If piracy is copying, and Linux is a way of developing software, and if copying is a way of developing software, then Linux is piracy.
I've seen software development by copying (and not just from teaching CompSci classes;-), and some of the best bugs come from "design by cut-n-paste", so Linux must therefore be piracy.
The difference between a Pareto distribution and a power law distribution is that in a Pareto distribution, the probability P[X > x] ~ x^-k, (that is, the probability that a observed value is greater than x is proportional to the inverse power of x) whereas a power law is P[X == x].
And a Zipf law is a power law on ranks, rather than values.
... especially because the Indigo (like many SGI systems) was built like a mini rack... there was a backplane at the rear of the case, and all the boards slid in on rails and latched in. Drives were also sled-mounted (which is a royal PITA for SGI retroheads like myself, always scrounging for sleds!).
Why would someone go out and buy a new video tape player (and let's not say VCR, do you think they'd be recordable;-), when we already have DVD? Because you could get the Brave New World of media coporation evil in a familiar form factor?
I can see it now... "Who needs the long-livedness, nearly random access, and large amounts of storage of DVDs when you could go back to tapes?" It'll be like nostalgia for vinyl, except without the hiss and pops.
It does NOT currently take more energy to obtain a Oil than to use it.
He didn't say "obtain," he said "make". When we run out of oil, we'll find out how hard it is to make... we're all out of dinosaurs and don't have a hundred million years to wait besides.
OOP doesn't solve engineering problems of the kind you describe. The programs solve the problems.
OOP is a way to think about structuring the program, how you organize data and operations on the data, how you build reusable components which you can apply in some future problem you need to write a program to solve. In other words, OO helps solve software engineering problems. You'll still need to write the program which solves your particular problem.
And before the flames commence, yes, OO isn't the only solution to this class of problems. It's just one.
I find it pretty interesting that some of these cards (according to the review) are being bundled with LCD shutter glasses... the glasses are synchronized with the screen to darken the screen over one eye while your monitor displays the view for your other eye. Refresh that at 120Hz, provide a slightly parallaxed view for each eye, presto, it's better than Jaws 3D.
I used to work with these things a while back... it's ok as long as you don't move much, but if you like to move your head around you'll get headaches pretty quick, since the view doesn't change based on where you're sitting. We used head-tracking to accomplish this, but none of that stuff here. Another problem is screen distortion, which doesn't mean much when you're playing Quake, but if you're thinking of a really nice interface for Blender or Maya, this can make a big difference in being able to actually point the mouse where you think it's pointing.
Without calibration to your personal interocular distance and eye-to-screen distance, and good correction for screen distortion, you can use these for max 30 minutes before getting eyestrain or just a plain headache. Add poor head-tracking and you can get seasick, too!
Last thing: there is more than depth cues to seeing 3D: good lighting and shadow effects, _accurate_ perspective views, and use of color all come into play. These glasses are a lot of fun, and if a lot of folks have them then maybe the state of the art will go forward a bit.
Actually they started writing the Constitution in 1789, and the Revolutionary War ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris, right? Until that time, we operated under Articles of Confederation which had much less federal power than even the Constitution.
Just think: six years, which is how long it's been since the last terrorist strike in this country. You wonder how different attention spans and memories were back then. No TV sound bites, but not a lot of reliable information sources either.
Turn off your telivision. One wonderful feature of hypermedia is that you can choose what to consume and when to consume it. Yes, this is theoretically also true with TV, but the fact of the matter is, for most people, the TV just stays on, "in the background", and this greatly contributes to your feeling of being inundated with reporting, which as you've noted is frequently gratuitous and often inaccurate.
With hypermedia, I'm back to the newspaper model of having news from different sources, with the advantage that I can choose the update rate (modulo the timeliness of the source, of course). With the newspaper, I have to wait until the next day, even if something important is happening, With TV, I get it shoved at me even if nothing is happening. Hypermedia puts you back in control of your information consumption.
Note that you will need to be running OSX (or Darwin?) to build or run this; it is a Carbon app. This isn't immediately obvious from the web page... I just assumed they hadn't tried it on anything but OSX.
