You can use a computer you already have as a general-purpose DSP without using a DSP chip as the CPU. However, you're not going to get as good of performance (read: You get what you pay for). And the majority of DSP chips are not compiler friendly (although this is changing in some of the newer generation chips) because DSP chips have structures that are difficult to map into HLL's like C. Putting a general purpose OS on a DSP chip will only end up hurting performance. If you want a quick prototyping base for DSP work, use your computer. If you want peak price-performance, you're going to do it on a DSP chip and with a minimal RTOS.
Now last I looked, TI's 'C6x architecture was headed that way with speed and scalability, but no one is ever going to write or port a general purpose OS (ie, Linux, Windoze, MacOS, Be) for/to that chip.
Uh, why would you port a general purpose OS to a DSP chip? DSP chips are special purpose devices that fit a lot of niches (well, okay, niche really isn't the word since they outsell CPUs by orders of magnitude) that don't need general purpose processors. Much better to have a controller chip of some kind (say x86 or PPC) interfacing with a DSP farm for processing.
That choice is probably out of their hands. More likely, the decision to place the bulk of the process of determining merit on the courts was enacted by some higher up, perhaps in Congress or the White House. And those people are most heavily influenced by the major corporations, who realize that court time is expensive, and likely will rely on the decision of a non-technical person or group of people to make final decision.
It's still no justification for attacking the people at the patent office. Most posters at this site seem to be convinced that the US Patent Office is off on some hell bent push to approve every stupid application. Don't blame them. Blame the people who are trying to push patent applications through faster, while not giving the PTO the resources needed to do so properly.
Is there anyone out there besides me who realizes that a lot of the questionable patents could be weeded out if the patent office wasn't badly understaffed and undertrained and if they weren't under pressure by Congress to handle applications faster?
A little reality check here: the number of people working as patent clerks who have a strong background in high tech fields is probably very small. These people don't get paid the kind of money that can be made in the industry. And they're under a lot of pressure to get applications processed as soon as possible. How many of you would honestly be willing to take a job with the Patent Office? If it meant you could do something concrete to regulate what gets patented and what doesn't? Or what about lobbying to get more and better trained people working at the patent office and give them more time and resources to research patent applications? There's too much money invested in the system to expect it to just go away, but that doesn't mean the system can't be used properly.
Hmm...need to carefully read article when brain isn't so foggy. Economics == Nap Time.
However, a quick read of the introduction suggests that differential pricing isn't such a bad thing in some markets:
The outcome of this investigation is that
(i) efficient pricing in such environments will typically involve prices that differ across consumers and type of service;
(ii) producers will want to engage in product and service differentiation in order for this differential pricing to be feasible; and,
(iii) differential pricing will arise naturally as a result of profit seeking by firms. It follows that differential pricing can generally be expected to contribute to economic efficiency [2].
Admittedly, I am kinda tired, and could easily overlook something. If production costs are separate from shipping and placement costs, then it's easy to see the hardcover costing more, or at least having slimmer margins. I guess the biggest thing is to look at all the different places that the price difference can come from:
Production Cost Differences
Shipping Cost Differences
Placement Cost Differences
Bookstore economics (shelf space, quantity, etc.)
Basic Supply vs. Demand
Others that I'm likely overlooking
The only way to really know where the price difference comes from is by tracking the price per unit from tree to consumer.
Perhaps a better way to do this is to have an online resource (say www.ora.com/student) that provides the practice problems and answers. Too often I've found textbooks where the answers are wrong. Having the problems online makes it easier to fix errors. Also, other people can submit problems, so the author isn't burdened with additional content to create. Having a high quality reference is a good thing. But too many people might think that a new edition of a book contains more than just new problem sets. It's better to keep the reference and the teaching parts separate. Alternative solution: Separate, low cost problem set manual.
I've heard that the hardcover and softcover versions of a book cost about the same to produce, and that the purpose of a hardcover edition is to extract extra money from people willing to pay more to read a book earlier (since the hardcover comes out well in advance of the softcover).
I'd like to see this validated or debunked. My gut feeling is that it's wrong. Hardcover books are almost universally heavier and bulkier than softcover versions with the same content. For equal numbers of copies of each, the hardcover version will end up with higher material costs (okay, the fancy ORA binding might make up for this) in production, and higher shipping costs, due to the higher shipping weight and volume. Factor in the economies of scale that result from differing volumes, and the price spread can swell.
