With the latest kernel, it shouldn't be too hard (more than 200 lines of code) to just write up a quick driver, assuming the specs on that hardware are available. Really, it is just a question of converting from one bit stream format to another -- and my hunch is that this is unnecessary, since there are standard formats that have probably been implemented already (PAL, NTSC, etc.). Analog TV, thankfully, hasn't become a mess of proprietary formats (the way digital movies and music have).
Which is why you: upgrade everyone at the same time (at least with software). On top of that, set a policy of using pdfs whenever possible, since on average they render properly on all versions (unless for some reason you decide you need the latest feature that nobody has every heard of). If you manage things well, you can avoid these proprietary problems -- or just not use proprietary software...
Or, instead, you could try not to get your software with one business model, and profit off of it with another. GPL'ed code, in terms of making a business based on it, basically requires you to charge for SUPPORT, not for code. You can get Qt for free, then charge for supporting your product -- just like most proprietary software vendors also charge for support. It is a business model, and it is a model that makes sense.
It is also important to note that the GPL only covers how your DISTRIBUTE your code, which is not required. It is perfectly legal for me to write a program using the GPL'ed version of Qt for just one company, in which case the "rights" are still held by the company that needs the code. In fact, this is very common to do for small, outsourced projects where money is tight, and there is nothing wrong with it. If you are paying for a commercial Qt license, but only plan to deploy your code within one company, then you are wasting your money.
I am pretty sure that I saw something with two screens, either of which can be turned around to present information to the person on the other side...can't remember the name though...
To encourage those countries to have patent laws of their own. Otherwise, I could get a glimpse of patented designs here in the states, take a flight to a country without patents, and make money on a patented idea. Then, countries without patent laws miss out because the companies that hold those patents don't want to risk giving the design to anyone not bound by it, and everyone else is not allowed to try.
It's just another example of the problems with patents. If I tried to produce patented medicine here in the states, and ship it to a country in Africa that needs it (and isn't getting it), I could go to jail despite the fact that NOBODY was actually hurt by what I did (and many people would benefit). Patents were fine for the era they were designed in: prior to software and prior to pharmaceuticals. In this day and age, patents have created a system that keeps medicine from the sick and hinders the ability of inventors to invent. The only solution is to eliminate them -- because copyright law would still protect software, and medicine shouldn't be "protected."
Which is a perfect solution, in my opinion. QEMU took about 10 minutes to set up, and my Win2K disk image worked fine -- and I can get a copy of it in less than a second. Yes, it takes slightly more CPU time, but that is reasonable. The fact of the matter is that no major software can be 100% secure, but virtual machines provide a way out...unless the VM itself is compromised, but that is far easier to address...
Are you kidding? I have meetings every other day at this point, though most are fairly short. I wouldn't be surprised to see daily meetings at some places, especially companies that develop large amounts of software on short deadlines.
In fact, the Japanese leadership wanted to surrender but keep the emperor. The United States, in our zeal to spread democracy, refused to negotiate anything but unconditional surrender. The second bomb was dropped as the surrender was being communicated to the United States; this extra destruction was not necessary.
It has been theorized by some that the dropping of the bombs may not have been purely to cause Japan to surrender, but rather as a message to the Soviet Union, who would clearly be the only world power other than the United States left after the war. The Cold War actually started in the 1920s, when the government of the United States began spreading its "communists are evil and will undermine your freedoms" message, and Stalin was not well trusted by Roosevelt during the war. For a while, this worked, except that Soviet scientists figured out how nuclear bombs work after some time (no, they were not told the secret by spies, despite the fact that the US executed a few people for this).
Anyway, guys, quit the RIAA bashing. Complain they're doing sloppy investigating and it's not really an acceptable standard we should encourage, but don't act like they're a pack of liars when they're almost undeniably correct in their accusations and their only flaw is not doing as air-tight a job as they should have.
Undeniably correct? Which accusation are you referring to, because I know it wasn't the part about their business being significantly damaged by file sharing. In fact, that claim is undeniably FALSE, as this study points out: http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf#search=%22file%20sharing%20record%20sales %22. Notice, in the abstract: Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically
indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. This would seem to make sense, as most of us should be familiar with the sales reports from Kazaa's high point, which showed the CD sales had more than recovered since Napster's debut -- and Kazaa had far more traffic than Napster, further weakening the claim that the RIAA would be bankrupted by file sharing.
