The issue comes when the kids wants to load on some Windows software that all their friends are using, then suddenly the operating system matters dramatically.
As far as school districts are concerned, that's probably another stroke in favor of Linux. They probably don't want students loading (intentionally or not) popular Windows software (including malware) onto their machines.
'What difference do you see?' I asked back. 'Nothing, really.' What a detailed, well thought-out response. Kid must have spent a whole 3 seconds coming up with that one.
Actually, for someone whose fairly new to computers without a lot of depth in platform-specific applications, there probably isn't that much major difference. Sure, there are a bunch of cosmetic differences, but they likely don't seem important, and the functional differences are beneath the surface. They look, in broad outline, a lot the same, and work a lot the same in broad outline, and, as much as the average/. has invested in their favorite environment and application, the differences aren't as big as the similarities to a novice.
For schools, that Linux is free (as in "beer" is probably good enough) both initially and for major upgrades to keep an environment of machines of different vintage as homogenous, in terms of software, as possible is a big advantage, and may be enough to make the decision given that, to a user not already conditioned heavily to one platform, there isn't a vast difference.
Re:Great job, now to clean up XML itself
on
Tim Bray Says RELAX
·
· Score: 1
XML is not a programming language. Lisp is not a markup language. I believe the comparison you were looking for was to s-expressions, which are a lot lighter than XML but don't do nearly as much.
Bare S-expressions don't define enough semantics to do what XML does; Lisp goes to far for what XML is used for in being a full programming language (though, given all the XML-related technologies that are widely used to add more and more programming-like features to XML, it may not be "too far"); somewhere between the two you could construct something that built on S-expressions to do what XML does fairly cleanly. It probably wouldn't be as good as XML as a "markup language" for structured text, but it would be more concise and arguably cleaner for exchanging other kinds of data, and XML is often used for things that aren't really marked-up text.
I believe you are looking for lisp. It's XML cleaned up, simplified and hulkified.
Not Lisp, but S-expressions, which are the basis of Lisp syntax; Lisp is an "application" of S-expressions, the same as XML applications are applications of XML. S-expressions extended with something similar to XMLs encoding declarations could substitute for XML and would be arguably cleaner—certainly, cleaner to Lispers, though I'm not so sure that:
(foo
(bar baz (spam: "eggs"))
is really more readable (rather than just more compact) than:
Um, no. If you're on a public street, it's fair game.
No, you aren't, generally (although the law varies in different jurisdictions in the US.)
What you're thinking of only applies to using someone's likeness or celebrity without consent to imply that a specific person is endorsing a product.
No, it doesn't, it applies almost time a recognizable person is the subject of a photograph used commercially, outside of matters of public concern. OTOH, generally speaking, where the photograph is of something else and the inclusion of the recognizable person is incidental, I believe that in most jurisdictions you may be okay.
You don't think that every local news station in the US has to compensate people milling about in the background of their news video, do you?
No, because news stations are covering matters of public concern, and are therefore likely within the space in which the First Amendment places a limit on any state-law right of publicity, and usually also explicitly excepted from such right of publicity.
If you're on public property you can take whatever pictures you want and commercialize them in nearly any fashion.
This statement is not generally accurate. As on example, the California law providing for the right of publicity (Civil Code 3344) makes liable "Any person who knowingly uses another's name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness, in any manner, on or in products, merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of, products, merchandise, goods or services, without such person's prior consent...". Note particularly that using a photograph on or in any "product, merchandise, or goods" is prohibited just as is using the photograph, etc., to sell goods.
There's no indication whatsoever in the article that Microsoft want to pre-install it, although one could obviously speculate that they'd like to sell units with Windows pre-installed to governments, this is not mentioned in the article.
Both Microsoft and Apple made offers aimed at being the "bundled" OS on the OLPC. Both were rejected for, among other reasons, the licensing terms which they were willing to offer. (IIRC, the Windows version Microsoft proposed would have been a special version of WinCE, which later OLPC and Microsoft were still working on making possible as an option rather than the bundled OS, so its odd that the new reports are that Microsoft is trying to squeeze XP onto the machine, which clearly doesn't have the horsepower, memory, or persistent storage to run XP well. One wonders what the point of such an option would be.)
