There are two types of people: those who pay interest, and those who collect it.
Of 10 people, 9 are in the former category while but 1 are in the latter.
It makes for very interesting political dynamics in a representative democracy, where on one hand there are lots of voters, but where on the other hand money can buy influence.
If you thought it was difficult doing a thorough Theo code audit for security was a formidable task, even given the open source code, then imagine the
difficulty of looking through all of the source and
wondering if any of it infringes on anyone's claimed "Intellectual Property". There aren't any options to diff and grep to complete such a task, AFAICT. The other half of the comparison remains under lock and key, except to those with rights to the IP.
Linus' policy of requiring signed patch contributions to the Linux source looks more and more like a good and proper defensive measure. I'd feel better if other high profile FOSS projects had systems of signing patches and an examinable web of trust between the major contributors. Go ahead and accept patches, but let each contributor sign them.
The whole issue of IP indemnification reeks of a deliberate strategy to slow the growth of free and open source deployments by sowing doubt
into the minds of decision makers considering use of FOSS for their business but must consider risk in their decision (and a limited amount of time and information on which to base a decision).
Transparency should make FOSS less IP infringing quickly compared to closed source, where IP infringements can be compiled away from easy recognition by the IP owners.
are there any particular aspects of X or Linux that reduce performance?
Probably more so for X11, given its age.
I'd be interested in having Someone That Really Knows tell me
"Given the current trends in GPU speed, memory, system bus increases, 3D, scalable graphics and fonts, a clean sheet of paper, would it be possible to create a high-performance graphics subsystem that would last as long as X11 has?"
"Could X11 be layered over the of the Y.NOT graphics system to speed its adoption?"
Unfortunately when they "cash in" those T-Bonds to pay benefits,
...the bonds won't be worth a plugged nickel.
That's because the Asian central banks holding over US$1e12 of T bonds and the owners of accumulated petrodollars will get tired of the weakening dollar eating their lunch.
We'll see $100/bbl oil, $5/gal gasoline a lot sooner than most of my fellow Americans realize.
But that's OK, we've been preparing admirably by increasing our consumer debt.
Microsoft will have to fight hard to catch up to this.
Why do they need to fight?
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to for them to buy TiVo outright? They could buy 100 companies of TiVo's size using petty cash!
And, just like hotmail service that originally ran fine on BSDying, they could slowly "upgrade" the TiVo users to MS-Whatever, once it's ported to PPC, once the call center's been warned about the fanatics calling in about how their 9th-Tee Ethernet card doesn't work anymore, etc.
I'm all for paying into Social Security to support those who depend on it or have paid into it for decades
I'm all for that, too.
However, the sad reality of this pay-as-you-go system is that early beneficiaries of Social Security got more than they paid in. A lot more. IIRC, one figure from about 10 years ago was that beneficiaries were getting something like $143 for every $1 they put into the system.
To be fair, however, that probably doesn't include the effects of inflation, nor does it include that some of those beneficiaries might have been supporting elderly relatives privately before the social security system was established.
And don't even get me started about the creative accounting investing of the current social security surplus into US Treasury Bonds that makes the deficit look much smaller than it really is. (Yes, the real deficit is actually worse than the $4e11 records that have been set lately.)
Us latecomers to this pyramid scheme should start planning for higher retirement ages, means-tested benefits, and COLA that really don't keep up with the COL.
Outrageous really as it goes against an explicit Supreme Court Ruling.
Minor point.
Since the U.S. Founding Fathers did not explicitly guarantee electronic copy protection in the Constitution, the strict constructionist majority bench to be appointed soon will overturn those old SCOTUS rulings by Liberal Activist Judges®.
I've been struggling to get all the required pieces together so that Ximian Novell Connector works under the Evolution that comes with FC3.
Connector is part of FC3 by default, but I'd really like to try to use Evo 2.0.2 that comes with FC3 with its corresponding updated Connector to the MyCorp Exchange server (which I did under Evo 1.4.6 under RH9).
Has anyone done this succesfully for FC3 and want to share how easy it was?
Pardon my naivete, but aren't all of these patents and intellectual property law protections supposed to encourage innovation and overall provide maximum benefit to society?
I see a great deal of innovation that is unprotected (open source) that, precisely because it is so unencumbered, serves to invite more and more rapid innovations built upon it.
