"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995)
Tell ol' Bill that for a suitable sum I'll give him an algorithm that factors large prime numbers in linear time proportional to the size of the prime.
(Or constant time, if time for transmission doesn't count..)
Could you please make a new category, "christiansen-generated-dribble" or "jealous hatred" or "flamebait" or the like so this can be filtered out?
Erwin
Re:Philanthropy != Communism
on
RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
I just checked for you at altavista to see where the word evil appears at the pages of either the Free software foundation or at the gnu website, and it doesn't return a thing.
(Try it, search for "host:fsf.org evil" or "host:gnu.org" evil)
Seeing all the bad rap RMS gets from people who haven't read a lot or nothing written by him, I'd say I don't think he's a communist, but a lot of his adverseries act a lot like McCarthy.
Your theory doesn't seem to hold; many providers in Europe do or did charge for the traffic, and while it did reduce traffic (I can tell, I've worked for companies with such connections) but it hasn't increased bandwidth.
And it does reduce innovative use of the Internet and the economic growth that comes with it.
In the United States, Internet metering has a very rare occurrence to my knowledge, and there are vastly bigger Internet connections than in Europe (the equivalent of a T3 in Europe is out of the question except for the biggest companies)
For providers, there is an incentive to keep increasing bandwidth when customers pay a flat fee: more bandwidth keeps more happy customers.
And the extra income generated by a new customer (startup fees, additional services, website design) is a lot bigger than the extra revenue from a metered service (and since most companies don't want to pay more for Internet than a certain sum, there's not likely to be much extra revenue).
In Europe you pay a monthly fee. This fee is for the connection you have to your local phone exchange.
The problem isn't calls withing the same phone exchange; there should be enough bandwidth within the exchange to connection every single phone line in the local loop *somewhere*. If an exchange doesn't have enough bandwidth for that, that's a design error. You're paying for it in your monthly bill! (Other things like dialing circuits used to be limited, but on a digital system this isn't much of a problem either; anyway with an Internet-call you'll only spend a tiny fraction of the time dialing)
The long-distance connections between the exchanges are the problem, they have limited bandwidth.
But the local exchange should be able to connection any local line line to any other local line for 24 hours a day, and it's already included in the monthly fee.
Well, mainly because until a short time ago all phone companies in Europe were state-owned and had a national monopoly.
So they didn't have to be cost-efficient, and could request from the government that calls within the local-loops were also charged per-minute.
Now the situation is changing slowly, but very few countries in Europe have a serious competitor for home phone lines to the former state-owned company.
Maybe in a few years the governments will mandate free local-loop calls, but only when their stakes in the phone companies have been reduced further so they won't feel the decline in income from the profits of those companies.
Of course it would be a popular move, so I can imagine that some governments will be tempted, especially when they come in a sitatuation in which their popularity is declining.
No so weird. x.org was registered before it was policy not to give out single-letter domains. ...Back in the days there were plenty of good domain names...
And they've been paying their bill for the domain every since.
What we need is to seperate the logical markup from the display stuff. We need a browser that understand XSL flow-objects for the display engine, and XSL stylesheets to tranform a logical document into a well-formatted display document.
And you can be concerned with pixels and at the same time allow the page to stretch when the browser window is stretched. That's what a good display language does.
Sun isn't listening, unfortunately. Although it's been at the top-25 of Java "requests for enhancements" by developers for more than a year, they have yet to announce support for PNG.
It depends on what you mean with discipline. If you mean being able to set limits, okay, I agree.
If you mean 'though love', hitting, yelling, continuus blaming, criticizing etc, I'd be willing to bet that's what those kids' parents did.
If your life at home is like DOOM, then it's not a great stretch to bring DOOM to school.
[Then again, that may not be the case. But according to reports, their parents were not very involved with the community. You'd be surprised how easy it is to hide child-abuse.]
You really must read this article on Salon magazine.
The first line says it all: "In the land of no good explanations, the man with the daffiest explanation is king."
