Imo, governments are a far smaller threat than corporations. In free democratic countries at least, freedom of speech is consitutionally protected. The government can't stop you from expressing your views. You can demonstrate, you can speak up in public (to some extent at least), even if your views do not coincide with the majority.
But in an Internet run by corporations, no such guarantees exist. Your ISP is free to cut you off for any reason whatsoever, especially when their corporate bottomline is in danger. If the internet is your primary means of communicating your views to the public, you now no longer have the means of speaking up.
The point is that no one besides the UK would bring battleships anywhere near Sealand, since however you wrangle it, it is still uncomfortably close to the UK.
Furthermore, Sealand, although independent, is still at the mercy of external controls. The fiber lines can be cut, network traffic can be intercepted, etc...
Not to worry. All they need is to host a few big companies (e.g. certification authorities like they're hoping), and you can be sure that they'll raise a din to their respective governments if someone tries to cut Sealand off.
You're missing the point completely. If they had a real platform they were trying to promote, it would make sense to give away their development tools, so that they can make more profit in the long run - especially when they seem to be the underdog here, and they're trying to capture an enthusiast user base. As it is, it sounds more like a scam than anything else.
As I'm already an established customer on a couple of other well known e-commerce sites would it not be possible to get some kind of referral from these sites, saying that I'm a worthy customer? What would the implications of this be?
It sounds like a good excuse for companies to trade information about you.
This is just plain silly and immature. Ok, challenge question: Please describe what's functionally different between C, assembler, a Turing machine, and Lambda calculus? Answer: Nothing, they are all computationally equivalent. But are they equivalent from a software engineering standpoint? Not at all.
I took a look at Raph Levien's results, and tried to understand how such good results were obtained with JPEG. I think I understand now: the process of smoothing (I assume that the GIMP smooths before downsampling to reduce aliasing) then downsampling, then compressing is actually similar to the wavelet approach (read my description of wavelet compression posted earlier), except that wavelets allow of more levels of hierarchy, and different types of wavelet filters can be applied.
If anything, Raph Levien's results are a validation of the wavelet/JPEG2K approach to image compression.
I don't know where Chew and Choo got their encoder...
The JPEG encoder was based on a direct implementation of the DCT.
Further, 2/3s of the images they looked at were outside of JPEG territory. They were sharp-edged patterns, or text. That's what GIFs are for!
That's the conventional wisdom, but JPEG2K apparently does perform well with text. In any case, it's part of the experimental process to compare the performance with different classes of images.
I wonder if Chew and Choo were "expected" to get certain results...
Yup. Start them on something fun. I started programming on an old hand me down Creative Apple II computer (that was when Creative was still making apple II compatibles). Its graphics and sound were state of the art for its time - it even had a Text of Speech synthesizer which could speak english and mandarin (mandarin speech synthesis worked very well due to the regular phonetic nature of the chinese language).
I started programming in Basic, reading the arcane user's manual - which didn't help much. Then I discovered that many of the games were written in Basic, and by listing the source code, new worlds opened up. It's a real pity that the same is rarely possible today... who knows how many potential programmers are lost because of the closed source nature of games today.
For example, lets say I'm doing market research and I send 50 people to the local mall to run around and look at what kind of (product) is being sold, and how many of them, and how much they cost. This is perfectly legitimate, and legal since that information is publicly available.
Not really. Try taking photographs at your local supermarket. You'll be stopped by security - I've had this happen to me before (and we were just taking a family photo). If you go around taking extensive notes on products and prices, I've no doubt you'll be stopped as well. They certainly have the right to prohibit certain activities on their premises, although I don't know that a general court ruling is needed or valid.
The production or replication cost of a good has little to do with the price of a good. I think this is the way it should be. Is a day of back breaking labor worth more to society than a flash of insight by a brilliant scientist? I don't think so. It has never been about how hard you work, or how much effort you put into something, or how much it costs to make or reproduce. I don't think it should be otherwise, else we will have a society where drudgery, muscle and the ability to mobilize resources is rewarded over talent.
But unchecked capitalism is evil. A starving man shouldn't be denied food. Similarly, the conduct of pharmaceutical companies and first world nations towards medical crises in the 3rd world is reprehensible. But let's not kid ourselves here: software and music are luxury goods. These are not basic necessities. We can go without them. And the people who take/steal these things do so not because they are unable to pay, but because they are unwilling to do so.
Bill Gates can give 1 Gig $ to fund foreign immunizations (and nuff respect to him for doing so), but the thing is, that money is "cute" and non-controversial. It is a hand out that doesn't make any statements about changing the system
Read this NYT article. The system of relentless profiteering and patent monopolies by drug companies, to the great demise of people in 3rd world countries, is a system in dire need of change. It is no less important, and in my mind, far more important than RedHat giving 50k to the EFF.