Of course, issues such as font and page size play into this too, but who wants a hardcover book that requires a magnifying glass to read?
Brilliant. Scare off all dissenters with threats of violence against their systems. Of course, considering the number of death threats that result from/. discussions, this fits in perfectly with the mindset of many/.'ers. And would likely end up getting/. labelled as a cyberterrorist hang-out if people did start attacking ISPs of posters they disagree with.
Umm...how is that constructive, or for that matter, productive? Just seems like a way of scareing (sp?) off those who don't follow the party line./. has jumped off the deep end into the USENET pool, but attacking ISPs is not going to win people over. Plus, if these attacks are traced back to/. in some way, then it's Rob and Andover that are going to pay, which only screws/. over even more.
I view it more along the lines of aspiring to transform the industry - and beyond that, society.
Like it or not, that desire to attempt to change society on the part of GPL-advocates (was this even a founding intention of RMS's?) may very well prove to be it's downfall. Not everyone follows RMS & Co. (nor should they). Not everyone wants to. And if somebody tries to force the GPL down everyone's throats, some people are going to react negatively. And if that advocate isn't prepared to deal with that reaction in a constructive manner, then the advocate is wasting his time.
discern in your mind that software is not a tangible good and should not be treated as such.
(Playing devil's advocate here. I consider this bit kinda flimsy myself, but others may accept it.) It could conceivably be argued that software is a tangible good in some sense because it must be stored in some physical medium to be useful. The amount of physical medium depends on the density of that medium, but a particular piece of software will impart a tangible alteration on that medium, while it exists there.
Actually font aliasing blurs the font out, most often making it harder, not easier, to read (IMHO). It's helpful for lines, curves, etc. but definitely not for fonts. Unless you don't value your eyesight that is.
Antialiasing doesn't sharpen anything. How can it? It's blurring it to make it smoother. And it's not a really trick of the human eye either. I've yet to see a computer graphics book that properly discusses the reasons for antialiasing. But a lot of that is because many CS types don't have a good background in Fourier analysis. The human eye, much like a monitor, is a point-sampling device. However, the human eye has much higher resolution than any monitor can hope to achieve. As a result, the lower sampling frequency of the monitor is visible as the so-called "jaggies" (high frequency transitions). Anti-aliasing attempts to reduce the impact of the jaggies by interpolating pixels to produce smoother (lower frequency) transitions graphically.
I'm not sure I'm all that interested in writing anything major for the public domain, since the GPL allows just as much use of the software, but also encourages other people to produce Free software.
This isn't meant as flamebait, but I've got a couple of problems with this (although they're closely intertwined):
The GPL doesn't allow just as much use of code as true Public domain code. That's because the GPL restricts how any code covered by it is used.
"Encourages other people to produce Free software" puts it lightly. Obligates law-abiding users of GPL'd code is more like it. Public domain code has no restriction on how it's used in a software project. GPL'd code does.
Anyways, those are minor semantic issues.
I think your post gets at the heart of any economic system in that there's always going to be problems that aren't easy to resolve. How would something like the Linux kernel or the GIMP be handled under such a system? There you have a open development system where many people contribute differing amounts. Figure that out and you can better handle "bazaar"-style development projects under this system.
As to your scenarios:
Scenario 1: Some would say that the author should undertake the project anyways, for the academic gains achieved. But in reality, if he undertakes the project anyways, he may lose money, in addition to valuable time he could've spend working on other interesting projects.
Scenario 2: That's a problem of an inflexible contract. There should be elements of the contract to account for overruns in development time, in addition to incentives for faster development.
Scenario 3: Good luck solving that one. Perhaps partial refunds if the developer and contractor agree it's not worth pursuing. But you won't find an easy solution that makes everyone happy.
Economic systems are not simple. There's many complex situations that can arise that need to be thought out. And there needs to be a way to retrofit the system with additional tweaks to handle situations that weren't envisioned originally.
who will pay?: Who pays for content now? Enthusiasts and those who need specific and/or reliable content (i.e. trade journals). Both of these groups will continue to pay for content, in what form that payment takes. (Via the Protocol or via royalties on container sales.) If these two groups can't support the authors -- who live in a scarcity economy -- than market forces ensure that the freeloaders will pay up. Hm, only two new books in the store since the last month. Time to go pay [my favorite author] some more.
