Because there is no open source alternative today I submit that the code could only exist in closed source...clearly there is neither a need nor advantage to having this product be open source (or it would already exist that way).
That's complete BS. It's not even rational. There's no open-source version, therefore an open-source version CAN'T EXIST? Are you mad?
There's a lot of niche software that doesn't have an open source equivalent (or no well-known open source equivalent), but that's usually because the people who need such niche software aren't programmers, and so don't write the software themselves. That's where open source software comes from: programmers who want software that does X, but find the proprietary (or extant open-source) versions lacking.
The point isn't that "commerical software bankrupts businesses." In fact, that point isn't made, claimed, implied or inferred anywhere in the article! The point is that proprietary software can be a danger for the reasons in the article, and people need to be aware of it.
Yeah, one of the labs in the basement of Boelter Hall at UCLA has that same sign... except at the top, where it would normally say DANGER in 72-point type, it just says DANG.
This seems like yet-another-bad-software-patent, but I guess Slashdotters pick and choose which bad software patents to get upset about.
Nevermind that there's more than one person on this site, with more than one opinion. Can you point to any specific Slashdot users who've denigrated other software patents but support this one?
There's quite a few of us who believe that all software patents should be invalid.
I'm guessing that at the least, Academy members are pleased to know they won't have to find a theatre to screen award nominees.
God forbid the people voting on the pictures should have to see them in the environment they were intended to be viewed in.:) Yeah, I know that it's not feasible for every Academy member to see every movie that's nominated in every category... I suppose one solution would be that members would only vote on categories in which they HAD seen all the nominated films. Dunno how you'd enforce that, but I imagine that simply asking them to do so would probably work well enough (modulo members voting for movies that they had some interest in, worked on, really liked, etc.).
Last year's Oscars had 52 nominated films. You can remove nineteen of those for the two short film categories (five films each), the foreign-language film category (five more films), the documentary feature category (five films), and the documentary short subject category (four films), leaving 33 films for the other categories. (Not to diminish the importance of these categories, but we have to start somewhere.) Most Academy voters will probably already have seen at least half of those 33 films before the nominations are even announced. So having to see another 17 films between the nomination announcement and the end of voting? What a tragedy! To be forced to go watch a bunch of Oscar-nominated films, in order to vote in a big popularity contest.:)
Well, if we're talking Big Giant Nuclear Tanks of Doom, that's another story, but designing an M1A1 Abrams-sized tank with a nuclear plant would still present the problems I described. Yeah, a carrier can have lots of extra heavy shielding (and armor) around its nuclear plant, but then a carrier is a couple hundred feet wide. A tank is maybe twenty feet wide. Also, tanks have to move a lot faster, be a lot more maneuverable... making them Big Giant would remove some of those advantages.
These tanks could also have equipment for burying themselves into the ground, increasing their protection.
And maybe they could fly, too! And their exhaust would be ice cream. As long as we're making wishes...:)
Nuclear-powered tanks? That doesn't seem like a great idea. Sure, they wouldn't need refueling for long, long periods of time... but then you'd need probably a lot of extra training to be able to refuel them. Then there's the fact that if one of them happens to get hit with a missile and blow up, it may well spray radioactive debris over a wide area.
I don't know if any advantages conferred by using a nuclear powerplant in a tank would override the obvious disadvantages.
This is fair. I was sort of projecting what I believe to be the crux of the geek's dislike for management types. I know that I believe in what I said, to a degree. And I do understand that there are skills involved in doing business -- if there weren't, we wouldn't have managers, because geeks could do everything;)
...for the ones that tests a particular program's performance.
If I never use Word, Premiere, Quake III, or whatever is being benchmarked, then what good does the benchmark tell me? There are too many programs that use processors in different ways for such benchmarks to be generally useful. If I'm going to be running programs A, B, and C, then the only benchmark that's useful to me is one that separately tests programs A, B, and C on different processors, and gives me the individual results for each. If processor #1 is better on programs A and B, but worse on program C, then saying that it's "overall" faster is still meaningless, especially if I don't use A and B nearly as much as I use C!
I'm beginning to think that benchmarks need to be done on a software-by-software basis. Game performance is irrelevant if I'm only using Final Cut; word processor performance is irrelevant if I'm only using Matlab. Benchmarkers should stick to individual program performance, varying only the hardware used.
And so you all don't think I'm biased in favor of Apple, I don't own any Apple products, and I never have, and I probably never will. My machines at home are a P3 and an Athlon XP running Red Hat and Win2k, respectively.
I certainly agree that the nation's history (both good and bad parts of it) have been shaped by religion. Of course, there have been plenty of non-religious forces shaping our country: greed, fear, pride, anger, love, hate, good will, honesty, hard work, and about a billion other human behaviors and emotions. We can't fit them all into the Pledge, so why should religion get an exception?