"It's already possible to execute linux/i386 compiled programms. Simple linux-native applications like 'Hello World!!!' are running now on SkyOS without compiling!"
I wonder if it's the spiffy GNU hello.c which includes its own email client.
Seriously, they only support a very small subset of calls thus far.
Well, yes, but I remember when the Melissa virus first went around. There was a big discussion on the Gnus mailing list (Gnus is the flagship email client for Emacs, but of course there are 4 or 5 others;-) about whether one could use Elisp in messages to Gnus to circulate a virus.
There were a lot of honest attempts, and some great snippets that really showed the power of Elisp, but in the end, we just couldn't do it. You couldn't actually get the code to do anything malicious.
I still make an effort to read the macro virii I get sent via email (Gnus displays them nicely as text). Funnier than the morning news.
1. Cryptography is a human rights tool for individuals who live under oppressive regimes without freedoms of expression, speech, or assembly to communicate. It doesn't completely eliminate the possibility of being listened to by secret police or otherwise, but is a tool to enable freer communication.
2. Not by cracking the code. Note this isn't a fault of PGP, it's a fault of modern cryptography and public key cryptosystems in general. Intelligence agencies are of course welcome to use a host of other, more familiar approaches to compromise keys, listen on channels, etc, as their governments (or otherwise) permit.
I'm not sure I'd call it a great opinion piece. It's good that someone's taking issue with judicial workplace privacy invasion. It'd be a great piece if he talked to the larger issue of any employee's right to privacy. It's kind of ironic that BOFH policies hit the news with judges, but what about the rest of us?
So they moved the Start button to a _worse_ place?
on
HP Jornada 560 Series
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I love how in the screenshot (which is undoubtedly a mockup), the Start button is now in the upper left corner. (It might have been this way for a while, I'm a Palm user so I'm ignorant here.)
Flash back to the Newton. They put all the buttons on the bottom of the screen. The close-box? Bottom right (or left for lefties). Why? Because you can tap the buttons without your hand obscuring the screen. Hey, maybe it was slow, but at least they thought about the interface.
This is something that so few palmtop developers can get right. Another example (just to be ecumenical) is the truly beautiful Palm app DrawIt... the toolbars are inscrutably along the top of the screen, so you can't actually see your drawing while you tap a new tool.
Come on, guys... the palmtop is not the desktop, the stylus is not a mouse (thank heavens!).
My first thought was that it's because Stephen Tweedie, lead developer of ext3, works for RedHat. ReiserFS was developed primarily by SUSE. JFS and XFS come from IBM and SGI.
So I read the article, and all of those reasons could easily apply to any of the above filesystems. Never mind that all of them are more mature and more stable than ext3. The only technical argument for ext3 is the upgrade path: ext3 is ext2 with a journal. But the real reason might be that RH can speed adoption (and by the bazaar model, improvement) of ext3, developed at RedHat, this way.
BeIA Internet Appliances are much more than a Palm
on
Palm To Purchase Be's IP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What are BeIA's hardware requirements?
We draw from the "PC clone organ bank." BeIA runs on x86 architecture (Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD) and Power PC processors. Device vendors can choose from a number of systems with a variety of add-ons. BeIA requires a minimum of 8MB of persistent storage (such as CompactFlash) and 32 MB RAM on a single-processor machine like the National Semiconductor Geode GXM chip, and can run on multiprocessor systems with hard disks and Open GL acceleration with a multichannel audio card.
That's quite a bit more than current Palms and almost more than most PocketPCs. And keep in mind how slow PocketPCs are... part of that is Wince^H^HCE, but part of that is trying to do an awful lot on what is basically an embedded device.
ObBeSlap: anyone notice that the 'Product' button on the Be site navbar doesn't do anything?
This is why encryption algorithms and standards need to be developed out in the open. Everyone who's taken a crypto class has thought up the Next Best Encryption Scheme, only to quickly find the many flaws.
