And although I think I'dve preferred if PDF had stayed the (relatively) simple, bloat-free, built-for-printing format that once it was - begrudgingly - I must admit it's kinda cool to see these funky new features in action.
I don't. Mostly because I read Slashdot often so I know both why it's capable of doing that (Javascript) and how many security holes that has opened in Adobe Reader (a metric fuckton). Hell, even an AJAX app that splits out a PDF would be cleaner from a design, security and usability standpoint and I hate webapps for things like this.
A Turing-complete scripting language has *no* business in my for-print document. Hey, wasn't that why we trimmed down Postscript to create PDFs in the first place?
Your problem is that you're using a propietary, undocumented and ever-changing format to store information that you don't want altered. Office 2001 opens incorrectly Office 2000 documents more often than not, despite being theoretically just a port to the Mac platform of the same codebase, with the 2003 and 2008 versions its only worse.
The only format I know of that actually guarantees your documents will still look the same a decade from now is TeX. No, not LaTeX, pure, vanilla, Knuth-sponsored TeX. Use anything else and you'll be lucky to get something 95% compatible in the next version, let alone 99.9999%.
If he was allowed to get off the hook for that, just think of the numbers of emboldened attackers who would see one less reason why they shouldn't attack a portion of the Internet that is already a huge target.
You really think it'd make a difference, don't you? the big problem for US military system aren't random hackers living in countries the US has treaties with, its people working for foreign governments such as China or North Korea, people with vastly more resources and whose government won't give up and extradite without putting up a serious fight.
But hey! continue fighting the good fight against common citizens, yours or otherwise, the longer you spend at this pathetic circus, the longer hostile nations will have to steal your precious secrets and make some *real* damage to your country. And given how annoying you've become these past few years, I'll be glad to see that happen.
And if you came home and found such a note on your table, what would your reaction be?
Would it be "My my, I should really double check to make sure the door was locked. Thanks, Anonymous Note Writer!"
That once happened with my neighbor, after my mom accidentally left her keys on the door. Her first reaction after seeing her note was to go over to the neighbor and thank her, not to call the cops on her.
But graphics can only be improved so much until you can no longer use it to market your game.
Left 4 Dead, for instance, still sells like hot cakes despite not looking anywhere near as good as Crysis in "full glory", and so does Counter Strike which even in the Source version looks worse than both.
Microsoft just realized what Nintendo already had (and Sony should have after the PS2): that there *is* such thing as "good enough", and that we've reached it already.
Fair point, but you've gotta admit implementations of Tetris, Pong, Chess, Conway's Game of Life, a text adventure game and a psychiatrist AI are *hardly* necessary features in a text editor.
what people commonly mean by "intelligence", which is something closer to "critical thinking skills combined with ability to acquire, retain, and use information"
Err, what exactly is "critical thinking skills"? that's one term I've never quite understood. And while acquiring and retaining information are easy to qualify, how do you measure its use?
As always, the problem isn't with them making money, but rather how they deal with those they consider "obstacles" to their business model.
And abusing DMCA takedown notices ranks pretty high on most of our "worst ways to deal with competition" lists so if they do that, the flamefest that's sure to follow will be completely deserved.
Because most people get whatever their OEM will sell them and stick with it 'til they buy something newer, and those of us who build our own jumped ship to 64-bits *years* ago.
The market of "people not ready to upgrade their 32-bit hardware looking for a new OS" is statistically insignificant.
Hardly any of them are US companies, Sony is japanese for instance, EMI is british and Vivendi is french. Its just that they bought laws in the US first because, apparently, politicians are cheaper over there than in Europe.
RAM, RAM, RAM, Linux more than anything loves RAM. I have a P1 166mhz laptop with 80 MBs of RAM with Debian and IceWM, Opera 9 ran pretty nicely as long as you kept your tab count below ~25 or so, and Abiword was a bit sluggish but still usable.
The big problem of using such a computer today is Flash which even with Gnash instead of Adobe's plugin its a CPU and memory hog (it even makes my current 1 Ghz laptop die a quick and painful death), but if the websites you browse to don't require it there's nothing stopping you from using such a machine as a basic desktop.
I'm sorry, I know I'm gonna sound like a Free Software zealot and a member of the Cult of St. IGNUcius here, but please bear with me.
Yes, its outlandish to think Microsoft makes this contribution for subversion because Richard M. Stallman has made it his main purpose in life to grant us a tool to prevent that from happening, and has fought hard for it. And that tool is the GPL.
Simply put, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy only works if you can keep your extensions from your competitors, and preventing that is *exactly* the main point of the GPL so as long as their contributions are under it we have nothing(*) to fear, be it from Microsoft or anyone else.
(*) except software patents, but due to the way its designed the only way to ever be safe from patent litigation is to abolish the patent system altogether. And in fact accepting code from Microsoft helps us a bit since trolls have a much bigger target to strike at.
Thing is, there's plenty of other companies that have done the same or worse. Remember Dmitry Sklyarov? yet criticizing Adobe's products here at Slashdot (particularly in a thread about Gnash or The GIMP) is one of the surest way to get an -1, Flamebait and half a dozen of "welcome to the real world, dumbass" replies.