This is separate from First Amendment grounds, of course. Putting "under God" into the Pledge had an expressly religious purpose when it was done, and still does now.
You will note that the Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence, is the document our country's law is founded on. Whatever poetic words there are in the Declaration, the Constitution explicitly forbids any establishment of religion.
That said, I'll play your game. Here's the Declaration's reference to the "source of our rights":
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
So what's missing? How about a definition for what "their Creator" means? It's plenty simple to assume it means, "the Christian God of the Old or, possibly, New Testament." But there's little reason to do so, as the Declaration doesn't mention Jesus, the Bible, or anything specific about Christianity. Never mind the fact that Jefferson was not a Christian.
Being familiar with Jefferson's beliefs, it's fairly obvious he's talking about the Deist "God," who is usually described as being the source of the universe, but not taking anything like an active hand. So, once again, exactly which Christian principles is the United States founded upon?
Except, whoops, the Dell machine cost less than the Apple machine, as the story update shows.
That aside, UCLA has dozens of separate departments -- you linked to the Statistics department website. There are plenty of other departments that aren't using OS X. I only point this out because your post is a little misleading -- might make people think that the use of OS X is university-wide, rather than decided on a department-by-department basis.
I think I was just annoyed because your original post implied that people who drive automatics do it because a manual transmission is "too much for them." Made me feel a little defensive, since I have entirely different, and perfectly valid reasons for not driving a manual;)
I use an automatic transmission, *and* I use Linux at home and at work. They didn't invent the automatic transmission because manual was "too much work," they invented it because it's annoying when you mis-time pressing the clutch and grind the gears, or cause your car to stall when you're at an intersection, etc. Yeah, automatics are more expensive, but that's the price you pay for convenience.
Even though the phrase "substantial noninfringing uses" isn't in the DMCA, if SunnComm's claim is correct, then since a computer is also a device that can effectively circumvent their encryption, computers need to be banned under the DMCA. (Not to mention the human brain.) The concept still applies, and SunnComm has no case.
At any rate, there's still the argument that SunnComm's encryption is not "effective" under the terms of the DMCA.
A computer can do more damage to the network than a car can do to a highway, and we license driving.
But we don't license driving in order to protect the highways. We license driving in order to protect the people using them. (Not that your overall point necessarily fails, just the analogy.:))
Well, at the very least, their case doesn't hold water -- the DMCA requires that whatever the "device" is that you traffic in that lets you bypass encryption (whether it be a physical device, information, etc.), that device must not have substantial noninfringing uses in order to be illegal under the DMCA. Pointing out that the SHIFT key can be used to bypass encryption is absolutely NO different than pointing out that you can use a hammer to break into someone's car. SunnComm hasn't got a leg to stand on.
This doesn't mean, however, that they won't abuse the court system in the usual ways and come out on top -- but at least we know that cheating is the only way they can win.
Instead of irrational ranting, next time you might want to try a cogent, well-thought-out argument instead.
Millions of people watch larger-than-life celebrities act convincingly in thousands of movies month after month, year after year, and does this cause people to become good actors? No.
Your logic is flawed beyond belief. This might be reasonable if I'd said that violent video games make kids into skilled murderers, but I said nor implied any such thing. The idea that watching someone do something with skill would magically give you that same level of skill is idiotic.
I was going to continue this post, but I've realized that almost anyone who reads what you wrote will realize that you're incoherent, so there's really no need to refute you.
As far as I can see from a quick reading, the idea is not that you see what people are typing, but that you have an indicator which lets you know that they are typing.
Being able to see what people are typing is an indicator that they are typing.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of niche software that doesn't have an open source equivalent (or no well-known open source equivalent), but that's usually because the people who need such niche software aren't programmers, and so don't write the software themselves. That's where open source software comes from: programmers who want software that does X, but find the proprietary (or extant open-source) versions lacking.
The point isn't that "commerical software bankrupts businesses." In fact, that point isn't made, claimed, implied or inferred anywhere in the article! The point is that proprietary software can be a danger for the reasons in the article, and people need to be aware of it.
Yeah, one of the labs in the basement of Boelter Hall at UCLA has that same sign... except at the top, where it would normally say DANGER in 72-point type, it just says DANG.
There's quite a few of us who believe that all software patents should be invalid.
Last year's Oscars had 52 nominated films. You can remove nineteen of those for the two short film categories (five films each), the foreign-language film category (five more films), the documentary feature category (five films), and the documentary short subject category (four films), leaving 33 films for the other categories. (Not to diminish the importance of these categories, but we have to start somewhere.) Most Academy voters will probably already have seen at least half of those 33 films before the nominations are even announced. So having to see another 17 films between the nomination announcement and the end of voting? What a tragedy! To be forced to go watch a bunch of Oscar-nominated films, in order to vote in a big popularity contest. :)
Nuclear-powered tanks? That doesn't seem like a great idea. Sure, they wouldn't need refueling for long, long periods of time... but then you'd need probably a lot of extra training to be able to refuel them. Then there's the fact that if one of them happens to get hit with a missile and blow up, it may well spray radioactive debris over a wide area.