If someone hands you a closed crypto algorithm and says "trust me", you have to do just that. In contrast, we might place the same trust in someone like Phil Zimmerman, but we're also trusting that thousands of qualified folks have looked at the code, fixes have been made, and no exploits have been found in a while.
If this spate of standards and resulting hack contests spells the end of the closed, proprietary, DMCA-protected encryption algorithm, it can only be good for the users.
Slashdot Mirror
The title is logically incorrect.
;-), and some of the best bugs come from "design by cut-n-paste", so Linux must therefore be piracy.
If piracy is copying, and Linux is a way of developing software, and if copying is a way of developing software, then Linux is piracy.
I've seen software development by copying (and not just from teaching CompSci classes
The difference between a Pareto distribution and a power law distribution is that in a Pareto distribution, the probability P[X > x] ~ x^-k, (that is, the probability that a observed value is greater than x is proportional to the inverse power of x) whereas a power law is P[X == x].
And a Zipf law is a power law on ranks, rather than values.
Lada Adamic of HP has an excellent how-to on power law distibutions you might find interesting.
Anyone for a round of Weird Al's "Yoda"?
"The long-term contract I hadda sign
Means I'll be making these movies 'till the end of time
With my Yoda..."
... especially because the Indigo (like many SGI systems) was built like a mini rack... there was a backplane at the rear of the case, and all the boards slid in on rails and latched in. Drives were also sled-mounted (which is a royal PITA for SGI retroheads like myself, always scrounging for sleds!).
Why would someone go out and buy a new video tape player (and let's not say VCR, do you think they'd be recordable ;-), when we already have DVD? Because you could get the Brave New World of media coporation evil in a familiar form factor?
I can see it now... "Who needs the long-livedness, nearly random access, and large amounts of storage of DVDs when you could go back to tapes?" It'll be like nostalgia for vinyl, except without the hiss and pops.
My biggest problem is web sites that use 2-point fonts. Gaaah. It's nice that Mozilla gives a key combo to change the font size!
It does NOT currently take more energy to obtain a Oil than to use it.
He didn't say "obtain," he said "make". When we run out of oil, we'll find out how hard it is to make... we're all out of dinosaurs and don't have a hundred million years to wait besides.
OOP doesn't solve engineering problems of the kind you describe. The programs solve the problems.
OOP is a way to think about structuring the program, how you organize data and operations on the data, how you build reusable components which you can apply in some future problem you need to write a program to solve. In other words, OO helps solve software engineering problems. You'll still need to write the program which solves your particular problem.
And before the flames commence, yes, OO isn't the only solution to this class of problems. It's just one.
I find it pretty interesting that some of these cards (according to the review) are being bundled with LCD shutter glasses... the glasses are synchronized with the screen to darken the screen over one eye while your monitor displays the view for your other eye. Refresh that at 120Hz, provide a slightly parallaxed view for each eye, presto, it's better than Jaws 3D.
I used to work with these things a while back... it's ok as long as you don't move much, but if you like to move your head around you'll get headaches pretty quick, since the view doesn't change based on where you're sitting. We used head-tracking to accomplish this, but none of that stuff here. Another problem is screen distortion, which doesn't mean much when you're playing Quake, but if you're thinking of a really nice interface for Blender or Maya, this can make a big difference in being able to actually point the mouse where you think it's pointing.
Without calibration to your personal interocular distance and eye-to-screen distance, and good correction for screen distortion, you can use these for max 30 minutes before getting eyestrain or just a plain headache. Add poor head-tracking and you can get seasick, too!
Last thing: there is more than depth cues to seeing 3D: good lighting and shadow effects, _accurate_ perspective views, and use of color all come into play. These glasses are a lot of fun, and if a lot of folks have them then maybe the state of the art will go forward a bit.
and how pray tell will you get the information _off_ the CD that quickly? Have you got an l33t 1000x CDROM someplace?
Oh, and you probably want to encode the CD, too.
Actually they started writing the Constitution in 1789, and the Revolutionary War ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris, right? Until that time, we operated under Articles of Confederation which had much less federal power than even the Constitution.