Well, not the definite best though, that'd be criticizing that little fruit-flavored company that has abused every IP law in the books to shut down anything they dislike from competitors to random fans' blogs and whose CEO is member of the Board of Directors of Disney, the prime cause behind the wrecking of the US' copyright system.
Even F/OSS supporters, with their love for the corporation that *invented* the concept of FUD and all those strategies that Microsoft is so despised for, that controlled the computing market with an iron fist until a legal oversight led to the popularization of PCs and drove them to near bankrupcy.
Let's face it, pretty much all major players in today's economy are a bunch of scumbags, that's the *reason* they're major players in the first place. But the GPL is a known F/OSS license, its freedoms and limits are fairly well understood by now so if they want play by our rules, I can't see a reason not to let them as we did with IBM et al.
Except they can't sue for copyright infringement, since its under the GPLv2 just as the rest of the kernel, and while they theoretically could sue over patent infringement, that applies to any and all code more complex than "hello, world", and goes for all companies.
That's what Linus is warning against, just because you hate them doesn't mean you have to leave your rationality aside.
If that were true, Apple's market share should be roughly constant between markets where they actively spend on advertisement, and those where they don't.
Is that the case? IIRC I believe it wasn't and their share in the US was much bigger than in Europe or Asia, but I could be wrong in that. It is the case for South America at least, but considering how insanely overpriced their computers are around here (you can get a Dell laptop with identical or superior specs to a Mac for half the price, or a Sony for 2/3rds of it) its not exactly a fair comparison either.
Your comments about Scheme are exactly how I felt about Common Lisp after learning it. It made me look at programming itself differently, and I honestly believe my code in other languages has improved compared to before learning it.
First, learn assembly, it teaches you how the machine works. (You should probably also learn electronics and digital logic)
Better yet, first make them learn Lambda calculus, then make them understand the Church-Turing thesis. Only when they fully grasp the nuances of an Universal Turing Machine should they even *touch* an actual computer and program in Assembly.
Or perhaps teaching "from the bottom-up" isn't such a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless their license allows relicensing to third parties, they'd likely get sued for copyright infringement and perhaps even fraud.
Wouldn't it be sweet?
And although I think I'dve preferred if PDF had stayed the (relatively) simple, bloat-free, built-for-printing format that once it was - begrudgingly - I must admit it's kinda cool to see these funky new features in action.
I don't. Mostly because I read Slashdot often so I know both why it's capable of doing that (Javascript) and how many security holes that has opened in Adobe Reader (a metric fuckton). Hell, even an AJAX app that splits out a PDF would be cleaner from a design, security and usability standpoint and I hate webapps for things like this.
A Turing-complete scripting language has *no* business in my for-print document. Hey, wasn't that why we trimmed down Postscript to create PDFs in the first place?
Your problem is that you're using a propietary, undocumented and ever-changing format to store information that you don't want altered. Office 2001 opens incorrectly Office 2000 documents more often than not, despite being theoretically just a port to the Mac platform of the same codebase, with the 2003 and 2008 versions its only worse.
The only format I know of that actually guarantees your documents will still look the same a decade from now is TeX. No, not LaTeX, pure, vanilla, Knuth-sponsored TeX. Use anything else and you'll be lucky to get something 95% compatible in the next version, let alone 99.9999%.
If he was allowed to get off the hook for that, just think of the numbers of emboldened attackers who would see one less reason why they shouldn't attack a portion of the Internet that is already a huge target.
You really think it'd make a difference, don't you? the big problem for US military system aren't random hackers living in countries the US has treaties with, its people working for foreign governments such as China or North Korea, people with vastly more resources and whose government won't give up and extradite without putting up a serious fight.
But hey! continue fighting the good fight against common citizens, yours or otherwise, the longer you spend at this pathetic circus, the longer hostile nations will have to steal your precious secrets and make some *real* damage to your country. And given how annoying you've become these past few years, I'll be glad to see that happen.
And if you came home and found such a note on your table, what would your reaction be? Would it be "My my, I should really double check to make sure the door was locked. Thanks, Anonymous Note Writer!"
That once happened with my neighbor, after my mom accidentally left her keys on the door. Her first reaction after seeing her note was to go over to the neighbor and thank her, not to call the cops on her.
Which is what I think any *sane* person would do.
But graphics can only be improved so much until you can no longer use it to market your game.
Left 4 Dead, for instance, still sells like hot cakes despite not looking anywhere near as good as Crysis in "full glory", and so does Counter Strike which even in the Source version looks worse than both.
Microsoft just realized what Nintendo already had (and Sony should have after the PS2): that there *is* such thing as "good enough", and that we've reached it already.
Fair point, but you've gotta admit implementations of Tetris, Pong, Chess, Conway's Game of Life, a text adventure game and a psychiatrist AI are *hardly* necessary features in a text editor.
what people commonly mean by "intelligence", which is something closer to "critical thinking skills combined with ability to acquire, retain, and use information"
Err, what exactly is "critical thinking skills"? that's one term I've never quite understood. And while acquiring and retaining information are easy to qualify, how do you measure its use?
