the ability to copy the songs a limitted number of times (there's no way you'd ever upgrade your machine more than twice anyway)
None of these options seem very satisfying, so it's best to just avoid any DRM encumbered entertainment.
Lispire's Carmony called it called the "all you can eat" business model. When a restaurant has an all you can eat buffet, it knows that some sumo wrestler is going to just camp out there and gorge, but that's okay on average because statistically the next 10 will ask for a small salad. You just have to find the right price to charge for the average. The "Unix fork" model works the same way and allows you to fork off more processes than you have memory for, yet 99% of the time nothing bad happens because most of the forks are "small salid eaters".
The problem comes when you have a month long sumo wrester's convention in town. More than likely, they'll choose an all you can eat place and if your restaurant is unfortunate enough to get their business, you may go bankrupt or face shortages for both the sumos and the "small salad" eaters.
Personally, I don't know what the answer is. People want to maximize utilization and they won't if they assume the worst case for all people. They'll have to charge more and dedicate than their competitors and provide their customers with service 99% wouldn't care for (or even notice) 99% of the time. That's the surest way to go backrupt.
The only thing I can say, is that if you live in sumo country and your ISP thinks that it's living in "small salad" eaterville, then pick another more realistic ISP.
Remember we're talking about "geological time" not "web time", so big changes like this happen a lot slower. According to Wikipedia:
"At present, the overall geomagnetic field is becoming weaker at a rate which would, if it continues, cause the dipole field to temporarily collapse by 3000-4000 AD."
So it'll be a bit of time before that happens. If I understand it correctly, it'll slowly get weaker and weaker until it just disappears before slowly coming back on the flip side. Hopefully the slowness will give us time to migrate off of a dependence on magnetic fields to tell us where we are, and hopefully animals will also have time to readjust and find alternative ways of knowing where they are.
This story is a dup.
:-)
It was posted twice last month (May 11 and May 26).
Actually, you don't have to use SED. Unix has a "rename" command that accommodates SED expression renames. It's a real godsent, so if you don't have it installed on your distro, do yourself a favour and use this PERL replacement:
http://www.greenfly.org/rename
Also, how much of that 6 million lines are drivers (which is not included in the microkernel calculation)?
I'm willing to bet that if you remove the drivers and modules from the Linux kernel that it's size will be on the order of 10k too.
A few things to consider:
* Remember what happened when Netscape 4.7 decided to do a complete rewrite instead of incremental improvements over a longer period of time? Netscape went from 90% market share to 1%. A complete rewrite would be just as damaging to Linux.
* Bugs are bugs, no matter where they are. Most of Linux's "million lines of code" are drivers. If no-one is doing bug fixes in the kernel drivers, moving them out of the kernel wouldn't help.
* Linux *has* moved most things to modules and the core is pretty well understood and not a likely source of bugs because it has the most eyeballs on it. So the added modularity of Microkernels wouldn't buy you anything.
* Linux scales from super computers to the Linux watch using the same code base. Supercomputers might not care about the added microkernel layer but low resource environments definitely *would*.
* Buffer overflows are generally not the reason most well designed kernels go down, it's hidden race conditions, starvation, and other NP complete problems that go hidden for years. Moving these problems to user space wouldn't solve them. In fact, it may aggravate them unless intimate knowledge of global state is available to user space (which is in itself a security risk and thus a source of bugs)
Maybe, but don't forget that Microsoft is in an Anti-Trust investigation in Europe. Suppose the EU decided that the only way MS Word would be available is if MS Word support the ODF file format and saved files *by default* in ODF format. That would pretty much level the Word Processing playing field and allow Microsoft to "innovate" freely since the only reason for chosing Microsoft the would be that you like their software.
Actually, it's an old tradition. Court Jesters ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_jester ) have been able tell the kings things no-one else would dare say, in the guise of comedy for centuries.
Actually, humanity was not designed to be idle, as you believe. If it were the case then idle people would have perfect health instead of getting all sorts of obesity related illnesses and the idle rich wouldn't be killing themselves with drugs instead of enjoying their life the way the active rich (who have jobs they created) seem to do.
You want want robot cashiers, surgeons, auto mechanics, chefs, soldiers, aircraft mechanics, software programmers, CEOs, but you're forgetting that there are enthusists in all these fields. Why is Mark Shuttleworth programming when he has so much money? Because he enjoys it. Why do hobbyist chefs cook on their own and take pride when they're able to cook for a large audience (even if they have to bust their butt for weeks to prepare)? Because they enjoy it. Why do hobbyist mechanics spend their weekends turning a bucket of bolts into a race car? Because they enjoy it. In each of these cases, turning their hobby into their job would enhance their lives. Many slashdotters love their jobs. Sure there are some annoyances, but that's life. You get just as many annoyances even on your dream vacation.
Perhaps you've never found that one job that you can treat as a hobby. Perhaps you found it but you chose to go for money and security and being a cog in the great beaurocracy instead of going for a good living (at less pay) with a little adventure and a lot more freedom. Perhaps you outgrew your dream job and you have a new dream job. I've switched careers a few times (and may do it again in the future). I still enjoyed my old career, but I realized that I won't in the future and that I had different dreams now. There's always a period of adjustment and some sacrifices, but if you've made the right choice, you'll eventually enjoy it.
Face it. You hate your job. Why are you *still* doing what you're doing? Why not take some time each day to try to figure out how to get out of your hell hole into something you enjoy doing? Do you really want to spend the next 20 to 40 years suffering? Do you really want to look back at the end of your life and curse? You know you deserve better than that.
> At the top of the list, I see the need for an enterprise-grade versioning and repository server. One that is connectable
> from anywhere in the enterprise, with flexible security and controls that integrates into the enterprise architecture.
> That might seem like a lot of buzzwords jammed into one little sentence, so I'll expand on that. Instead of saving your
> document to a file, it will save it into a server. The server will save the document, and save subsequent changes. It
> will have the ability to give you the old version if you've bunged up completely.....
Isn't this called Subversion/Clearcase/CVS/Bitkeeper/....?