Just think: six years, which is how long it's been since the last terrorist strike in this country. You wonder how different attention spans and memories were back then. No TV sound bites, but not a lot of reliable information sources either.
Turn off your telivision. One wonderful feature of hypermedia is that you can choose what to consume and when to consume it. Yes, this is theoretically also true with TV, but the fact of the matter is, for most people, the TV just stays on, "in the background", and this greatly contributes to your feeling of being inundated with reporting, which as you've noted is frequently gratuitous and often inaccurate.
With hypermedia, I'm back to the newspaper model of having news from different sources, with the advantage that I can choose the update rate (modulo the timeliness of the source, of course). With the newspaper, I have to wait until the next day, even if something important is happening, With TV, I get it shoved at me even if nothing is happening. Hypermedia puts you back in control of your information consumption.
Note that you will need to be running OSX (or Darwin?) to build or run this; it is a Carbon app. This isn't immediately obvious from the web page... I just assumed they hadn't tried it on anything but OSX.
Ah, well, back to E...
btw, if for some odd reason you have want to have a non-Linux OS but want to run Linux binaries on it, FreeBSD does a bang-up job.
I wonder if it's the spiffy GNU hello.c which includes its own email client.
Seriously, they only support a very small subset of calls thus far.
Especially if I can pick it up in the neighborhood Indian restaurant.
Well, yes, but I remember when the Melissa virus first went around. There was a big discussion on the Gnus mailing list (Gnus is the flagship email client for Emacs, but of course there are 4 or 5 others ;-) about whether one could use Elisp in messages to Gnus to circulate a virus.
There were a lot of honest attempts, and some great snippets that really showed the power of Elisp, but in the end, we just couldn't do it. You couldn't actually get the code to do anything malicious.
I still make an effort to read the macro virii I get sent via email (Gnus displays them nicely as text). Funnier than the morning news.
would Slashdot be the dot in .dot?
1. Cryptography is a human rights tool for individuals who live under oppressive regimes without freedoms of expression, speech, or assembly to communicate. It doesn't completely eliminate the possibility of being listened to by secret police or otherwise, but is a tool to enable freer communication.
2. Not by cracking the code. Note this isn't a fault of PGP, it's a fault of modern cryptography and public key cryptosystems in general. Intelligence agencies are of course welcome to use a host of other, more familiar approaches to compromise keys, listen on channels, etc, as their governments (or otherwise) permit.
I'm not sure I'd call it a great opinion piece. It's good that someone's taking issue with judicial workplace privacy invasion. It'd be a great piece if he talked to the larger issue of any employee's right to privacy. It's kind of ironic that BOFH policies hit the news with judges, but what about the rest of us?
Flash back to the Newton. They put all the buttons on the bottom of the screen. The close-box? Bottom right (or left for lefties). Why? Because you can tap the buttons without your hand obscuring the screen. Hey, maybe it was slow, but at least they thought about the interface.
This is something that so few palmtop developers can get right. Another example (just to be ecumenical) is the truly beautiful Palm app DrawIt... the toolbars are inscrutably along the top of the screen, so you can't actually see your drawing while you tap a new tool.
Come on, guys... the palmtop is not the desktop, the stylus is not a mouse (thank heavens!).
So I read the article, and all of those reasons could easily apply to any of the above filesystems. Never mind that all of them are more mature and more stable than ext3. The only technical argument for ext3 is the upgrade path: ext3 is ext2 with a journal. But the real reason might be that RH can speed adoption (and by the bazaar model, improvement) of ext3, developed at RedHat, this way.
ObBeSlap: anyone notice that the 'Product' button on the Be site navbar doesn't do anything?
ahHA! You wouldn't happen to have a cite from Blinn's corner or his book?
If someone hands you a closed crypto algorithm and says "trust me", you have to do just that. In contrast, we might place the same trust in someone like Phil Zimmerman, but we're also trusting that thousands of qualified folks have looked at the code, fixes have been made, and no exploits have been found in a while.
If this spate of standards and resulting hack contests spells the end of the closed, proprietary, DMCA-protected encryption algorithm, it can only be good for the users.