Consider that FrameMaker originated on UNIX was ported to Windows and Mac, bought by Adobe, and the beta test of Framemaker for Linux was discontinued and no product was released.
At MyCorp, dozens of users of Framemaker were hung out to dry as expensive Sun SPARCStations were replaced by less expensive Linux boxes. Besides, the attachments sent by the beancounters suggested strongly that they needed a Windows box to decode Word and Excel files. Hardly any of them bought Framemaker licenses.
Adobe took an unnecessary big step backwards on desktop Linux before this announcement.
If you have no clue of the issues, if you're basing your decision solely on superficial reasons, or if you're just voting because someone told you to, please don't vote.
Don't drown out the voices of actual concerned citizens who have invested a good amount of effort looking at all the issues and reviewing the histories and promises of the various candidates.
Not to worry, friend. I have seen untold hours worth of informative commercials on the television that have provided me with the critical in-depth vision I need to cast my vote.
Since then I've realized that at some companies, resumes really ARE expected to be fiction, and they select the fiction they enjoy the most.
You should get (Score: 6, Insightful) for that comment as today, November 2, 2004, millions of American voters go to the polls and select a candidate for the topmost job in the land based on exactly that same criterion.
it is easy to see from the figures that this is less than point one percent of the bars they checked which was a staggering 1.8 million.
True enough. If all dissenting voices were equally informed, equally well-written, and equally dangerous to the established order then I'd believe that argument.
If Tom Paine were shut down in the 1700's, a similar argument could be made that his voice was only a small proportion of the total dissenters.
But it is also true that his propaganda was enormously influential.
How many of you run Linux on something that wouldn't run WinXP?
I see Linux being deployed schizophrenically.
That is, my Linux machine is typically loaded with to the gills with advanced hardware, U320 RAID controllers, etc. (I must admit I google through for Linux hardware compatibility before specifying the machine (hint to vendors)).
And, yet, still, at the very same time, I expect I can move that old P-II doorstop machine into a piddly webserver or print server running Linux that ought to stay up until Armageddon.
That breadth of applicability on their OS is what Windows admins have come not to expect from Microsoft.
"Whizbang new software needs whizbang new hardware."
Does anyone know how much effect endorsements actually have on vote counts?
Depends.
However, The Economist is probably one of the most highly respected of the weekly news magazines in the English-speaking world. It's read by the heavy movers and shakers (when I had a subscription I used to get bulk mail for services that would make more sense if my net worth were two orders of magnitude higher) and has a lot more detail and depth about international news than you'll typically find in any single U.S. magazine.
In some ways they could be regarded as Libertarian; a few years ago they had some in-depth articles examining the proposition of decriminalizing recreational drugs.
The Economist is thoughtful, detailed, slightly right leaning. A good complement to reading the New York Times, which is thoughtful, detailed, slightly left leaning. Both publications are well-written, too.
I've noticed that technology exists already for anonymous verification of lottery tickets and gambling bets by the bearer. An optically read hash of the transaction is printed and saved by the issuer and can be verified at any network location.
It should be possible for some of the same technologies to be applied to voting. AFAICT, the big hangup is limiting the paper to official boxes and official terminals to discourage vote selling where a person could produce a ticket and collect $10, a bottle of whiskey, or whatever for voting a verifiable ticket.
I own 2 TiVo units. Upgraded the disks myself. Bought 2 lifetime subscriptions for program guides.
For a small company trying to grow its subscriber base and earn more revenue, doing the opposite of what customers want seems to be phenomenonally foot wounding for TiVo.
I'll soon upgrade to HDTV. But given the restrictions coming down the pike on digital recording, eg, the broadcast flag in July 2005, I'll probably just build my own MythTV box for my future PVR needs, not buying an HD-TiVo.
Slashdot Mirror
Those of us in the US changed to using flashlights long ago.
You city boys probably overlooked the simple fact that you need a Lucifer match to light a torch.
There are two types of people: those who pay interest, and those who collect it.
Of 10 people, 9 are in the former category while but 1 are in the latter.
It makes for very interesting political dynamics in a representative democracy, where on one hand there are lots of voters, but where on the other hand money can buy influence.
[looks all around Slashdot...]
lack of open source expertise?!?
Excuse me, while I have a cognitive dissonance moment...
You can see where this is going.