Yes, but except for certain special cases like news reporting on events of public interest, they can't take pictures in which you are recognizable and use them for commercial purposes without your express consent. Legal rights to "privacy" don't only apply to rights to prevent people from seeing you in the first instance.
Let a business man have a try. That has to be better than lawyers.
George W. Bush was a businessman, but not a lawyer, before going into politics. Bill Clinton was a lawyer. George H. W. Bush was businessman. Ronald Reagan was neither a businessman, as most people conceive of that, or a lawyer, but an actor. Jimmy Carter was a businessman. Gerald Ford was a lawyer. Richard Nixon was a lawyer. Lyndon Johnson was a community college instructor. John Kennedy was a naval officer with no significant civilian professional background. One could go on...
Its hardly all been lawyers, and its even less as if businessmen other than lawyers haven't had a shot (or as if they have been uniformly better in any widely-accepted way than lawyers.)
Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the billions (trillions?) of dollars needed to put people on other planets on improving the lives of people on this particular planet?
Saying that the former is essential is not saying that efforts should not expended on the latter. And, in fact, getting to the point where people can productively and sustainably live on other planets requires lots and lots of fairly generally applicable basic research that would do much to enable new ways of improving life on this planet.
What's the logic of going with a version that is so far behind?
Suse Professional 9.3 was released, what, a year and a half ago? That's not precisely ancient, especially given that the council apparently took time to take an existing base and then do their own customization.
Okay, hate Microsoft all you want, but will someone tell me just what is so wrong with Exchange Server that makes it such a target for Open Source replacement?
For many open-source idealists, it is a major target because it is (1) commonly used, (2) in a business-critical role, and (3) close-source.
I would like someone to honestly tell me either that Exchange has problems that need fixing, or that Exchange must go for Linux to gain more share in the Enterprise space.
Since Exchange server doesn't run on Linux, clearly the perceived need for Exchange is a barrier to Linux advancement, whether or not Exchange also has functional problems, but many people who want Linux to advance (probably virtually all of them that don't have a financial stake in some Linux-oriented business) are open-source idealists that want open-source software to become more dominant, and Exchange is, simply by its own dominance, a target for that, besides any barrier it poses to Linux adoption.
I think what the guy has realised is that a cheap laptop is certainly not going to be some silver bullet in the heart of bad education.
Or perhaps he's realized that increasing free access to information, a side effect of OLPC, isn't always helpful to a military junta that has recently seized power by force and clamped down hard on the flow of information.
It's going to take far more than a flashy new piece of hardware to turn around a stumbling educational system...
Since the OLPC program (1) doesn't bill itself as a complete solution, and (2) provides more than hardware (indeed, while the hardware effort gets the most media attention, and even moerso the most attention on Slashdot, the content portion is at least as important to the project, this comment, while true, is pretty much irrelevant.
There's no guarantee that an article, at any moment in time, even approaches accuracy. If an expert in a field has reviewed some piece of information within it, perhaps a mechanism allowing him to digitally sign that piece of information would allow the article to gain some credibility.
Since Wikipedia is licensed under a fairly permissive license, nothing stops experts (or anyone else) from serving digitally-signed copies of Wikipedia articles if they want to endorse them in that way.
In theory, citations should achieve the same goal, but it's clear that people don't want to research Wikipedia articles that have already been written.
People who care about accuracy and aren't qualified to evaluate the content independently do.
People who don't don't care about accuracy.
They want to use them as research. Do we want to work to try to change people's habits and perceptions, or change the system to work with people's habits and perceptions?
There is no way to "change the system" so that people whose "habits and perceptions" are to accept anonymously-written secondary sources as reliable without any kind of critical analysis or review of sources are going to get consistent, reliable information.