Perhaps this theory would help: most people who use file sharing networks would not have purchased the album in question anyway, so no actual sales were lost. Think about that statement, and think about who is using file sharing networks. Before Napster came out, were college students out buying hundreds of CDs (the equivalent of the thousands of MP3s that some had downloaded and shared)? Certainly not, most cannot afford to spend upwards of $5000 on album collections. So downloading those tracks should not be counted as a lost sale, any more than sharing CDs in a dorm building should (but I wouldn't put it past the RIAA to count it that way). This is why I am always skeptical of economists who say that millions of dollars per year are lost to piracy, because I am forced to ask whether or not the people using pirated music, movies, books, or software were actually going to buy these things to begin with (especially with software, especially when it costs more than $100). The problem is that basic economics does not apply here; the fact that music is available for free does not mean that people will automatically flock to the free stuff, as we learned that they should in economics 101, and the reasons behind this are still being studied.
Actually, Wal-mart does engage in anti-competitive practices, and does have a monopoly position. Problem is, nobody is filing a complaint, at least nobody big enough to matter; with Microsoft, big players like Sun and Apple were filing, so people noticed. Wal-mart's anti-competitive practices are parallel with Microsoft's, but in their business, that just means that small stores and local chains are ruined.
This thing with the movie studios is nothing new, Wal-mart engages in such tactics all the time, with all of their products. The basic, "if you sell to anything that competes with us, we will use our mass to hurt your business," tactic is something that Wal-mart is very good at, and is one of the main reasons they are capable of destroying the economies of entire towns. In this case, it won't be destroying a town's economy, it will just make it harder for Apple to offer their DRM downloads. This is where I am forced to ask myself which is worse, DRM DVD's or DRM downloads...what a wonderful choice to make. They wonder why people use BitTorrent.
The problem is that most people don't care enough about their freedoms to care, especially with computers. They are certainly happy when the next patch to fairuse4wm is released, if they even know such things exist, but they aren't willing to give up the software they know. It doesn't matter that Amarok organizes music better (I have heard friends, especially musicians, comment on it), or that xmms is so much easier to use...nobody really cares enough to switch. To most, if they buy something, the people they buy it from have to right to sell them something with limited uses because...? Who knows? "It's business" is what I hear when the discussion is about software...
And Windows should have been designed with security in mind since '95, when they integrated networking and web browsing. Symantec's MASSIVE business is the result of poor design on Microsoft's part, which is a shaky basis for a business. The fact that Microsoft is at least trying with security is making Symantec nervous...
Of course, they said that about other things too...
Sounds like a thin-client setup to me. Get one high-powered computer as your server, and just use the old '95 boxes as terminals. Just running a kernel and X11 should be no problem at all, and if it is, NetBSD-tiny is the answer. Just make sure the network won't break under the high load.
You would think that cases like this would illustrate to the world that DRM is an inanely stupid idea that doesn't serve consumers. Maybe when a company like Microsoft tells it's users that they have to break the law in order to view media they purchased, Congress should consider repealing the law.
This was bound to happen. Let's see if anything good comes of it.
It has been shown that efficiency decreases when the number of icons becomes sufficiently large -- and you would be surprised how often this actually happens. When you are at home, this may not be a problem, but when talking about an office environment, being unable to find a document because it is buried somewhere on the desktop is a bad thing...and I see it happen all the time. I have seen it get so bad that icons begin getting placed on top of each other, even so bad that people can't even remember whether or not they created a file because it is so difficult to sort through everything.
Let me start by saying that I have been waiting for KDE 4 since it was first announced, mainly because of it's lower memory requirements.
Having said that, I have found that most people will clutter their desktops regardless of what the software tries to do. Remember XP's desktop cleanup wizard, which attempted to help people remove things from their desktops that they didn't use often? I still see the majority of people with hundreds of icons and files haphazardly arranged. When I helped my friend migrate to Linux, it only took him a week to turn KDE into an icon pile. Add Firefox into the mix, which drops downloads onto the desktop by default, and the battle is completely lost.
NetBSD ran with no problems, out of the box, on my P5, even with X11. I have yet to find a Linux distro that competes. Only reason I use Fedora on my laptop is that it is a laptop.
But why should Microsoft care? There aren't enough OOo or WordPerfect users out there for their voices to add up to anything more than a fringe. What is needed first is for people to become less fearful of using non-Microsoft software...but every time something fails to render properly, people run back to what they were using for years.
Except that won't happen. For the DMCA to be struck down, somebody would have to first lose a massive lawsuit against the **AA people, and who is willing to take that risk? And this is not a political climate that favors striking down the DMCA; even if it was struck down, corporate lobbyists would instantly be pushing congress to pass an even stricter law. What is really needed is to have a study publicized which demonstrates that the content industries never had anything to fear in the first place (such a study was conducted, but never made it to the press...), and press coverage about just how stupid the content industry is being. But where are these stories? I guess the media really doesn't want to criticize itself.
