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... calls the Drudge Report untrustworthy?
Now that's the pot calling the kettle black!
New user: replace this text with a witty comment or saying for use as a signature.
Look. A couple years ago Apple was in bad shape. There were bankruptsy rumors and takeover rumors. At the time, they were plausable. Barely.
Since then Apple has seen an amazing rebirth and return to amazing profitability. Even in the dark days this sort of crap was barely believable, but now days it is just absurd.
Why the hell would Disney want Apple? Disney I could see buying Pixar, but Apple? And why would Apple want Disney?
This just doesn't make any sense. I guess I'd chastize Slashdot for giving it enough credence to post at all.
My homepage
Doubtless fuelled by the Jobs/Pixar Pixar Disney connection and the fact that the Pixar movies , well at least the toy stories represent some of Disneys biggest money spinners of recent years.
For example http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/9902/disney-to-buy-apple.shtml
Just feed Apple Disney merger into any search engine for many previous similar speculations, all equally uninformed ever since Jos took over the helm back at Apple.
I seem to recall slashdot fetaturing it before as well ... here it is
-- Oh Well
Re:This one is always popping up ..(Score:3, Funny)by / on Monday July 10, @09:19AM EDT (User Info)
Indeed. There seems to be some simple harmonic motion in the cycle between this rumor and the rumor that Apple is about to go out of business -- the longer it's been since one rumor was published, the more likely it is for the other to pop up. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
From macnn.com this morning...
"Reigniting old rumors which have surfaced several times in the past few years, the latest edition of The Drudge Report speculates on an impending merger announcement between Pixar, Apple, and Disney. We advise readers to be highly skeptical of this rumor; AppleInsider first published an article more than 18 months ago that also suggested a possible Apple/Disney merger was in the works."
This has popped up so many times, I laughed so hard when Drudge put this up there.
And compared to Drudge.../. is hella better. When was the last time "the President's Talking Penis" was a 72 point headline on /.?
Ad Astra Per Aspera "A Rough Road Leads to the Stars"
...means a truly mouse-driven user experience.
/me dodges tomatoes.
Cupertino 06/10/00 - Apple today announced that they will be merging with Disney in order to obtain disney's mouse technology. Having proven their success with 'Mickey' for over nearly 80 years, Apple are keen to revamp disney's mouse in a variety of different translucent colours in a bid to entice consumers to think differently.
Now we can see apples in more movies. Why are all computers in movies apples?
Remember how everybody says the Macintosh has a niche market, and other than that they've got really low market share? Well, guess what that niche market is? That's right - graphics, music, sound, video, film, etc. etc. The people who make movies use Macs.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that Apple often gives computers to movie studios for use in movies. And sometimes they do cobranded marketing, like for Mission: Impossible.
Remember when Forrest Gump bought stock in a fruit company? Apple didn't call the movie studio and ask them to use their logo. The movie studio called Apple and asked for permission.
Something you might find interesting: Apple Masters.
--
The views expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Depends. The merger can't complete unless you can get Mickey to wear blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
...this project is less than a week old and consists of some theories bandied about by a developer and he's friend (who is providing the crypto knowledge).
Wouldn't have been better to post this when there was actually news to report? Simply because someone has an idea and backs it up with a webpage does not a headline make.
PS: That said, I wish them luck. :)
What kind of Flame Warrior are you?