Everone's looking for an explanation, and the Internet is just one things fingers are being pointed at. Other things are: Kosovo, trenchcoats, Goths. (I wonder what kind of upbringing these boys had)
I guess this quote from the article explains why the Internet stands accused: "But clearly there are deeper fears at work. We are eternally concerned with what technology will do to us -- how it will change our minds, change our lives, affect our livelihoods."
With over 50% of US families having access to the Internet, I don't think many people will take this finger-pointing seriously.
Last paragraph: will they ever come to understand?
on
ISP Sues Spammer
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· Score: 2
In the last part: "The European Consumers' Organisation (BEUC) has lobbied for governments to have the right to block advertising and marketing that violates their own laws rather than leave it to the country of origin."
*sigh* Will they ever understand? And this is coming from a consumer organisation?
Any kind of government-mandated filtering is doomed to be incomplete, because people will make copies of the material, and especially the kind of people who would engage in ripping off consumers, and thus evade the filter.
But it will also give governments a change to filter other kinds of stuff they don't like; just label it "bad marketing" or whatever.
What happened to educating people? Europeans don't have as much Internet-experience as Americans, but does that mean that we have to be treated like children here? What happened to your own reponsibility?
I really feel sick because of this kind of ignorance.
You wrote: "It means that if you do decide to file suit against Apple for patent infringement you are no longer allowed to work on the source via this license. In no way does it restrict your ability to defend your own patents."
Theoretically, that's true. But in practice, if you want to build a bussiness based on APSL-code, you cannot defend your patents should Apple decide to use them without securing a license agreement with you.
It goes to show that the GPL is a lot more friendly towards commercial use than those "commercial open source" licenses. If I had a company that was going to create products based on "open-source" software, only the GPL and the BSD license would be my choice as secure enough to build a bussiness on.
Slashdot Mirror
You never stopped to wonder why your Quakz Gamez were so slow?
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime
numbers." Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995)
Tell ol' Bill that for a suitable sum I'll give him an algorithm that factors large prime numbers in linear time proportional to the size of the prime.
(Or constant time, if time for transmission doesn't count..)
Hi Rob,
Could you please make a new category, "christiansen-generated-dribble" or "jealous hatred" or "flamebait" or the like so this can be filtered out?
Erwin
I just checked for you at altavista to see where the word evil appears at the pages of either the Free software foundation or at the gnu website, and it doesn't return a thing.
(Try it, search for "host:fsf.org evil" or "host:gnu.org" evil)
Seeing all the bad rap RMS gets from people who haven't read a lot or nothing written by him, I'd say I don't think he's a communist, but a lot of his adverseries act a lot like McCarthy.
You seem to have serious reading-and-comprehension problems, pal.
I was saying that they were less cost-effective.
Not that I expected any better reading skills with your use of language.
Your theory doesn't seem to hold; many providers in Europe do or did charge for the traffic, and while it did reduce traffic (I can tell, I've worked for companies with such connections) but it hasn't increased bandwidth.
And it does reduce innovative use of the Internet and the economic growth that comes with it.
In the United States, Internet metering has a very rare occurrence to my knowledge, and there are vastly bigger Internet connections than in Europe (the equivalent of a T3 in Europe is out of the question except for the biggest companies)
For providers, there is an incentive to keep increasing bandwidth when customers pay a flat fee: more bandwidth keeps more happy customers.
And the extra income generated by a new customer (startup fees, additional services, website design) is a lot bigger than the extra revenue from a metered service (and since most companies don't want to pay more for Internet than a certain sum, there's not likely to be much extra revenue).
In Europe you pay a monthly fee. This fee is for the connection you have to your local phone exchange.
The problem isn't calls withing the same phone exchange; there should be enough bandwidth within the exchange to connection every single phone line in the local loop *somewhere*.
If an exchange doesn't have enough bandwidth for that, that's a design error. You're paying for it in your monthly bill!
(Other things like dialing circuits used to be limited, but on a digital system this isn't much of a problem either; anyway with an Internet-call you'll only spend a tiny fraction of the time dialing)
The long-distance connections between the exchanges are the problem, they have limited bandwidth.