Recapping:
If you thought it was difficult doing a thorough Theo code audit for security was a formidable task, even given the open source code, then imagine the difficulty of looking through all of the source and wondering if any of it infringes on anyone's claimed "Intellectual Property". There aren't any options to diff and grep to complete such a task, AFAICT. The other half of the comparison remains under lock and key, except to those with rights to the IP.
Linus' policy of requiring signed patch contributions to the Linux source looks more and more like a good and proper defensive measure. I'd feel better if other high profile FOSS projects had systems of signing patches and an examinable web of trust between the major contributors. Go ahead and accept patches, but let each contributor sign them.
The whole issue of IP indemnification reeks of a deliberate strategy to slow the growth of free and open source deployments by sowing doubt into the minds of decision makers considering use of FOSS for their business but must consider risk in their decision (and a limited amount of time and information on which to base a decision).
Transparency should make FOSS less IP infringing quickly compared to closed source, where IP infringements can be compiled away from easy recognition by the IP owners.
are there any particular aspects of X or Linux that reduce performance?
Probably more so for X11, given its age.
I'd be interested in having Someone That Really Knows tell me
Quite so.
Unfortunately when they "cash in" those T-Bonds to pay benefits,
...the bonds won't be worth a plugged nickel.
That's because the Asian central banks holding over US$1e12 of T bonds and the owners of accumulated petrodollars will get tired of the weakening dollar eating their lunch.
We'll see $100/bbl oil, $5/gal gasoline a lot sooner than most of my fellow Americans realize.
But that's OK, we've been preparing admirably by increasing our consumer debt.
Microsoft will have to fight hard to catch up to this.
Why do they need to fight?
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to for them to buy TiVo outright? They could buy 100 companies of TiVo's size using petty cash!
And, just like hotmail service that originally ran fine on BSDying, they could slowly "upgrade" the TiVo users to MS-Whatever, once it's ported to PPC, once the call center's been warned about the fanatics calling in about how their 9th-Tee Ethernet card doesn't work anymore, etc.
OK, nevermind.
I'm all for paying into Social Security to support those who depend on it or have paid into it for decades
I'm all for that, too.
However, the sad reality of this pay-as-you-go system is that early beneficiaries of Social Security got more than they paid in. A lot more. IIRC, one figure from about 10 years ago was that beneficiaries were getting something like $143 for every $1 they put into the system.
To be fair, however, that probably doesn't include the effects of inflation, nor does it include that some of those beneficiaries might have been supporting elderly relatives privately before the social security system was established.
And don't even get me started about the creative accounting investing of the current social security surplus into US Treasury Bonds that makes the deficit look much smaller than it really is. (Yes, the real deficit is actually worse than the $4e11 records that have been set lately.)
Us latecomers to this pyramid scheme should start planning for higher retirement ages, means-tested benefits, and COLA that really don't keep up with the COL.
IE is so often the 'lowest common denominator' when it comes to designing for the web.
Would that IE actually was a common denominator (as well as the distinction of being the least as Netscape 4 has fallen by the way.)
Now that W3C standards have settled in for several years, it's tragic that the IE math offers "40" as a common denominator to 2003.
Outrageous really as it goes against an explicit Supreme Court Ruling.
Minor point.
Since the U.S. Founding Fathers did not explicitly guarantee electronic copy protection in the Constitution, the strict constructionist majority bench to be appointed soon will overturn those old SCOTUS rulings by Liberal Activist Judges®.
I've been struggling to get all the required pieces together so that Ximian Novell Connector works under the Evolution that comes with FC3.
Connector is part of FC3 by default, but I'd really like to try to use Evo 2.0.2 that comes with FC3 with its corresponding updated Connector to the MyCorp Exchange server (which I did under Evo 1.4.6 under RH9).
Has anyone done this succesfully for FC3 and want to share how easy it was?
Pardon my naivete, but aren't all of these patents and intellectual property law protections supposed to encourage innovation and overall provide maximum benefit to society?
I see a great deal of innovation that is unprotected (open source) that, precisely because it is so unencumbered, serves to invite more and more rapid innovations built upon it.
Crazy.
Consider that FrameMaker originated on UNIX was ported to Windows and Mac, bought by Adobe, and the beta test of Framemaker for Linux was discontinued and no product was released.