Providing a method for "experts" to digitally sign Wikipedia pages won't fix that, because peopel who don't care to check sources also won't care to review the qualifications or appropriateness of the "expert" that signed the page, or even pay attention to whether or not it is signed. The problem isn't that people who care have no way to evaluate Wikipedia articles, the problem is that people don't care to do that.
IME, Wikipedia is often better on technical subjects than on subjects of general interest, because the people who are motivated to actual read/edit the articles tend to have some knowledge of the field, know how to do research, and not be particularly interested in goofing around with it.
If you're not an expert, you should be skeptical about your sources. In the case of Wikipedia, you should find an actual expert you can trust, have them read the entry, and tell you their expert opinion of its reliability.
Or you should have the basic critical thinking competence to review whether the claims in the article are sourced, and review the sources (particularly if the use is of any importance.)
An encyclopedia is, after all, a starting point for research, not an ending point.
If you don't understand what an encyclopedia is for, you shouldn't be using Wikipedia at all.
Let's suppose you can in fact cram all the audio/video in the world onto an iPod? What then? How could you conceivably use all that information?
You don't, nor do I think the Google exec is seriously suggesting that you would have iPods in fact having all that media on them, even if they have the capacity, simply that with the current trends, storage capacity limits are very rapidly going to stop being a limiting factor for portable media devices for any practical purposes. His comments on the mobile industry aping the internet seems to be suggesting that similar process will affect the mobile industry more generally, perhaps extending the idea to wireless bandwidth as well as memory.
Though its really hard to tell what the actual point is, TFA isn't really all that coherent.
Re:Standard geek viewpoint == standard geek proble
on
Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 1
Certainly not past a *few*,*salient* choices.
The "few, salient" options relevant to any particular user may not be the few, salient option relevant to any other user, though, which raises the problem of having the right set of options for the specific user.
It sounds like the judge is taking the track that any historically accurate game is ok...
More likely, the judge is taking the position that the First Amendment does not allow banning material on the basis of "obscenity" unless the three prongs of the Miller test are satisfied, particularly the third prong: "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
A 2D linked graph isn't actually a case of what is described in the patent here (its considerably more advanced, IMO); what the patent describes is just a set of singly-linked lists sharing all of their data elements but having different orders.
Saying that, the mentioned patent may not be so obvious as seems at first sight. The idea is not a simple linked-list or doubly-linked-list, but somewhat more sophisticated linked-list with auxiliary pointers.
No, its really a simple linked list.
If you start with a set of data structures, and impose one order on them to create a linked list, the result is another set of data structures, and a head pointer to the first.
If you take the exact same process, but with a new comparison function creating a new sort order, and apply it to the set of data structures you just created, you get the two pointer list described in Claim 1.
If you take the same process, but with a third comparison function creating a third sort order, and apply it to the set of data structures you got from the last step, you get the three pointer list described in Claim 2.
If you apply standard, single-linked list traversal from any of the available three head pointers in your triple-linked list, you get the traversal method they describe in Claim 3.
If you have a computer system that applies single-linked list traversal from any of the available head pointers as described in the preceding paragraph, you have the computer system they describe in Claim 4.
A singly-linked list is a well-described, well-understood, well-established way of imposing order on any set of data structures. It produces a new set of data structures. This patent claims as novel the application of the well-understood, well-established method of imposign order on any set of data structures to the set of data structures produced as the output of that well-understood, well-established process.
To say that the "invention" is neither genuinely novel nor non-obvious is an understatement.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, for someone whose fairly new to computers without a lot of depth in platform-specific applications, there probably isn't that much major difference. Sure, there are a bunch of cosmetic differences, but they likely don't seem important, and the functional differences are beneath the surface. They look, in broad outline, a lot the same, and work a lot the same in broad outline, and, as much as the average
For schools, that Linux is free (as in "beer" is probably good enough) both initially and for major upgrades to keep an environment of machines of different vintage as homogenous, in terms of software, as possible is a big advantage, and may be enough to make the decision given that, to a user not already conditioned heavily to one platform, there isn't a vast difference.