Except they're not the maker, they just licensed it first.
As always, the problem isn't with them making money, but rather how they deal with those they consider "obstacles" to their business model.
And abusing DMCA takedown notices ranks pretty high on most of our "worst ways to deal with competition" lists so if they do that, the flamefest that's sure to follow will be completely deserved.
Because most people get whatever their OEM will sell them and stick with it 'til they buy something newer, and those of us who build our own jumped ship to 64-bits *years* ago.
The market of "people not ready to upgrade their 32-bit hardware looking for a new OS" is statistically insignificant.
From experience I can tell you that Windows 7 (64-bit version) can be installed on a 10 GB partition. Barely, but it does work.
If you want light, Minix still can't be beat but I don't see anyone using it as a desktop OS. I wonder why.
I believe if he's waving his appendages at you, "anger" isn't exactly the emotion he's experiencing. I hope you have some vaseline, though.
Hardly any of them are US companies, Sony is japanese for instance, EMI is british and Vivendi is french. Its just that they bought laws in the US first because, apparently, politicians are cheaper over there than in Europe.
So you're saying that, when illegal file-sharing dropped, so did actual sales?
And just to help you all to do so:
Magnatune.com
Jamendo.com
LegalTorrents.com
Archive.org
If anyone has any other link, feel free to post them as well.
One has to wonder, though, about a right you enjoy only for as long as you don't try to use it...
Copyright is your only lever to prevent this from happening.
If it should be prevented. I'm still not convinced that's the case.
RAM, RAM, RAM, Linux more than anything loves RAM. I have a P1 166mhz laptop with 80 MBs of RAM with Debian and IceWM, Opera 9 ran pretty nicely as long as you kept your tab count below ~25 or so, and Abiword was a bit sluggish but still usable.
The big problem of using such a computer today is Flash which even with Gnash instead of Adobe's plugin its a CPU and memory hog (it even makes my current 1 Ghz laptop die a quick and painful death), but if the websites you browse to don't require it there's nothing stopping you from using such a machine as a basic desktop.
I'm sorry, I know I'm gonna sound like a Free Software zealot and a member of the Cult of St. IGNUcius here, but please bear with me.
Yes, its outlandish to think Microsoft makes this contribution for subversion because Richard M. Stallman has made it his main purpose in life to grant us a tool to prevent that from happening, and has fought hard for it. And that tool is the GPL.
Simply put, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy only works if you can keep your extensions from your competitors, and preventing that is *exactly* the main point of the GPL so as long as their contributions are under it we have nothing(*) to fear, be it from Microsoft or anyone else.
(*) except software patents, but due to the way its designed the only way to ever be safe from patent litigation is to abolish the patent system altogether. And in fact accepting code from Microsoft helps us a bit since trolls have a much bigger target to strike at.
Thing is, there's plenty of other companies that have done the same or worse. Remember Dmitry Sklyarov? yet criticizing Adobe's products here at Slashdot (particularly in a thread about Gnash or The GIMP) is one of the surest way to get an -1, Flamebait and half a dozen of "welcome to the real world, dumbass" replies.
Well, not the definite best though, that'd be criticizing that little fruit-flavored company that has abused every IP law in the books to shut down anything they dislike from competitors to random fans' blogs and whose CEO is member of the Board of Directors of Disney, the prime cause behind the wrecking of the US' copyright system.
Even F/OSS supporters, with their love for the corporation that *invented* the concept of FUD and all those strategies that Microsoft is so despised for, that controlled the computing market with an iron fist until a legal oversight led to the popularization of PCs and drove them to near bankrupcy.
Let's face it, pretty much all major players in today's economy are a bunch of scumbags, that's the *reason* they're major players in the first place. But the GPL is a known F/OSS license, its freedoms and limits are fairly well understood by now so if they want play by our rules, I can't see a reason not to let them as we did with IBM et al.
Except they can't sue for copyright infringement, since its under the GPLv2 just as the rest of the kernel, and while they theoretically could sue over patent infringement, that applies to any and all code more complex than "hello, world", and goes for all companies.
That's what Linus is warning against, just because you hate them doesn't mean you have to leave your rationality aside.
If that were true, Apple's market share should be roughly constant between markets where they actively spend on advertisement, and those where they don't.
Is that the case? IIRC I believe it wasn't and their share in the US was much bigger than in Europe or Asia, but I could be wrong in that. It is the case for South America at least, but considering how insanely overpriced their computers are around here (you can get a Dell laptop with identical or superior specs to a Mac for half the price, or a Sony for 2/3rds of it) its not exactly a fair comparison either.
Your comments about Scheme are exactly how I felt about Common Lisp after learning it. It made me look at programming itself differently, and I honestly believe my code in other languages has improved compared to before learning it.
Though I'd replace Python with Ruby, personally ;)
First, learn assembly, it teaches you how the machine works. (You should probably also learn electronics and digital logic)
Better yet, first make them learn Lambda calculus, then make them understand the Church-Turing thesis. Only when they fully grasp the nuances of an Universal Turing Machine should they even *touch* an actual computer and program in Assembly.
Or perhaps teaching "from the bottom-up" isn't such a good idea.