I thought this was a semi-reasonable point by Bertrand Meyer. Through the scenario given, BM is attempting to show the absurdity of RMS's position -- but there's really a difference of fundamentals between the two: RMS has stated that free software is a matter of freedom, an intrinsic good, and that he would choose free software over proprietary software even if the free software were technically inferior ( I believe the analogy he gave was free press vs controlled press; even if the latter were superior, we still choose the former).
An interesting essay, but he repeatedly (shall I say, deliberately) confuses ESR's views with RMS's views, and vice versa, to the effect of discrediting them both.
"I expect to be quite wealthy once the dust from the Linux IPOs has settled." (http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/travelrules.htm)
There is nothing wrong with this --- except when commercial developers trying to "make a living" are accused of moral perversion because what they are really supposed to want is... to become wealthy
From what I've read, ESR views open source development merely as a superior engineering method. I don't recall him having accused makers of proprietary software of "moral perversion" -- this is completely Stallman's point of view.
It is high time for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds to state publicly that they do not endorse the views of the gun lunatics, and that their cherished notion of freedom has nothing to do with the freedom to kill children and other innocents.
It's quite clear that there's a lot of disagreement between RMS and ESR, and it's quite clear that ESR's views on guns is controversial even within the community. I know this, you know this, and he knows this. Associating ESR's views on guns with RMS and Linus Torvalds is just a lame pot shot.
I've antialiased fonts installed (copied over from windows), and that made Netscape look somewhat better, but for some reason, it still looks worse than windows, and some fonts are still hideous.
My former university (Cornell) has always stood up for its students right to free speech on the internet. e.g. Godfrey vs Cornell. This is important, because it goes to the heart of what a university is - an institution where freedom of expression is respected. And yes, Oxford does have all that money.
"Would you rather fly on an airplane with software that has been proven to be correct, or on an airplane with software that has been rigorously tested through actual flight time?"
Slashdot Mirror
Imo, governments are a far smaller threat than corporations. In free democratic countries at least, freedom of speech is consitutionally protected. The government can't stop you from expressing your views. You can demonstrate, you can speak up in public (to some extent at least), even if your views do not coincide with the majority.
But in an Internet run by corporations, no such guarantees exist. Your ISP is free to cut you off for any reason whatsoever, especially when their corporate bottomline is in danger. If the internet is your primary means of communicating your views to the public, you now no longer have the means of speaking up.
The point is that no one besides the UK would bring battleships anywhere near Sealand, since however you wrangle it, it is still uncomfortably close to the UK.
Furthermore, Sealand, although independent, is still at the mercy of external controls. The fiber lines can be cut, network traffic can be intercepted, etc...
Not to worry. All they need is to host a few big companies (e.g. certification authorities like they're hoping), and you can be sure that they'll raise a din to their respective governments if someone tries to cut Sealand off.
You're missing the point completely. If they had a real platform they were trying to promote, it would make sense to give away their development tools, so that they can make more profit in the long run - especially when they seem to be the underdog here, and they're trying to capture an enthusiast user base. As it is, it sounds more like a scam than anything else.
As I'm already an established customer on a couple of other well known e-commerce sites would it not be possible to get some kind of referral from these sites, saying that I'm a worthy customer? What would the implications of this be?
It sounds like a good excuse for companies to trade information about you.
Use Iridium, it works anywhere in the world.
Of course you need to think about making money. What happens when you're old and sick and need medical care? Or want a house for your family?
Teach driving. My driving instructor used to be a programmer...
This is just plain silly and immature. Ok, challenge question:
Please describe what's functionally different between C, assembler, a Turing machine, and Lambda calculus?
Answer: Nothing, they are all computationally equivalent.
But are they equivalent from a software engineering standpoint? Not at all.
Also take a look at Tiqit, founded to market minature computers by the Stanford professor whose matchbox web server was slashdotted sometime back.
Its not 'is it legal to do it', its 'is it illegal for EBay to stop you from doing it on their site'
That isn't the question. The question is whether Ebay and MS are engaging in low down, slimy practices. I think the answer to this question is yes.
(sorry to reply to this thread again,but)
I took a look at Raph Levien's results, and tried to understand how such good results were obtained with JPEG. I think I understand now: the process of smoothing (I assume that the GIMP smooths before downsampling to reduce aliasing) then downsampling, then compressing is actually similar to the wavelet approach (read my description of wavelet compression posted earlier), except that wavelets allow of more levels of hierarchy, and different types of wavelet filters can be applied.
If anything, Raph Levien's results are a validation of the wavelet/JPEG2K approach to image compression.
I don't know where Chew and Choo got their encoder...
The JPEG encoder was based on a direct implementation of the DCT.