Bare S-expressions don't define enough semantics to do what XML does; Lisp goes to far for what XML is used for in being a full programming language (though, given all the XML-related technologies that are widely used to add more and more programming-like features to XML, it may not be "too far"); somewhere between the two you could construct something that built on S-expressions to do what XML does fairly cleanly. It probably wouldn't be as good as XML as a "markup language" for structured text, but it would be more concise and arguably cleaner for exchanging other kinds of data, and XML is often used for things that aren't really marked-up text.
Not Lisp, but S-expressions, which are the basis of Lisp syntax; Lisp is an "application" of S-expressions, the same as XML applications are applications of XML. S-expressions extended with something similar to XMLs encoding declarations could substitute for XML and would be arguably cleaner—certainly, cleaner to Lispers, though I'm not so sure that:
(foo
(bar baz (spam: "eggs"))
is really more readable (rather than just more compact) than:
<foo>
<bar>
<baz spam="eggs"/>
</bar>
</foo>
No, you aren't, generally (although the law varies in different jurisdictions in the US.)
No, it doesn't, it applies almost time a recognizable person is the subject of a photograph used commercially, outside of matters of public concern. OTOH, generally speaking, where the photograph is of something else and the inclusion of the recognizable person is incidental, I believe that in most jurisdictions you may be okay.
No, because news stations are covering matters of public concern, and are therefore likely within the space in which the First Amendment places a limit on any state-law right of publicity, and usually also explicitly excepted from such right of publicity.
This statement is not generally accurate. As on example, the California law providing for the right of publicity (Civil Code 3344) makes liable "Any person who knowingly uses another's name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness, in any manner, on or in products,
merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or
soliciting purchases of, products, merchandise, goods or services,
without such person's prior consent...". Note particularly that using a photograph on or in any "product, merchandise, or goods" is prohibited just as is using the photograph, etc., to sell goods.
Both Microsoft and Apple made offers aimed at being the "bundled" OS on the OLPC. Both were rejected for, among other reasons, the licensing terms which they were willing to offer. (IIRC, the Windows version Microsoft proposed would have been a special version of WinCE, which later OLPC and Microsoft were still working on making possible as an option rather than the bundled OS, so its odd that the new reports are that Microsoft is trying to squeeze XP onto the machine, which clearly doesn't have the horsepower, memory, or persistent storage to run XP well. One wonders what the point of such an option would be.)
Yes, but except for certain special cases like news reporting on events of public interest, they can't take pictures in which you are recognizable and use them for commercial purposes without your express consent. Legal rights to "privacy" don't only apply to rights to prevent people from seeing you in the first instance.
George W. Bush was a businessman, but not a lawyer, before going into politics. Bill Clinton was a lawyer. George H. W. Bush was businessman. Ronald Reagan was neither a businessman, as most people conceive of that, or a lawyer, but an actor. Jimmy Carter was a businessman. Gerald Ford was a lawyer. Richard Nixon was a lawyer. Lyndon Johnson was a community college instructor. John Kennedy was a naval officer with no significant civilian professional background. One could go on...
Its hardly all been lawyers, and its even less as if businessmen other than lawyers haven't had a shot (or as if they have been uniformly better in any widely-accepted way than lawyers.)
Saying that the former is essential is not saying that efforts should not expended on the latter. And, in fact, getting to the point where people can productively and sustainably live on other planets requires lots and lots of fairly generally applicable basic research that would do much to enable new ways of improving life on this planet.
Suse Professional 9.3 was released, what, a year and a half ago? That's not precisely ancient, especially given that the council apparently took time to take an existing base and then do their own customization.
Um, the Web Servers and Browser bit I get, but Microsoft has hardly dominated any industry with the XBox.
For many open-source idealists, it is a major target because it is (1) commonly used, (2) in a business-critical role, and (3) close-source.