I'll attest to that. LEGO was an integral part of my childhood, up to the point where I starting building machines that LEGO robotics just could not handle (this was around the time I put a transmission system in my robot but could not make it automatic). In all seriousness, however, I definitely think that LEGO makes a better toy for kids than a Nintendo. Give them video games when they hit middle or high school, and not a minute before that.
There is most certainly a monopoly, but the Windows monopoly is a secondary effect of the Office monopoly. People just are not trained on anything other than MS-Office, and naturally jump back in fear at the very idea of using something other than Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. This is a cycle that is difficult to break, especially at larger, well-established companies that often have hundreds of documents that simply do not render right in OOo or Wordperfect (to name the two most popular non-MS-Office suites). Startups still need to hire people, and finding people who put OpenOffice on their resume is difficult, and migrating from Office to OOo is very difficult, despite the fact that most business tasks are covered by OOo. I know people who run Linux but still have to get Windows and Office licenses and run them under VMWare or QEMU -- OS migration is easy compared to document and software migration.
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With the latest kernel, it shouldn't be too hard (more than 200 lines of code) to just write up a quick driver, assuming the specs on that hardware are available. Really, it is just a question of converting from one bit stream format to another -- and my hunch is that this is unnecessary, since there are standard formats that have probably been implemented already (PAL, NTSC, etc.). Analog TV, thankfully, hasn't become a mess of proprietary formats (the way digital movies and music have).
Which is why you: upgrade everyone at the same time (at least with software). On top of that, set a policy of using pdfs whenever possible, since on average they render properly on all versions (unless for some reason you decide you need the latest feature that nobody has every heard of). If you manage things well, you can avoid these proprietary problems -- or just not use proprietary software...
It is also important to note that the GPL only covers how your DISTRIBUTE your code, which is not required. It is perfectly legal for me to write a program using the GPL'ed version of Qt for just one company, in which case the "rights" are still held by the company that needs the code. In fact, this is very common to do for small, outsourced projects where money is tight, and there is nothing wrong with it. If you are paying for a commercial Qt license, but only plan to deploy your code within one company, then you are wasting your money.
I am pretty sure that I saw something with two screens, either of which can be turned around to present information to the person on the other side...can't remember the name though...
I didn't take a single prep class for the SAT, but my scores on the SAT were about the only reason I was accepted to any college at all...
It's just another example of the problems with patents. If I tried to produce patented medicine here in the states, and ship it to a country in Africa that needs it (and isn't getting it), I could go to jail despite the fact that NOBODY was actually hurt by what I did (and many people would benefit). Patents were fine for the era they were designed in: prior to software and prior to pharmaceuticals. In this day and age, patents have created a system that keeps medicine from the sick and hinders the ability of inventors to invent. The only solution is to eliminate them -- because copyright law would still protect software, and medicine shouldn't be "protected."
Which is a perfect solution, in my opinion. QEMU took about 10 minutes to set up, and my Win2K disk image worked fine -- and I can get a copy of it in less than a second. Yes, it takes slightly more CPU time, but that is reasonable. The fact of the matter is that no major software can be 100% secure, but virtual machines provide a way out...unless the VM itself is compromised, but that is far easier to address...
Why move the Hummer at all? A building could fall on it and it would be fine.
Are you kidding? I have meetings every other day at this point, though most are fairly short. I wouldn't be surprised to see daily meetings at some places, especially companies that develop large amounts of software on short deadlines.
Now I can run 80 instances of Doom at the same time. Nothing quite like heavy multitasking.
Keyboard not found. Press any key to continue.
It has been theorized by some that the dropping of the bombs may not have been purely to cause Japan to surrender, but rather as a message to the Soviet Union, who would clearly be the only world power other than the United States left after the war. The Cold War actually started in the 1920s, when the government of the United States began spreading its "communists are evil and will undermine your freedoms" message, and Stalin was not well trusted by Roosevelt during the war. For a while, this worked, except that Soviet scientists figured out how nuclear bombs work after some time (no, they were not told the secret by spies, despite the fact that the US executed a few people for this).
Undeniably correct? Which accusation are you referring to, because I know it wasn't the part about their business being significantly damaged by file sharing. In fact, that claim is undeniably FALSE, as this study points out: http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf#search=%22file%20sharing%20record%20sales %22. Notice, in the abstract: Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically
indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. This would seem to make sense, as most of us should be familiar with the sales reports from Kazaa's high point, which showed the CD sales had more than recovered since Napster's debut -- and Kazaa had far more traffic than Napster, further weakening the claim that the RIAA would be bankrupted by file sharing.