I don't know if any advantages conferred by using a nuclear powerplant in a tank would override the obvious disadvantages.
For a second I thought you said Europe. I imagine the Germans would get pretty annoyed if the Chinese sent a manned mission to Stuttgart.
This is fair. I was sort of projecting what I believe to be the crux of the geek's dislike for management types. I know that I believe in what I said, to a degree. And I do understand that there are skills involved in doing business -- if there weren't, we wouldn't have managers, because geeks could do everything ;)
...for the ones that tests a particular program's performance.
If I never use Word, Premiere, Quake III, or whatever is being benchmarked, then what good does the benchmark tell me? There are too many programs that use processors in different ways for such benchmarks to be generally useful. If I'm going to be running programs A, B, and C, then the only benchmark that's useful to me is one that separately tests programs A, B, and C on different processors, and gives me the individual results for each. If processor #1 is better on programs A and B, but worse on program C, then saying that it's "overall" faster is still meaningless, especially if I don't use A and B nearly as much as I use C!
I'm beginning to think that benchmarks need to be done on a software-by-software basis. Game performance is irrelevant if I'm only using Final Cut; word processor performance is irrelevant if I'm only using Matlab. Benchmarkers should stick to individual program performance, varying only the hardware used.
And so you all don't think I'm biased in favor of Apple, I don't own any Apple products, and I never have, and I probably never will. My machines at home are a P3 and an Athlon XP running Red Hat and Win2k, respectively.
I'm proud to say I'm of the latter opinion. ;)
I certainly agree that the nation's history (both good and bad parts of it) have been shaped by religion. Of course, there have been plenty of non-religious forces shaping our country: greed, fear, pride, anger, love, hate, good will, honesty, hard work, and about a billion other human behaviors and emotions. We can't fit them all into the Pledge, so why should religion get an exception?
This is separate from First Amendment grounds, of course. Putting "under God" into the Pledge had an expressly religious purpose when it was done, and still does now.
I have trouble thinking of any situation where we'd need to say the Pledge (and that it would do any good to do so).
Being familiar with Jefferson's beliefs, it's fairly obvious he's talking about the Deist "God," who is usually described as being the source of the universe, but not taking anything like an active hand. So, once again, exactly which Christian principles is the United States founded upon?
I'd think that Kill Bill, Volume X would be more appropriate. :)
Except, whoops, the Dell machine cost less than the Apple machine, as the story update shows.
That aside, UCLA has dozens of separate departments -- you linked to the Statistics department website. There are plenty of other departments that aren't using OS X. I only point this out because your post is a little misleading -- might make people think that the use of OS X is university-wide, rather than decided on a department-by-department basis.
I think I was just annoyed because your original post implied that people who drive automatics do it because a manual transmission is "too much for them." Made me feel a little defensive, since I have entirely different, and perfectly valid reasons for not driving a manual ;)
I use an automatic transmission, *and* I use Linux at home and at work. They didn't invent the automatic transmission because manual was "too much work," they invented it because it's annoying when you mis-time pressing the clutch and grind the gears, or cause your car to stall when you're at an intersection, etc. Yeah, automatics are more expensive, but that's the price you pay for convenience.
We resent them because they have the money, power, and cars despite their inability to create anything more interesting than a business deal.
Even though the phrase "substantial noninfringing uses" isn't in the DMCA, if SunnComm's claim is correct, then since a computer is also a device that can effectively circumvent their encryption, computers need to be banned under the DMCA. (Not to mention the human brain.) The concept still applies, and SunnComm has no case.
At any rate, there's still the argument that SunnComm's encryption is not "effective" under the terms of the DMCA.
Well, at the very least, their case doesn't hold water -- the DMCA requires that whatever the "device" is that you traffic in that lets you bypass encryption (whether it be a physical device, information, etc.), that device must not have substantial noninfringing uses in order to be illegal under the DMCA. Pointing out that the SHIFT key can be used to bypass encryption is absolutely NO different than pointing out that you can use a hammer to break into someone's car. SunnComm hasn't got a leg to stand on.
This doesn't mean, however, that they won't abuse the court system in the usual ways and come out on top -- but at least we know that cheating is the only way they can win.
I was going to continue this post, but I've realized that almost anyone who reads what you wrote will realize that you're incoherent, so there's really no need to refute you.
We do have a standard: viruses. Check any dictionary; that's the common usage. "Virii" is only in use among the undereducated. :)