Further, 2/3s of the images they looked at were outside of JPEG territory. They were sharp-edged patterns, or text. That's what GIFs are for!
That's the conventional wisdom, but JPEG2K apparently does perform well with text. In any case, it's part of the experimental process to compare the performance with different classes of images.
I wonder if Chew and Choo were "expected" to get certain results...
Not at all.
We did a JPEG vs JPEG2000 comparison for a class project here. The improvement seems to be dramatic, especially at low bit rates.
Yup. Start them on something fun. I started programming on an old hand me down Creative Apple II computer (that was when Creative was still making apple II compatibles). Its graphics and sound were state of the art for its time - it even had a Text of Speech synthesizer which could speak english and mandarin (mandarin speech synthesis worked very well due to the regular phonetic nature of the chinese language).
I started programming in Basic, reading the arcane user's manual - which didn't help much. Then I discovered that many of the games were written in Basic, and by listing the source code, new worlds opened up. It's a real pity that the same is rarely possible today... who knows how many potential programmers are lost because of the closed source nature of games today.
For example, lets say I'm doing market research and I send 50 people to the local mall to run around and look at what kind of (product) is being sold, and how many of them, and how much they cost. This is perfectly legitimate, and legal since that information is publicly available.
Not really. Try taking photographs at your local supermarket. You'll be stopped by security - I've had this happen to me before (and we were just taking a family photo). If you go around taking extensive notes on products and prices, I've no doubt you'll be stopped as well. They certainly have the right to prohibit certain activities on their premises, although I don't know that a general court ruling is needed or valid.
Who's side are they on?
Money__, I think they're on your side.
The production or replication cost of a good has little to do with the price of a good. I think this is the way it should be. Is a day of back breaking labor worth more to society than a flash of insight by a brilliant scientist? I don't think so. It has never been about how hard you work, or how much effort you put into something, or how much it costs to make or reproduce. I don't think it should be otherwise, else we will have a society where drudgery, muscle and the ability to mobilize resources is rewarded over talent.
But unchecked capitalism is evil. A starving man shouldn't be denied food. Similarly, the conduct of pharmaceutical companies and first world nations towards medical crises in the 3rd world is reprehensible. But let's not kid ourselves here: software and music are luxury goods. These are not basic necessities. We can go without them. And the people who take/steal these things do so not because they are unable to pay, but because they are unwilling to do so.
that Game companies are
1. Greedy
2. Shortsighted.
A game museum for people to play out of print games? Out of the question.
Bill Gates can give 1 Gig $ to fund foreign immunizations (and nuff respect to him for doing so), but the thing is, that money is "cute" and non-controversial. It is a hand out that doesn't make any statements about changing the system
Read this NYT article. The system of relentless profiteering and patent monopolies by drug companies, to the great demise of people in 3rd world countries, is a system in dire need of change. It is no less important, and in my mind, far more important than RedHat giving 50k to the EFF.
I thought this was a semi-reasonable point by Bertrand Meyer. Through the scenario given, BM is attempting to show the absurdity of RMS's position -- but there's really a difference of fundamentals between the two: RMS has stated that free software is a matter of freedom, an intrinsic good, and that he would choose free software over proprietary software even if the free software were technically inferior ( I believe the analogy he gave was free press vs controlled press; even if the latter were superior, we still choose the former).
An interesting essay, but he repeatedly (shall I say, deliberately) confuses ESR's views with RMS's views, and vice versa, to the effect of discrediting them both.
... to become wealthy
"I expect to be quite wealthy once the dust from the Linux IPOs has settled." (http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/travelrules.htm)
There is nothing wrong with this --- except when commercial developers trying to "make a living" are accused of moral perversion because what they are really supposed to want is
From what I've read, ESR views open source development merely as a superior engineering method. I don't recall him having accused makers of proprietary software of "moral perversion" -- this is completely Stallman's point of view.
It is high time for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds to state publicly that they do not endorse the views of the gun lunatics, and that their cherished notion of freedom has nothing to do with the freedom to kill children and other innocents.
It's quite clear that there's a lot of disagreement between RMS and ESR, and it's quite clear that ESR's views on guns is controversial even within the community. I know this, you know this, and he knows this. Associating ESR's views on guns with RMS and Linus Torvalds is just a lame pot shot.
I've antialiased fonts installed (copied over from windows), and that made Netscape look somewhat better, but for some reason, it still looks worse than windows, and some fonts are still hideous.
My former university (Cornell) has always stood up for its students right to free speech on the internet. e.g. Godfrey vs Cornell. This is important, because it goes to the heart of what a university is - an institution where freedom of expression is respected. And yes, Oxford does have all that money.
Well my professor at college asked this question:
"Would you rather fly on an airplane with software that has been proven to be correct, or on an airplane with software that has been rigorously tested through actual flight time?"
I think the answer is clear.