Um...could you clarify this a bit? It seems to be saying that even though your favorite author hasn't produced anything this month, you're still going to pay him as if you were buying a book.
FWIW: At a place I used to work at, they were considering a very large CD changer system (~60+ IIRC). After looking into it in greater detail, they decided instead to buy a bunch of HDDs instead and copy the CDs onto the HDDs. If you use SCSI HDDs, then multiple people can access multiple files/disks at the same time, and the overall cost (for them anyways) actually worked out cheaper. I suspect that at the prices you quoted, you wont be able to access multiple CDs simultaneously. Disk will be more expensive for you, but probably a better all-around solution.
> I think one of the very real things feeding this > penomenon (as well as one of the most disturbing > things about/. in general) is the (apparently) > prevailing attitude that anyone in in management > (the dreaded "suits") is a dolt or worse.
As much as I agree with this, I think a significant reason behind this attitude is the number of/.'ers who have no real experience with business people. What % of readership is students? How many/.'ers worship Dilbert, overlooking what an apologetic POS it really is? And what % of the readership actually interacts heavily with management on a daily basis? Of course, heaven forbid management and labor should work together. That would break all the rules of labor relations, and might even be productive.
The other, and often overlooked issue, is Linux's ability to run on >> 2-4 procs. For many larger businesses, their core systems run on many processor machines that are designed to be extremely fault tolerant and stable (up times > 10 or 20 years are common). Beowulf-style clusters aren't really an option. The article (which was posted yesterday) is more about the appropriateness of Linux as a replacement for S/390 and AS/400 type servers.
"Sorry, but GNU/Linux can't scale to 128 processor [snip] systems yet."
Beautiful. Didn't Microsoft perfect the vaporware technique years ago? Linux runs good on systems that developers have access too, however, the overwhelming majority of Linux developers don't have access to the many processor machinery needed to fully port and extend Linux on. And it will still take quite a while to get the QoS that companies like IBM and Amdahl can promise.
That being said, there's a much better chance of getting Linux (or the *BSDs) up and running on an Origin-class server than NT, considering the OS architecture.
> That leaves Richard Stallman debating whether > Linux needs a GNU tacked on in front of it. Heh...rather than doing what he does best: write code.
In all honesty though, the people who would serve best as [advocates|proponents|evangelists] aren't welcomed with open arms by the programmers (see discussion RE: ESR quitting), and the programmers typically are poor in the advocacy realms.
Perhaps it would be best for OpenSource to lose the spotlight for a little while. Then again, if it does, we'll probably be hearing more "Whatever happened to..." questions like with so many other technologies (especially those at odds with Microsoft). That doesn't mean the movement's dead, but at the same time, it means loss of mindshare, which makes adoption of the technologies and ideas more difficult. Somebody needs to step up to the plate, but it doesn't do any good if the home team won't support that person.
Sampling rate limits spectral resolution capabilities. DSP theory teaches that. In addition, you need to have different target spectrums for different formats, as lossy formats (eg. MP3) throw away part of that spectrum in the interest of saving storage space, whereas non-lossy formats (eq. WAV) hold true to the proper frequency characteristics of an audio clip.
If you fail to take this into consideration, you will fail miserably. And your technique would be fairly easy to circumvent if you don't access the entire file you check.
ipnot.org argues that everyone will be honest. maybe you need to re-read parts of their manifesto.
perhaps you forget that some people have no care about reputation. only honorable men operate by honorable principles. others will take advantage of every loophole possible. your argument seems to include the acceptance that people will be taken advantage of, and there's no reason to try to prevent it.
I am willing to acknowledge problems in current copyright law, however I fail to see how the existence of copyright law mandates a heavy handed government presence in the lives of the citizens. If government interference is your main concern, there are far greater issues to worry about. However, nothing I have seen has yet to convince me that IP law must be destroyed.