But the local exchange should be able to connection any local line line to any other local line for 24 hours a day, and it's already included in the monthly fee.
Well, mainly because until a short time ago all phone companies in Europe were state-owned and had a national monopoly.
So they didn't have to be cost-efficient, and could request from the government that calls within the local-loops were also charged per-minute.
Now the situation is changing slowly, but very few countries in Europe have a serious competitor for home phone lines to the former state-owned company.
Maybe in a few years the governments will mandate free local-loop calls, but only when their stakes in the phone companies have been reduced further so they won't feel the decline in income from the profits of those companies.
Of course it would be a popular move, so I can imagine that some governments will be tempted, especially when they come in a sitatuation in which their popularity is declining.
Erwin
> I mean what are you going to do? Punish NSI by
> shutting them down? You'd cripple the internet.
Not really, NSI only runs one of the root nameservers. The other root nameservers are much older than NSI.
If NSI were shut down, it would mean that no domains could be added/changed/deleted for a while.
A few months ago, I would have said "no difference" but lately NSI seems to be picking up some speed in the handling of these things.
No so weird. x.org was registered before it was policy not to give out single-letter domains.
...Back in the days there were plenty of good domain names...
And they've been paying their bill for the domain every since.
What we need is to seperate the logical markup from the display stuff. We need a browser that understand XSL flow-objects for the display engine, and XSL stylesheets to tranform a logical document into a well-formatted display document.
And you can be concerned with pixels and at the same time allow the page to stretch when the browser window is stretched. That's what a good display language does.
Sun isn't listening, unfortunately. Although it's been at the top-25 of Java "requests for enhancements" by developers for more than a year, they have yet to announce support for PNG.
It depends on what you mean with discipline. If you mean being able to set limits, okay, I agree.
If you mean 'though love', hitting, yelling, continuus blaming, criticizing etc, I'd be willing to bet that's what those kids' parents did.
If your life at home is like DOOM, then it's not a great stretch to bring DOOM to school.
[Then again, that may not be the case. But according to reports, their parents were not very involved with the community. You'd be surprised how easy it is to hide child-abuse.]
You really must read this article on Salon magazine.
The first line says it all: "In the land of no good explanations, the man with the daffiest explanation is king."
Everone's looking for an explanation, and the Internet is just one things fingers are being pointed at. Other things are: Kosovo, trenchcoats, Goths. (I wonder what kind of upbringing these boys had)
I guess this quote from the article explains why the Internet stands accused:
"But clearly there are deeper fears at work. We are eternally concerned with what technology will do to us -- how it will change our minds, change our lives, affect our livelihoods."
With over 50% of US families having access to the Internet, I don't think many people will take this finger-pointing seriously.
In the last part: "The European Consumers' Organisation (BEUC) has lobbied for governments to have the right to block advertising and marketing that violates their own laws rather than leave it to the country of origin."
*sigh* Will they ever understand? And this is coming from a consumer organisation?
Any kind of government-mandated filtering is doomed to be incomplete, because people will make copies of the material, and especially the kind of people who would engage in ripping off consumers, and thus evade the filter.
But it will also give governments a change to filter other kinds of stuff they don't like; just label it "bad marketing" or whatever.
What happened to educating people? Europeans don't have as much Internet-experience as Americans, but does that mean that we have to be treated like children here?
What happened to your own reponsibility?
I really feel sick because of this kind of ignorance.
You wrote: "It means that if you do decide to file suit against Apple for patent infringement you are no longer allowed to work on the source via this license. In no way does it restrict your ability to defend your own patents."
Theoretically, that's true. But in practice, if you want to build a bussiness based on APSL-code, you cannot defend your patents should Apple decide to use them without securing a license agreement with you.
It goes to show that the GPL is a lot more friendly towards commercial use than those "commercial open source" licenses.
If I had a company that was going to create products based on "open-source" software, only the GPL and the BSD license would be my choice as secure enough to build a bussiness on.