I used to think that way when I used Yahoo! email, but you're actually paying those services a MASSIVE amount every time you put some data into them. For example, when Yahoo! decided that POP access should be a "premium" (ie. pay-for) feature it made every desktop and locally-runnable Web-based email interface incapable of accessing my email for me overnight.
Rather than trying to use their awful ad-laden Web-based tripe (note for Web developers: white text is not readable on a white background!), I ditched them and moved to Gmail. It took AGES to change my Yahoo address to my Gmail address all over the place (on the Web, in people's address books, in official documents, etc.), and I'm sure there are still loads of emails arriving in my Yahoo account to this day which I'll never see.
*That's* the price which is paid, and for many people this is so high that they'll stick with their Web service even when the provider does really stupid crap which they'd never tolerate if their data wasn't inaccessible otherwise.
If Google ever try to pull a stunt like Yahoo! that then I'll run my own email server.
Also, with Web-based services there is the terrible issue of the UI being intertwined with the data. Whilst I can use any UI I want to display Gmail's IMAP data, if I used Yahoo!'s Web interface I'm stuck with what they decide I should use. Regardless of whether you think a Web interface is good or not, you still have absolutely no control over it. Just look at the outcry caused when Facebook and last.fm changed their Web interfaces.
The brakes on the Semi-Truck behind you go out... 'Quick! The invisibility cloak will save us!'
I thought we were supposed to consider that lorry to be a uniform sphere? Now you're saying we should treat it as a wave, too? I didn't realize light shared wave-particle duality with semi trucks.
Try MenuetOS then http://www.menuetos.net/ It's what Kolibri is based on. At least, Kolibri is based on the Free Software 32bit MenuetOS. The author has since switched to a 64bit version which isn't Free Software (hence Kolibri exists).
This has very little to do with Open Source. Jabber sells proprietary software http://www.jabber.com/ (NOT http://www.jabber.org/ ) which uses the XMPP system they developed (which used to be called the "Jabber" network, but changed its name when it was standardised).
XMPP is currently looked after by the XMPP Standards Foundation, so this doesn't affect the status of the standards, except that Peter Saint-Andre, who does a lot of the work mantaining, improving and drafting XMPP-based standards, works for Jabber. Despite the volume of his work, however, the XSF still has to approve the standards he writes (just like if I wrote a standard, or Google did, or Microsoft), so there's been no shift of power over XMPP.
All of the Open Source XMPP software out there will continue unaffected by this, except that there may be more users, developers and libraries available as Cisco spreads the technology.
If some company starts selling (or distributing for free for its own financial benefit which is morally the same thing) a codec with unlicensed, patented technology, they're over the line. They did not pay the patent holder any dough, and so have no right to benefit from the invention that way.
Which is exactly why (L)GPL codecs which break patents, like LAME, cannot be distributed wherever those patents hold water. The license says that EVERYBODY who gets it must have permission to do that:
"4. Conveying Verbatim Copies. You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program. You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee."
However, if the person/entity can't have those permissions for any reason (like patents) then they're not allowed to receive it in the first place:
"12. No Surrender of Others' Freedom. If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program."
That's taken from the GPLv3 (the LGPLv3 is GPLv3+some extra), but it is similar wording to previous versions (although the "No Surrender of Others' Freedom" clause wasn't in GPL1)
The problem is that the makers of a Free Software implementation, like LAME, will not get a license to use the patents because they are not the distributor, EVERYONE who gets it is a distributor. Apple can pay fees based on the number of iPods sold, but with Free Software a license fee for a single unit could be payed, then the recipient of that single unit can copy it indefinetly around the globe without paying anything.
If, on the other hand, the recipient had to pay for the number of copies distributed (and those recipients had to, and so on), then the recipient would be receiving the software without the right to redisribute it (either copied or modified). This violates the GPL's 'liberty or death' clause which says that if the recipient doesn't get all of the rights specified in the license then you're simply not allowed to give it to them.
In other words, nobody can obtain a license, and even if they did they would be prevented from sharing that codec with anyone under similar laws. What this results in is the entire world complaining about codecs and decryption software because America contains some very powerful cretins, along with "sueing everyone" being both a valid career option and a business plan for said cretins.
Yes, I wish we lived in a world where all formats, protocols, and standards were Free, but they never will be so long as capitalism remains our official state religion. Meanwhile, we still want to watch our movies and play our music.
You do realise, of course, that such places do still exist, and as far as I'm aware Canonical is in one since they are a UK-based company, and is not bound by retarded US laws like the DMCA and pretty much all software patents?