Perhaps this theory would help: most people who use file sharing networks would not have purchased the album in question anyway, so no actual sales were lost. Think about that statement, and think about who is using file sharing networks. Before Napster came out, were college students out buying hundreds of CDs (the equivalent of the thousands of MP3s that some had downloaded and shared)? Certainly not, most cannot afford to spend upwards of $5000 on album collections. So downloading those tracks should not be counted as a lost sale, any more than sharing CDs in a dorm building should (but I wouldn't put it past the RIAA to count it that way). This is why I am always skeptical of economists who say that millions of dollars per year are lost to piracy, because I am forced to ask whether or not the people using pirated music, movies, books, or software were actually going to buy these things to begin with (especially with software, especially when it costs more than $100). The problem is that basic economics does not apply here; the fact that music is available for free does not mean that people will automatically flock to the free stuff, as we learned that they should in economics 101, and the reasons behind this are still being studied.
This thing with the movie studios is nothing new, Wal-mart engages in such tactics all the time, with all of their products. The basic, "if you sell to anything that competes with us, we will use our mass to hurt your business," tactic is something that Wal-mart is very good at, and is one of the main reasons they are capable of destroying the economies of entire towns. In this case, it won't be destroying a town's economy, it will just make it harder for Apple to offer their DRM downloads. This is where I am forced to ask myself which is worse, DRM DVD's or DRM downloads...what a wonderful choice to make. They wonder why people use BitTorrent.
The problem is that most people don't care enough about their freedoms to care, especially with computers. They are certainly happy when the next patch to fairuse4wm is released, if they even know such things exist, but they aren't willing to give up the software they know. It doesn't matter that Amarok organizes music better (I have heard friends, especially musicians, comment on it), or that xmms is so much easier to use...nobody really cares enough to switch. To most, if they buy something, the people they buy it from have to right to sell them something with limited uses because...? Who knows? "It's business" is what I hear when the discussion is about software...
Of course, they said that about other things too...
Sounds like a thin-client setup to me. Get one high-powered computer as your server, and just use the old '95 boxes as terminals. Just running a kernel and X11 should be no problem at all, and if it is, NetBSD-tiny is the answer. Just make sure the network won't break under the high load.
This was bound to happen. Let's see if anything good comes of it.
It has been shown that efficiency decreases when the number of icons becomes sufficiently large -- and you would be surprised how often this actually happens. When you are at home, this may not be a problem, but when talking about an office environment, being unable to find a document because it is buried somewhere on the desktop is a bad thing...and I see it happen all the time. I have seen it get so bad that icons begin getting placed on top of each other, even so bad that people can't even remember whether or not they created a file because it is so difficult to sort through everything.
Having said that, I have found that most people will clutter their desktops regardless of what the software tries to do. Remember XP's desktop cleanup wizard, which attempted to help people remove things from their desktops that they didn't use often? I still see the majority of people with hundreds of icons and files haphazardly arranged. When I helped my friend migrate to Linux, it only took him a week to turn KDE into an icon pile. Add Firefox into the mix, which drops downloads onto the desktop by default, and the battle is completely lost.
NetBSD ran with no problems, out of the box, on my P5, even with X11. I have yet to find a Linux distro that competes. Only reason I use Fedora on my laptop is that it is a laptop.
But why should Microsoft care? There aren't enough OOo or WordPerfect users out there for their voices to add up to anything more than a fringe. What is needed first is for people to become less fearful of using non-Microsoft software...but every time something fails to render properly, people run back to what they were using for years.
Except that won't happen. For the DMCA to be struck down, somebody would have to first lose a massive lawsuit against the **AA people, and who is willing to take that risk? And this is not a political climate that favors striking down the DMCA; even if it was struck down, corporate lobbyists would instantly be pushing congress to pass an even stricter law. What is really needed is to have a study publicized which demonstrates that the content industries never had anything to fear in the first place (such a study was conducted, but never made it to the press...), and press coverage about just how stupid the content industry is being. But where are these stories? I guess the media really doesn't want to criticize itself.
I'll attest to that. LEGO was an integral part of my childhood, up to the point where I starting building machines that LEGO robotics just could not handle (this was around the time I put a transmission system in my robot but could not make it automatic). In all seriousness, however, I definitely think that LEGO makes a better toy for kids than a Nintendo. Give them video games when they hit middle or high school, and not a minute before that.
There is most certainly a monopoly, but the Windows monopoly is a secondary effect of the Office monopoly. People just are not trained on anything other than MS-Office, and naturally jump back in fear at the very idea of using something other than Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. This is a cycle that is difficult to break, especially at larger, well-established companies that often have hundreds of documents that simply do not render right in OOo or Wordperfect (to name the two most popular non-MS-Office suites). Startups still need to hire people, and finding people who put OpenOffice on their resume is difficult, and migrating from Office to OOo is very difficult, despite the fact that most business tasks are covered by OOo. I know people who run Linux but still have to get Windows and Office licenses and run them under VMWare or QEMU -- OS migration is easy compared to document and software migration.