Re:Don't Want To Be A Spoilsport But...(Score:4, Insightful)by phil reed (phillipcreed@yahoo.com) on Monday July 10, @10:34AM EDT (User Info)
What better way to attract attention and get some serious development effort aimed at it? For those of us who don't want solutions handed to us on a silver platter, this is the best time to get involved. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
Re:Don't Want To Be A Spoilsport But...(Score:3, Insightful)by PD (pdrap@startrekmail.com) on Monday July 10, @10:41AM EDT (User Info) http://slashdot.org
I'm going to paraphrase the movie about Larry Flynt's life starring Woody Harrelson here. He said that he was a scumbag, the lowest of the lowlifes, and if the law protected his right to say what he wanted to say, then you be certain that the law would also protect fine upstanding citizens like ourselves. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
Re:Don't Want To Be A Spoilsport But...(Score:3, Insightful)by bmetzler (email@bmetzler.org) on Monday July 10, @10:54AM EDT (User Info) http://www.geeky.org We want to ensure that the scumbags can never be censored. If that happens, then we find upstanding citizens can also never be censored. Gun control laws prevent law-abiding citizens from owning guns. Not scumbags. So, even though scumbags will always be assured of having guns, upstanding citizens will not. I guess that theory is wrong. -Brent-- Are you a geek? |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
Re:Don't Want To Be A Spoilsport But...(Score:3, Interesting)by PD (pdrap@startrekmail.com) on Monday July 10, @11:03AM EDT (User Info) http://slashdot.org
I don't think anyone can define what a scumbag is. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
Re:Don't Want To Be A Spoilsport But...(Score:3, Insightful)by Harri on Monday July 10, @10:55AM EDT (User Info) Do we really need a way for people to pass around child pornography without having a way to find out who they are (so we can stop them)? In a word: Yes. We do. For the simple reason that there _is no way_ for any of us to exert our simple right to anonymity without having a way to pass round child porn too. This is one of those circumstances where people will have to choose between a greater evil and a lesser evil. At risk of making myself very unpopular, I would suggest the evils that can come from denial of freedom of speech could be an awful lot worse than the evils coming from the hampering of one of the ways the police use to track down a class of particularly unpleasant criminals. Put it this way: would you like every tiny piece of data about yourself in big government database, even though this would clearly help to catch many criminals, probably including some child pornographers? Supposing you didn't mind this. Now would you make it compulsory for _everyone_ to be in this database? That's what you're asking.
Supposing the goverment could identify the profile of a child pornographer with 90% accuracy from this data. So they imprison all the people with these characteristics. This is another way the government could reduce child porn, but few would argue that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
One of the things that always strikes me as interesting about things like this is the posiblities for abuse. No - I'm not talking about things like trading warez, porn, MP3, or whatever the hot semi-illegal commodity of the week is.
I'm more interested in the possible effects for companies that keep wanting to do things like map out the Internet (see article last week here on /. about the group maping the 'net for advertising purposes) but don't want to really tick off admins who's machines they are adding to thier map. Same goes for script kiddies looking for machines (using nothing more than ping to see who responds) but want to keep from possibly alerting the admin at some company they are maping out.
Just a thought - I could, of course, be completely wrong!
Davis
MidnightRyder.Com
Boulder Panic! 2 - The Challenge
There's no way to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks with a truly anonymous protocol as there is no way to verify the authenticity of the server.
In addition, crypto without a pre-arranged way to mutually verify both parties is trivial to crack. The NSA will certainly not mind you exporting this protocol overseas. :P But that is just a footnote to the above problem I mentioned. You can probably derive the encryption keys by monitoring the beginning of the conversation with the server and thus decrypt the contents of the packet(s). However, I am no expert in this, so I may be incorrect about being able to derive the keys - specifically, I know nothing about the duffie-hellmann(sp?) public key exchange stuff, beyond "it works", so YMMV.
The other problem I can see is that you're sending up a big red flag saying "Here I am! Look at me, I'm up to no good!" to your network administrators. Net admins are notoriously paranoid, moreso now with the proliferation of scripts. This means that if you use it at work, you stand a good chance of having your network access monitored/revoked and/or you getting your ass canned. Yeah! Go crypto!
The ideal protocol for this would be one where monitoring would a) do an attacker no good (which means you have to verify the authenticity of the server somehow before you communicate over the unsecured channel (the 'net)) and b) look like normal traffic. This is important - either you encrypt everything, even non-sensitive material, or you encrypt nothing and rely on stenography. I like stenography better myself.. and it'll become more important as governments crack down on conventional crypto - witness new zealand, I believe, which made it a law forcing you to divulge the keys of every encrypted thing on your system under penalty of jail.. even when they can't prove you ever had them!