Funny, I have yet to see anything of substance in your side of the argument. Just lots of ranting about greedy megacorps. Take your rose-colored glasses off. Maybe you'll see how easy it is for dishonest people to take advantage of honest people when there's nothing to back up the claims of the honest people. Without IP law, it's even easier for the rich and powerful to take advantage of the less fortunate, but more creative. Groups like ipnot.org operate on the false assumption that all people are inherently honest. However, when your assumptions fail to hold up, so to does your model fail.
For ages, it also was nigh impossible to cheaply and easily profit off of the work of others. Books could not be quickly and easily produced until the rise of the printing press. Music could not be copied until the rise of the record. The rise of the Industrial Revolution made the mass production of nearly all consumer goods possible. The Digital Age has made it possible to perfectly copy another's work, label it as one's own, and redistribute it with astonishing speed.
I know this from personal experience. I was commisioned to produce graphics for a fantasy rpg along with a couple of other people. One of the other people producing graphics stole the graphics I produced and received credit and payment for the work I did. Because it was my word against his, and he wasn't going to fess up, I had no real way to receive restitution. The game never ended up shipping, but I still lost out. If I had some way of effectively watermarking the image and not having to worry about someone altering that watermark. Have you ever actually been involved in an IP-related dispute?
> since many ideas children have tend to have > more merit than those of their older > counterparts;
Interesting statement, considering the older counterparts can (and do) get away with taking credit for the works of younger coworkers and because of their reputation. But such is the nature of research.
Fact is, the idea of eliminating IP law as we know it is supported almost exclusively by academians, who are used to the free exchange of ideas and whose motivations are other than monetary in nature. To suggest that someone would change his opinions if he wasn't in academia is an observation of human nature not an insult (unlike your assertion that I'm some FUD-spreading, unenlightened troll). The world isn't a meritocracy. The world is driven by money and power and greed. Your landlord (or perhaps bank, unless your among the lucky few that truly own their residence) could care less about your contributions to the Linux kernel if you can't make your monthly payments.
The world is a greedy ugly place. Face it. Honesty won't get you very far when you're dealing with a liar.
Dude, that's pretty fscking funny! The idea that the other hunters would inherently take care of Uhg because he did them a favor! Hah! You obivously know nothing about human nature. Of course you apparently also lack the backbone to affix your name to your comments.
Slashdot Mirror
You can use a computer you already have as a general-purpose DSP without using a DSP chip as the CPU. However, you're not going to get as good of performance (read: You get what you pay for). And the majority of DSP chips are not compiler friendly (although this is changing in some of the newer generation chips) because DSP chips have structures that are difficult to map into HLL's like C. Putting a general purpose OS on a DSP chip will only end up hurting performance. If you want a quick prototyping base for DSP work, use your computer. If you want peak price-performance, you're going to do it on a DSP chip and with a minimal RTOS.
Now last I looked, TI's 'C6x architecture was headed that way with speed and scalability, but no one is ever going to write or port a general purpose OS (ie, Linux, Windoze, MacOS, Be) for/to that chip.
Uh, why would you port a general purpose OS to a DSP chip? DSP chips are special purpose devices that fit a lot of niches (well, okay, niche really isn't the word since they outsell CPUs by orders of magnitude) that don't need general purpose processors. Much better to have a controller chip of some kind (say x86 or PPC) interfacing with a DSP farm for processing.
That choice is probably out of their hands. More likely, the decision to place the bulk of the process of determining merit on the courts was enacted by some higher up, perhaps in Congress or the White House. And those people are most heavily influenced by the major corporations, who realize that court time is expensive, and likely will rely on the decision of a non-technical person or group of people to make final decision.
It's still no justification for attacking the people at the patent office. Most posters at this site seem to be convinced that the US Patent Office is off on some hell bent push to approve every stupid application. Don't blame them. Blame the people who are trying to push patent applications through faster, while not giving the PTO the resources needed to do so properly.
Is there anyone out there besides me who realizes that a lot of the questionable patents could be weeded out if the patent office wasn't badly understaffed and undertrained and if they weren't under pressure by Congress to handle applications faster?
A little reality check here: the number of people working as patent clerks who have a strong background in high tech fields is probably very small. These people don't get paid the kind of money that can be made in the industry. And they're under a lot of pressure to get applications processed as soon as possible. How many of you would honestly be willing to take a job with the Patent Office? If it meant you could do something concrete to regulate what gets patented and what doesn't? Or what about lobbying to get more and better trained people working at the patent office and give them more time and resources to research patent applications? There's too much money invested in the system to expect it to just go away, but that doesn't mean the system can't be used properly.