At MyCorp, dozens of users of Framemaker were hung out to dry as expensive Sun SPARCStations were replaced by less expensive Linux boxes. Besides, the attachments sent by the beancounters suggested strongly that they needed a Windows box to decode Word and Excel files. Hardly any of them bought Framemaker licenses.
Adobe took an unnecessary big step backwards on desktop Linux before this announcement.
If you have no clue of the issues, if you're basing your decision solely on superficial reasons, or if you're just voting because someone told you to, please don't vote.
Don't drown out the voices of actual concerned citizens who have invested a good amount of effort looking at all the issues and reviewing the histories and promises of the various candidates.
Not to worry, friend. I have seen untold hours worth of informative commercials on the television that have provided me with the critical in-depth vision I need to cast my vote.
Since then I've realized that at some companies, resumes really ARE expected to be fiction, and they select the fiction they enjoy the most.
You should get (Score: 6, Insightful) for that comment as today, November 2, 2004, millions of American voters go to the polls and select a candidate for the topmost job in the land based on exactly that same criterion.
issues of the election
have been assiduously avoided by the two major candidates because they don't want to alienate anyone.
it is easy to see from the figures that this is less than point one percent of the bars they checked which was a staggering 1.8 million.
True enough. If all dissenting voices were equally informed, equally well-written, and equally dangerous to the established order then I'd believe that argument.
If Tom Paine were shut down in the 1700's, a similar argument could be made that his voice was only a small proportion of the total dissenters.
But it is also true that his propaganda was enormously influential.
DCHP server decided to stop giving out addresses
Seinfeld...Soup Nazi episode...
How many of you run Linux on something that wouldn't run WinXP?
I see Linux being deployed schizophrenically.
That is, my Linux machine is typically loaded with to the gills with advanced hardware, U320 RAID controllers, etc. (I must admit I google through for Linux hardware compatibility before specifying the machine (hint to vendors)).
And, yet, still, at the very same time, I expect I can move that old P-II doorstop machine into a piddly webserver or print server running Linux that ought to stay up until Armageddon.
That breadth of applicability on their OS is what Windows admins have come not to expect from Microsoft.
The software you need for advanced chip design typically cost on the order of $50,000 - $100,000 PER MONTH in licensing costs.
So one of the bottlenecks to produce a decent fully-open video card is ... open source software for advanced chip design.
All of the talented professors and graduates students in the field haven't spawned anything like this yet?
It would seem to me to be a great way to make a name for oneself as author of Ginger Scary Baby Posh Sporty Spice.
It happened like a year ago, you'd think people catch up
Especially so glaring a name change.
Kind of like the FirePhoenixBirdFoxzilla browser I'm using....
Does anyone know how much effect endorsements actually have on vote counts?
Depends.
However, The Economist is probably one of the most highly respected of the weekly news magazines in the English-speaking world. It's read by the heavy movers and shakers (when I had a subscription I used to get bulk mail for services that would make more sense if my net worth were two orders of magnitude higher) and has a lot more detail and depth about international news than you'll typically find in any single U.S. magazine.
In some ways they could be regarded as Libertarian; a few years ago they had some in-depth articles examining the proposition of decriminalizing recreational drugs.
The Economist is thoughtful, detailed, slightly right leaning. A good complement to reading the New York Times, which is thoughtful, detailed, slightly left leaning. Both publications are well-written, too.
I've noticed that technology exists already for anonymous verification of lottery tickets and gambling bets by the bearer. An optically read hash of the transaction is printed and saved by the issuer and can be verified at any network location.
It should be possible for some of the same technologies to be applied to voting. AFAICT, the big hangup is limiting the paper to official boxes and official terminals to discourage vote selling where a person could produce a ticket and collect $10, a bottle of whiskey, or whatever for voting a verifiable ticket.
I own 2 TiVo units. Upgraded the disks myself. Bought 2 lifetime subscriptions for program guides.
For a small company trying to grow its subscriber base and earn more revenue, doing the opposite of what customers want seems to be phenomenonally foot wounding for TiVo.
I'll soon upgrade to HDTV. But given the restrictions coming down the pike on digital recording, eg, the broadcast flag in July 2005, I'll probably just build my own MythTV box for my future PVR needs, not buying an HD-TiVo.
if you want a permanent copy why not purchase a permenent copy in the first place?
Because they charge so much money for those permanent copies?