From your use of dollars to describe prices, I assume you're American and were previously unable to get these legally, except directly from Fluendo, but I think it is a slippery slope for a UK business to willingly bend over before the laws of another country. Firstly in not offering Free Software like LAME and libdvdcss to users who want it, can get it, and are entitled to do so (users such as me), and now to follow it with sending tribute to the foreign patent holders and IP cops who cause this crap in the first place.
I hate Java so much. Don't waste my time with GUIs, 10 years from now swing won't frigging matter. Some of us aren't going to be software engineers dammit!... My ideal curriculum would start with a semester of Python just to get students familiar with how programming works without worrying about the intricacies of a specific language. Then after that do Lisp or C/C++. Anything but Java.
Since when does Java==GUIs? Many server-side programs are written in Java, and writing commandline apps in Java is easier than writing GUI apps (as it should be).
Java is nice to teach with because it enforces a lot of things, like forcing every program to be at least some level of object oriented, enforcing types and enforcing exception handling. These are useful things when being taught object oriented programming, because the difficulty in introductory programs is not how to solve the given problem, but in getting one's head around what is happening at each point in the program. Types help with this, as does the forceful use of methods.
Using Python as an introductory language would result in a lot of programmers who have no concept of program structure, since a huge sequential program is completely valid in Python without any boilerplate syntax. Humans are hard-wired to find the easiest solution to a problem, which in the case of teaching examples is often a long list of operations, which forces students to learn functions, objects and such only when they're confronted with a large and complicated task, which is the hardest thing to learn a new style with.
I agree with the not-liking-Java opinion though, as that's all my University teaches in Computer Science (although I have learned C and C++ from the Physics department), but whilst I may use Python for all of my own projects I admit that Java was a useful tool to teach me some structuring principles.
The W3C already pushes RDF and RDFa, which are simple, machine-readable statements. Surely this already existing technology could be used to say things like "Site X has a trustworthyness of 80%", which could be stored in a distributed network of servers, with digital signing to show who's opinion it is. Then, people/sites which are well trusted can have their opinions held in higher regard, following some algorithm. Add some rules which keep automated entries from having much weight and voila.
Yes, there would be no "absolute truth" in such a system, it would all be a matter of consensus, but that's just the same as real life. "I think therefore I am" and all that.
"OpenDarwin was a community-led operating system based on the Darwin platform. It was founded in April 2002 by Apple Inc. and Internet Systems Consortium. Its goal was to increase collaboration between Apple developers and the free software community. Apple theoretically benefited from the project because improvements to OpenDarwin would be incorporated into Darwin releases; and the free/open source community supposedly benefited from being given complete control over its own operating system, which could then be used in free software distributions such as GNU-Darwin.[11]
On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects," and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed. They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[12] The last stable release was version 7.2.1, released on July 16, 2004. [1]"
WebKit was a massive code dump of KHTML, modified so much that merging those changes would require more effort than starting a whole new project.
Whilst I think that all open source code contributions are a good thing, to me Apple's policy seems to consist of fork-by-default, then contribute back anything for which that would be too costly.
Are we caring about that? its on the moon yes there is always the off the wall chance of it harming anyone but is the radiation from the spent material *really* that much worse than the UV radiation bombarding the surface of the moon?
What about the radiation of the material on the way up? If such a reactor+material were sent along with a manned mission then the cost of getting the shielding off the ground would be huge.
The only way I see it working is by sending up the reactor first with no shielding and landing it in a crater, then setting up the thing with robots, sending the manned mission to land outside the crater (with a nice chunk of Moon between them and the reactor to act as a radiation shield) and finally sending a robot to carry a power cable between the two sites. Trouble is, if something goes wrong which the robots are not equipped to handle then anyone going into the crater to fix it would be on a suicide mission.
Gnome seems to be adopting Empathy ( http://live.gnome.org/Empathy ) as their default messaging application (they used to use Gossip). Empathy includes voice and video support (although I've never got it to work myself), so it seems unclear at the moment if Ekiga will remain part of Gnome.
As a side note, I've never got Ekiga to work either, but this is something to do with NAT traversal which doesn't seem to work even after forwarding the ports given in the documentation.
...what the hell are they going to do after 26 releases?
As far as I know, there's only three animals that start with "aa", and no adjectives. Unless they're going to roll over to just "a" again, which would be lame (but more practical).
The naming system hasn't been in place for the whole of Ubuntu's life.
First came Warty Warthog, then Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger and Dapper Drake. Only with version 6.10 did they follow alphabetically, with Edgy Eft.