However, a quick read of the introduction suggests that differential pricing isn't such a bad thing in some markets:
The outcome of this investigation is that
(i) efficient pricing in such environments will typically involve prices that differ across consumers and type of service;
(ii) producers will want to engage in product and service differentiation in order for this differential pricing to be feasible; and,
(iii) differential pricing will arise naturally as a result of profit seeking by firms. It follows that differential pricing can generally be expected to contribute to economic efficiency [2].
Admittedly, I am kinda tired, and could easily overlook something. If production costs are separate from shipping and placement costs, then it's easy to see the hardcover costing more, or at least having slimmer margins. I guess the biggest thing is to look at all the different places that the price difference can come from:
- Production Cost Differences
- Shipping Cost Differences
- Placement Cost Differences
- Bookstore economics (shelf space, quantity, etc.)
- Basic Supply vs. Demand
- Others that I'm likely overlooking
The only way to really know where the price difference comes from is by tracking the price per unit from tree to consumer.Perhaps a better way to do this is to have an online resource (say www.ora.com/student) that provides the practice problems and answers. Too often I've found textbooks where the answers are wrong. Having the problems online makes it easier to fix errors. Also, other people can submit problems, so the author isn't burdened with additional content to create. Having a high quality reference is a good thing. But too many people might think that a new edition of a book contains more than just new problem sets. It's better to keep the reference and the teaching parts separate. Alternative solution: Separate, low cost problem set manual.
I've heard that the hardcover and softcover versions of a book cost about the same to produce, and that the purpose of a hardcover edition is to extract extra money from people willing to pay more to read a book earlier (since the hardcover comes out well in advance of the softcover).
:)
I'd like to see this validated or debunked. My gut feeling is that it's wrong. Hardcover books are almost universally heavier and bulkier than softcover versions with the same content. For equal numbers of copies of each, the hardcover version will end up with higher material costs (okay, the fancy ORA binding might make up for this) in production, and higher shipping costs, due to the higher shipping weight and volume. Factor in the economies of scale that result from differing volumes, and the price spread can swell.
Of course, issues such as font and page size play into this too, but who wants a hardcover book that requires a magnifying glass to read?
Need a quickie hardcover? Try cardboard!
Brilliant. Scare off all dissenters with threats of violence against their systems. Of course, considering the number of death threats that result from /. discussions, this fits in perfectly with the mindset of many /.'ers. And would likely end up getting /. labelled as a cyberterrorist hang-out if people did start attacking ISPs of posters they disagree with.
Umm...how is that constructive, or for that matter, productive? Just seems like a way of scareing (sp?) off those who don't follow the party line. /. has jumped off the deep end into the USENET pool, but attacking ISPs is not going to win people over. Plus, if these attacks are traced back to /. in some way, then it's Rob and Andover that are going to pay, which only screws /. over even more.
I view it more along the lines of aspiring to transform the industry - and beyond that, society.
Like it or not, that desire to attempt to change society on the part of GPL-advocates (was this even a founding intention of RMS's?) may very well prove to be it's downfall. Not everyone follows RMS & Co. (nor should they). Not everyone wants to. And if somebody tries to force the GPL down everyone's throats, some people are going to react negatively. And if that advocate isn't prepared to deal with that reaction in a constructive manner, then the advocate is wasting his time.
discern in your mind that software is not a tangible good and should not be treated as such.
(Playing devil's advocate here. I consider this bit kinda flimsy myself, but others may accept it.) It could conceivably be argued that software is a tangible good in some sense because it must be stored in some physical medium to be useful. The amount of physical medium depends on the density of that medium, but a particular piece of software will impart a tangible alteration on that medium, while it exists there.
Actually font aliasing blurs the font out, most often making it harder, not easier, to read (IMHO). It's helpful for lines, curves, etc. but definitely not for fonts. Unless you don't value your eyesight that is.