Since Exchange server doesn't run on Linux, clearly the perceived need for Exchange is a barrier to Linux advancement, whether or not Exchange also has functional problems, but many people who want Linux to advance (probably virtually all of them that don't have a financial stake in some Linux-oriented business) are open-source idealists that want open-source software to become more dominant, and Exchange is, simply by its own dominance, a target for that, besides any barrier it poses to Linux adoption.
I don't usually define "a military junta that desires tight control of information" as "sanity", but clearly YMMV.
Or perhaps he's realized that increasing free access to information, a side effect of OLPC, isn't always helpful to a military junta that has recently seized power by force and clamped down hard on the flow of information.
Since the OLPC program (1) doesn't bill itself as a complete solution, and (2) provides more than hardware (indeed, while the hardware effort gets the most media attention, and even moerso the most attention on Slashdot, the content portion is at least as important to the project, this comment, while true, is pretty much irrelevant.
Since Wikipedia is licensed under a fairly permissive license, nothing stops experts (or anyone else) from serving digitally-signed copies of Wikipedia articles if they want to endorse them in that way.
People who care about accuracy and aren't qualified to evaluate the content independently do.
People who don't don't care about accuracy.
There is no way to "change the system" so that people whose "habits and perceptions" are to accept anonymously-written secondary sources as reliable without any kind of critical analysis or review of sources are going to get consistent, reliable information.
Providing a method for "experts" to digitally sign Wikipedia pages won't fix that, because peopel who don't care to check sources also won't care to review the qualifications or appropriateness of the "expert" that signed the page, or even pay attention to whether or not it is signed. The problem isn't that people who care have no way to evaluate Wikipedia articles, the problem is that people don't care to do that.
IME, Wikipedia is often better on technical subjects than on subjects of general interest, because the people who are motivated to actual read/edit the articles tend to have some knowledge of the field, know how to do research, and not be particularly interested in goofing around with it.
Or you should have the basic critical thinking competence to review whether the claims in the article are sourced, and review the sources (particularly if the use is of any importance.)
An encyclopedia is, after all, a starting point for research, not an ending point.
If you don't understand what an encyclopedia is for, you shouldn't be using Wikipedia at all.
If everyone hated them, Sony wouldn't be selling any.
You don't, nor do I think the Google exec is seriously suggesting that you would have iPods in fact having all that media on them, even if they have the capacity, simply that with the current trends, storage capacity limits are very rapidly going to stop being a limiting factor for portable media devices for any practical purposes. His comments on the mobile industry aping the internet seems to be suggesting that similar process will affect the mobile industry more generally, perhaps extending the idea to wireless bandwidth as well as memory.
Though its really hard to tell what the actual point is, TFA isn't really all that coherent.
The "few, salient" options relevant to any particular user may not be the few, salient option relevant to any other user, though, which raises the problem of having the right set of options for the specific user.
A 2D linked graph isn't actually a case of what is described in the patent here (its considerably more advanced, IMO); what the patent describes is just a set of singly-linked lists sharing all of their data elements but having different orders.
a1 > a2 is a different criterion than
a1 < a2
No, its really a simple linked list.
If you start with a set of data structures, and impose one order on them to create a linked list, the result is another set of data structures, and a head pointer to the first.
If you take the exact same process, but with a new comparison function creating a new sort order, and apply it to the set of data structures you just created, you get the two pointer list described in Claim 1.
If you take the same process, but with a third comparison function creating a third sort order, and apply it to the set of data structures you got from the last step, you get the three pointer list described in Claim 2.
If you apply standard, single-linked list traversal from any of the available three head pointers in your triple-linked list, you get the traversal method they describe in Claim 3.
If you have a computer system that applies single-linked list traversal from any of the available head pointers as described in the preceding paragraph, you have the computer system they describe in Claim 4.
A singly-linked list is a well-described, well-understood, well-established way of imposing order on any set of data structures. It produces a new set of data structures. This patent claims as novel the application of the well-understood, well-established method of imposign order on any set of data structures to the set of data structures produced as the output of that well-understood, well-established process.
To say that the "invention" is neither genuinely novel nor non-obvious is an understatement.