Besides, Mark Shuttleworth probably has enough money to either find or genetically engineer new species, then name them to fit Ubuntu's releases:P
If there were a manned mission to another planet which lasted generations, then without very careful exercise, artificial gravity (centrifuge?), etc. the people arriving at the destination would most likely have such atrophied muscles that their hearts couldn't get their blood up to their heads. This happens right now for long stays on space stations, so being born in microgravity would certainly cause unwanted "evolution" for colonists.
in the last 30 days I've sent 45 gigabytes and received 89 gigabytes.
I USE 50k PHONE LINE TO DOWNLOAD DOCTOR WHO (about 3 hours per episode). Who needs broadband?
Your comment suggests you've downloaded 89GB in the last 30 days, yet your sig suggests that downloading 89GB would take you somewhere around 150 days. I suggest that either you need to update your sig now that you have broadband, or I need to find something more productive to do with my time.
Interestingly, the most important thing is missing from the summary -- the prize. So, what the prize is you ask?
An incredible, unbelievable, astonishing and amazing amount of... wtf... fourty (40) US Dollars? Yes, you heard that right! No wonder nobody has shown any interest in participating.
Full quote from the site: Should someone win, they get to keep the drive. They also will receive $40.00 USD and the title "King (or Queen) of Data Recovery".
That's not fair. They also get to keep whatever broken pile of scrap remains of the drive after they've managed to scrap the file/folder names off it:)
This prize is so valuable that it is actually a kingdom.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if this is popular enough, we'll see it in the next version of Windows? Can't wait!
I don't like the idea of where that might go. "It looks as if you are trying to uninstall Vista. Please prove the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis"...
Hey, it's working for the ReCAPTCHA initiative, so why not get a few unsolved mathematical problems solved in the process?
Don't forget about Microsoft's and others' habit of Win<name>.NET# as well.
And of course Google's naming scheme of suffixing everything with "BETA" :P
I used to think that way when I used Yahoo! email, but you're actually paying those services a MASSIVE amount every time you put some data into them. For example, when Yahoo! decided that POP access should be a "premium" (ie. pay-for) feature it made every desktop and locally-runnable Web-based email interface incapable of accessing my email for me overnight.
Rather than trying to use their awful ad-laden Web-based tripe (note for Web developers: white text is not readable on a white background!), I ditched them and moved to Gmail. It took AGES to change my Yahoo address to my Gmail address all over the place (on the Web, in people's address books, in official documents, etc.), and I'm sure there are still loads of emails arriving in my Yahoo account to this day which I'll never see.
*That's* the price which is paid, and for many people this is so high that they'll stick with their Web service even when the provider does really stupid crap which they'd never tolerate if their data wasn't inaccessible otherwise.
If Google ever try to pull a stunt like Yahoo! that then I'll run my own email server.
Also, with Web-based services there is the terrible issue of the UI being intertwined with the data. Whilst I can use any UI I want to display Gmail's IMAP data, if I used Yahoo!'s Web interface I'm stuck with what they decide I should use. Regardless of whether you think a Web interface is good or not, you still have absolutely no control over it. Just look at the outcry caused when Facebook and last.fm changed their Web interfaces.
The brakes on the Semi-Truck behind you go out... 'Quick! The invisibility cloak will save us!'
I thought we were supposed to consider that lorry to be a uniform sphere? Now you're saying we should treat it as a wave, too? I didn't realize light shared wave-particle duality with semi trucks.
No no no no! It's a series of tubes!
I'm looking forward to the upcoming Brick Epidemic, the following Cobblestone Conundrum, and finally the Pointy-stick Problem.
He's got a board with a nail in it!
Try MenuetOS then http://www.menuetos.net/ It's what Kolibri is based on. At least, Kolibri is based on the Free Software 32bit MenuetOS. The author has since switched to a 64bit version which isn't Free Software (hence Kolibri exists).
This has very little to do with Open Source. Jabber sells proprietary software http://www.jabber.com/ (NOT http://www.jabber.org/ ) which uses the XMPP system they developed (which used to be called the "Jabber" network, but changed its name when it was standardised).
XMPP is currently looked after by the XMPP Standards Foundation, so this doesn't affect the status of the standards, except that Peter Saint-Andre, who does a lot of the work mantaining, improving and drafting XMPP-based standards, works for Jabber. Despite the volume of his work, however, the XSF still has to approve the standards he writes (just like if I wrote a standard, or Google did, or Microsoft), so there's been no shift of power over XMPP.
All of the Open Source XMPP software out there will continue unaffected by this, except that there may be more users, developers and libraries available as Cisco spreads the technology.