Antialiasing doesn't sharpen anything. How can it? It's blurring it to make it smoother. And it's not a really trick of the human eye either. I've yet to see a computer graphics book that properly discusses the reasons for antialiasing. But a lot of that is because many CS types don't have a good background in Fourier analysis. The human eye, much like a monitor, is a point-sampling device. However, the human eye has much higher resolution than any monitor can hope to achieve. As a result, the lower sampling frequency of the monitor is visible as the so-called "jaggies" (high frequency transitions). Anti-aliasing attempts to reduce the impact of the jaggies by interpolating pixels to produce smoother (lower frequency) transitions graphically.
This isn't meant as flamebait, but I've got a couple of problems with this (although they're closely intertwined):
- The GPL doesn't allow just as much use of code as true Public domain code. That's because the GPL restricts how any code covered by it is used.
- "Encourages other people to produce Free software" puts it lightly. Obligates law-abiding users of GPL'd code is more like it. Public domain code has no restriction on how it's used in a software project. GPL'd code does.
Anyways, those are minor semantic issues.I think your post gets at the heart of any economic system in that there's always going to be problems that aren't easy to resolve. How would something like the Linux kernel or the GIMP be handled under such a system? There you have a open development system where many people contribute differing amounts. Figure that out and you can better handle "bazaar"-style development projects under this system.
As to your scenarios:
- Scenario 1: Some would say that the author should undertake the project anyways, for the academic gains achieved. But in reality, if he undertakes the project anyways, he may lose money, in addition to valuable time he could've spend working on other interesting projects.
- Scenario 2: That's a problem of an inflexible contract. There should be elements of the contract to account for overruns in development time, in addition to incentives for faster development.
- Scenario 3: Good luck solving that one. Perhaps partial refunds if the developer and contractor agree it's not worth pursuing. But you won't find an easy solution that makes everyone happy.
Economic systems are not simple. There's many complex situations that can arise that need to be thought out. And there needs to be a way to retrofit the system with additional tweaks to handle situations that weren't envisioned originally.who will pay?: Who pays for content now? Enthusiasts and those who need specific and/or reliable content (i.e. trade journals). Both of these groups will continue to pay for content, in what form that payment takes. (Via the Protocol or via royalties on container sales.) If these two groups can't support the authors -- who live in a scarcity economy -- than market forces ensure that the freeloaders will pay up. Hm, only two new books in the store since the last month. Time to go pay [my favorite author] some more.
Um...could you clarify this a bit? It seems to be saying that even though your favorite author hasn't produced anything this month, you're still going to pay him as if you were buying a book.
FWIW: At a place I used to work at, they were considering a very large CD changer system (~60+ IIRC). After looking into it in greater detail, they decided instead to buy a bunch of HDDs instead and copy the CDs onto the HDDs. If you use SCSI HDDs, then multiple people can access multiple files/disks at the same time, and the overall cost (for them anyways) actually worked out cheaper. I suspect that at the prices you quoted, you wont be able to access multiple CDs simultaneously. Disk will be more expensive for you, but probably a better all-around solution.
> I think one of the very real things feeding this > penomenon (as well as one of the most disturbing > things about /. in general) is the (apparently) > prevailing attitude that anyone in in management > (the dreaded "suits") is a dolt or worse.
/.'ers who have no real experience with business people. What % of readership is students? How many /.'ers worship Dilbert, overlooking what an apologetic POS it really is? And what % of the readership actually interacts heavily with management on a daily basis? Of course, heaven forbid management and labor should work together. That would break all the rules of labor relations, and might even be productive.
As much as I agree with this, I think a significant reason behind this attitude is the number of
The other, and often overlooked issue, is Linux's ability to run on >> 2-4 procs. For many larger businesses, their core systems run on many processor machines that are designed to be extremely fault tolerant and stable (up times > 10 or 20 years are common). Beowulf-style clusters aren't really an option. The article (which was posted yesterday) is more about the appropriateness of Linux as a replacement for S/390 and AS/400 type servers.
"Sorry, but GNU/Linux can't scale to 128 processor [snip] systems yet."
Beautiful. Didn't Microsoft perfect the vaporware technique years ago? Linux runs good on systems that developers have access too, however, the overwhelming majority of Linux developers don't have access to the many processor machinery needed to fully port and extend Linux on. And it will still take quite a while to get the QoS that companies like IBM and Amdahl can promise.
That being said, there's a much better chance of getting Linux (or the *BSDs) up and running on an Origin-class server than NT, considering the OS architecture.