If some company starts selling (or distributing for free for its own financial benefit which is morally the same thing) a codec with unlicensed, patented technology, they're over the line. They did not pay the patent holder any dough, and so have no right to benefit from the invention that way.
Which is exactly why (L)GPL codecs which break patents, like LAME, cannot be distributed wherever those patents hold water. The license says that EVERYBODY who gets it must have permission to do that:
"4. Conveying Verbatim Copies.
You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.
You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee."
However, if the person/entity can't have those permissions for any reason (like patents) then they're not allowed to receive it in the first place:
"12. No Surrender of Others' Freedom.
If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program."
That's taken from the GPLv3 (the LGPLv3 is GPLv3+some extra), but it is similar wording to previous versions (although the "No Surrender of Others' Freedom" clause wasn't in GPL1)
The problem is that the makers of a Free Software implementation, like LAME, will not get a license to use the patents because they are not the distributor, EVERYONE who gets it is a distributor. Apple can pay fees based on the number of iPods sold, but with Free Software a license fee for a single unit could be payed, then the recipient of that single unit can copy it indefinetly around the globe without paying anything.
If, on the other hand, the recipient had to pay for the number of copies distributed (and those recipients had to, and so on), then the recipient would be receiving the software without the right to redisribute it (either copied or modified). This violates the GPL's 'liberty or death' clause which says that if the recipient doesn't get all of the rights specified in the license then you're simply not allowed to give it to them.
In other words, nobody can obtain a license, and even if they did they would be prevented from sharing that codec with anyone under similar laws. What this results in is the entire world complaining about codecs and decryption software because America contains some very powerful cretins, along with "sueing everyone" being both a valid career option and a business plan for said cretins.
Yes, I wish we lived in a world where all formats, protocols, and standards were Free, but they never will be so long as capitalism remains our official state religion. Meanwhile, we still want to watch our movies and play our music.
You do realise, of course, that such places do still exist, and as far as I'm aware Canonical is in one since they are a UK-based company, and is not bound by retarded US laws like the DMCA and pretty much all software patents?
From your use of dollars to describe prices, I assume you're American and were previously unable to get these legally, except directly from Fluendo, but I think it is a slippery slope for a UK business to willingly bend over before the laws of another country. Firstly in not offering Free Software like LAME and libdvdcss to users who want it, can get it, and are entitled to do so (users such as me), and now to follow it with sending tribute to the foreign patent holders and IP cops who cause this crap in the first place.
It seems like an even worse case than the French anti-Nazi thing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/760782.stm
yeah, why the heck don't they convert the CO2 into something usable, like C and O2?
Maybe build another generating plant next door that supplies the energy required to break the molocules...
Python is more maintainable and easier to make cross-platform, and personally I think that Orange can get cheaper SMS prices.
I hate Java so much. Don't waste my time with GUIs, 10 years from now swing won't frigging matter. Some of us aren't going to be software engineers dammit! ... My ideal curriculum would start with a semester of Python just to get students familiar with how programming works without worrying about the intricacies of a specific language. Then after that do Lisp or C/C++. Anything but Java.
Since when does Java==GUIs? Many server-side programs are written in Java, and writing commandline apps in Java is easier than writing GUI apps (as it should be).
Java is nice to teach with because it enforces a lot of things, like forcing every program to be at least some level of object oriented, enforcing types and enforcing exception handling. These are useful things when being taught object oriented programming, because the difficulty in introductory programs is not how to solve the given problem, but in getting one's head around what is happening at each point in the program. Types help with this, as does the forceful use of methods.
Using Python as an introductory language would result in a lot of programmers who have no concept of program structure, since a huge sequential program is completely valid in Python without any boilerplate syntax. Humans are hard-wired to find the easiest solution to a problem, which in the case of teaching examples is often a long list of operations, which forces students to learn functions, objects and such only when they're confronted with a large and complicated task, which is the hardest thing to learn a new style with.
I agree with the not-liking-Java opinion though, as that's all my University teaches in Computer Science (although I have learned C and C++ from the Physics department), but whilst I may use Python for all of my own projects I admit that Java was a useful tool to teach me some structuring principles.
The W3C already pushes RDF and RDFa, which are simple, machine-readable statements. Surely this already existing technology could be used to say things like "Site X has a trustworthyness of 80%", which could be stored in a distributed network of servers, with digital signing to show who's opinion it is. Then, people/sites which are well trusted can have their opinions held in higher regard, following some algorithm. Add some rules which keep automated entries from having much weight and voila.