> That leaves Richard Stallman debating whether
> Linux needs a GNU tacked on in front of it.
Heh...rather than doing what he does best: write code.
In all honesty though, the people who would serve best as [advocates|proponents|evangelists] aren't welcomed with open arms by the programmers (see discussion RE: ESR quitting), and the programmers typically are poor in the advocacy realms.
Perhaps it would be best for OpenSource to lose the spotlight for a little while. Then again, if it does, we'll probably be hearing more "Whatever happened to..." questions like with so many other technologies (especially those at odds with Microsoft). That doesn't mean the movement's dead, but at the same time, it means loss of mindshare, which makes adoption of the technologies and ideas more difficult. Somebody needs to step up to the plate, but it doesn't do any good if the home team won't support that person.
Actually pacemakers do some pretty impressive amounts of work, given the device parameters (size, power usage, I/O requirements, analysis, etc.).
Technical note:
Sampling rate limits spectral resolution capabilities. DSP theory teaches that. In addition, you need to have different target spectrums for different formats, as lossy formats (eg. MP3) throw away part of that spectrum in the interest of saving storage space, whereas non-lossy formats (eq. WAV) hold true to the proper frequency characteristics of an audio clip.
If you fail to take this into consideration, you will fail miserably. And your technique would be fairly easy to circumvent if you don't access the entire file you check.
ipnot.org argues that everyone will be honest. maybe you need to re-read parts of their manifesto.
perhaps you forget that some people have no care about reputation. only honorable men operate by honorable principles. others will take advantage of every loophole possible. your argument seems to include the acceptance that people will be taken advantage of, and there's no reason to try to prevent it.
I am willing to acknowledge problems in current copyright law, however I fail to see how the existence of copyright law mandates a heavy handed government presence in the lives of the citizens. If government interference is your main concern, there are far greater issues to worry about. However, nothing I have seen has yet to convince me that IP law must be destroyed.
Funny, I have yet to see anything of substance in your side of the argument. Just lots of ranting about greedy megacorps. Take your rose-colored glasses off. Maybe you'll see how easy it is for dishonest people to take advantage of honest people when there's nothing to back up the claims of the honest people. Without IP law, it's even easier for the rich and powerful to take advantage of the less fortunate, but more creative. Groups like ipnot.org operate on the false assumption that all people are inherently honest. However, when your assumptions fail to hold up, so to does your model fail.
> For ages people got by without IP.
For ages, it also was nigh impossible to cheaply and easily profit off of the work of others. Books could not be quickly and easily produced until the rise of the printing press. Music could not be copied until the rise of the record. The rise of the Industrial Revolution made the mass production of nearly all consumer goods possible. The Digital Age has made it possible to perfectly copy another's work, label it as one's own, and redistribute it with astonishing speed.
I know this from personal experience. I was commisioned to produce graphics for a fantasy rpg along with a couple of other people. One of the other people producing graphics stole the graphics I produced and received credit and payment for the work I did. Because it was my word against his, and he wasn't going to fess up, I had no real way to receive restitution. The game never ended up shipping, but I still lost out. If I had some way of effectively watermarking the image and not having to worry about someone altering that watermark. Have you ever actually been involved in an IP-related dispute?
> since many ideas children have tend to have
> more merit than those of their older
> counterparts;
Interesting statement, considering the older counterparts can (and do) get away with taking credit for the works of younger coworkers and because of their reputation. But such is the nature of research.
Fact is, the idea of eliminating IP law as we know it is supported almost exclusively by academians, who are used to the free exchange of ideas and whose motivations are other than monetary in nature. To suggest that someone would change his opinions if he wasn't in academia is an observation of human nature not an insult (unlike your assertion that I'm some FUD-spreading, unenlightened troll). The world isn't a meritocracy. The world is driven by money and power and greed. Your landlord (or perhaps bank, unless your among the lucky few that truly own their residence) could care less about your contributions to the Linux kernel if you can't make your monthly payments.
The world is a greedy ugly place. Face it. Honesty won't get you very far when you're dealing with a liar.
Dude, that's pretty fscking funny! The idea that the other hunters would inherently take care of Uhg because he did them a favor! Hah! You obivously know nothing about human nature. Of course you apparently also lack the backbone to affix your name to your comments.