Yes, there would be no "absolute truth" in such a system, it would all be a matter of consensus, but that's just the same as real life. "I think therefore I am" and all that.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
"OpenDarwin was a community-led operating system based on the Darwin platform. It was founded in April 2002 by Apple Inc. and Internet Systems Consortium. Its goal was to increase collaboration between Apple developers and the free software community. Apple theoretically benefited from the project because improvements to OpenDarwin would be incorporated into Darwin releases; and the free/open source community supposedly benefited from being given complete control over its own operating system, which could then be used in free software distributions such as GNU-Darwin.[11]
On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects," and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed. They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[12] The last stable release was version 7.2.1, released on July 16, 2004. [1]"
WebKit was a massive code dump of KHTML, modified so much that merging those changes would require more effort than starting a whole new project.
Whilst I think that all open source code contributions are a good thing, to me Apple's policy seems to consist of fork-by-default, then contribute back anything for which that would be too costly.
Are we caring about that? its on the moon yes there is always the off the wall chance of it harming anyone but is the radiation from the spent material *really* that much worse than the UV radiation bombarding the surface of the moon?
What about the radiation of the material on the way up? If such a reactor+material were sent along with a manned mission then the cost of getting the shielding off the ground would be huge.
The only way I see it working is by sending up the reactor first with no shielding and landing it in a crater, then setting up the thing with robots, sending the manned mission to land outside the crater (with a nice chunk of Moon between them and the reactor to act as a radiation shield) and finally sending a robot to carry a power cable between the two sites. Trouble is, if something goes wrong which the robots are not equipped to handle then anyone going into the crater to fix it would be on a suicide mission.
Is reacting more positively to someone with brown hair than to someone with blond hair racist?
It depends on how much hair. These are virtual worlds we're talking about, so the all-over look can't be ignored :P
Gnome seems to be adopting Empathy ( http://live.gnome.org/Empathy ) as their default messaging application (they used to use Gossip). Empathy includes voice and video support (although I've never got it to work myself), so it seems unclear at the moment if Ekiga will remain part of Gnome.
As a side note, I've never got Ekiga to work either, but this is something to do with NAT traversal which doesn't seem to work even after forwarding the ports given in the documentation.
He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end.
Hang on, I thought Microsoft *wanted* OEMs to preinstall Windows?
Some P2P company should sue them for defamation.
I vote the Pirate Bay ;)
...what the hell are they going to do after 26 releases?
As far as I know, there's only three animals that start with "aa", and no adjectives. Unless they're going to roll over to just "a" again, which would be lame (but more practical).
The naming system hasn't been in place for the whole of Ubuntu's life.
First came Warty Warthog, then Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger and Dapper Drake. Only with version 6.10 did they follow alphabetically, with Edgy Eft.
Besides, Mark Shuttleworth probably has enough money to either find or genetically engineer new species, then name them to fit Ubuntu's releases :P
If there were a manned mission to another planet which lasted generations, then without very careful exercise, artificial gravity (centrifuge?), etc. the people arriving at the destination would most likely have such atrophied muscles that their hearts couldn't get their blood up to their heads. This happens right now for long stays on space stations, so being born in microgravity would certainly cause unwanted "evolution" for colonists.
I find it rather amusing that an anti-Scientology YouTube video is linked to as a comment on "4,000 Anti-Scientology Videos Yanked From YouTube" :D
in the last 30 days I've sent 45 gigabytes and received 89 gigabytes.
I USE 50k PHONE LINE TO DOWNLOAD DOCTOR WHO
(about 3 hours per episode). Who needs broadband?
Your comment suggests you've downloaded 89GB in the last 30 days, yet your sig suggests that downloading 89GB would take you somewhere around 150 days. I suggest that either you need to update your sig now that you have broadband, or I need to find something more productive to do with my time.
Interestingly, the most important thing is missing from the summary -- the prize. So, what the prize is you ask?
An incredible, unbelievable, astonishing and amazing amount of... wtf... fourty (40) US Dollars? Yes, you heard that right! No wonder nobody has shown any interest in participating.
Full quote from the site: Should someone win, they get to keep the drive. They also will receive $40.00 USD and the title "King (or Queen) of Data Recovery".
That's not fair. They also get to keep whatever broken pile of scrap remains of the drive after they've managed to scrap the file/folder names off it :)
This prize is so valuable that it is actually a kingdom.
Sounds like Dell really are embracing Linux. They're moving their manufacturing into a specialised daemon, doing one thing and doing it well.
It was inevitable, since they've been treating their components as files for years (they are kept in a "notebook" afterall) :P