Imagine an HTTP request to www.someplace.com where the downloaded JPEG contains the information requested and the POST contents contained the key+query. E-commerce cookies can easily look like crypto keys. Rewrite a few doubleclick cookies and no one will be the wiser.
-o Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even agree with me about C indentation style. o-
The author's justifications are very much anti-tax (he appears to be a serious Randian). One of the unstated reasons that the U.S. government was believed to be anti-crypto was exactly that the widespread distribution of unbreakable crypto would allow the development of an underground untaxable economy. It's interesting that this web site's author comes right out and says pretty much the same thing.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Great! Not giving away your IP address is a fantastic idea! As long as we don't need to get information back from the server, it'll work for sure! Exclamation points can make the suckiest idea sound good if used right!
Seriously, though, you need to reveal your IP address so the server can send back the information you requested. That's what servers do.
Big Brother doesn't care about you
Note: ESO is the European Southern Observatory,, an intergovernmental, European organisation for astronomical research. It has eight member countries. ESO operates astronomical observatories in Chile and has its headquarters in Garching, near Munich, Germany.
Question 4: what do you say to people who doubt that scientists can be spiritual and artistic people?
I would say, go meet some real scientists!!!
I am an astronomer, and I would say that my colleagues are pretty average Americans in terms of their religious outlook. In fact, some see a very strong connection between their religion and their research: both are searches for the truth.
I am reading an interesting book called Brother Astronomer, which is the memoirs of a Vatican astronomer (most people don't know that the Catholic church pumps a fair bit of money into astronomical research). Some chapters are rather boring, but others are very enlightening, particularly the chapter about the church and Galileo: the church is actually quite a bit more pro-science than most people allow.
Science, like spirituality, is an investigation into the nature of the universe. Both are continually evolving as we learn more. For both, what we don't know is much larger than what we do know.
|
]
IIS Vs. Apache and Netcraft ResultsApache | Posted by Hemos on Monday July 10, @11:37AMfrom the what-to-make-of-this? dept. ant banks wrote to us with an article that takes issue with the Netcraft results regarding Apache's continued domination of web servers. This server looked at Fortune 500 companies and their deployment, with some differing results. < Chris McKinstry Replies: Telecopes, AI And More
|
http://www.speakfreely.org/
Hey, Ask Slashdot editors: Could we get a slightly higher quality of question and less repetition (we've had the "internet camera" question at least twice).
--
Connect your MAPI users to your UNIX mail system! MailOne for Linux!
I know this may cause thousands of readers to pump up their blood pressure, but if it's a commercial company, then it will naturally target its products on windows (let's face it, if it's a product that needs to make money, windows would be more sensible, not because of the platform's attractiveness, but because that's where the most users are. And this sounds like a home consumer type of product as well.) I can understand it if you want to target BOTH windows and linux, but from your description, it looks like you're sour about moving from exclusively linux to exclusively windows. Why not both?
After all, if it's written in java, that would be one of the key advantages. btw, did you look on computer telephony magazine?
w/m
Voice over IP has been a hot subject for quite a while now, but till now we've never seen it being realised on big scale. First I think it has been marketised too much. Voice over ip is not rocket science. For me, it doesn't say more than 'telnet over ip'. Classic telephony calls are practicaly 100% reliable. TCP/IP connections are too unexpectuous: theres a big risk on delays, that are not important for data, but are so for voice. With TCP, you're sure your packets arrives, but it is too slow for voice packets. UDP hasn't this checking, is fast enough, but you are not sure the packets are delivered. How many times we like to see realaudio clips, but that we can't get a connection. Internet telephony is super for applications like netmeeting etc, but when somebody with a real telephone calls another , he expects that his call arrives, not that it is in a jam. People are used to this. So, in my opinion their will not be evolution to internet telephony as long their is no protocol redesign.
--ReViN--
Re:The internet isn't made for voice calls.(Score:3, Insightful)by Th3 D0t (.@.com) on Monday July 10, @08:56AM EDT (User Info) Ever get a "this circuit is busy" message on the phone? IP is more alike to modern telephone networks than you realize. Many (especially long distance) lines are packet switched virtual connections just like TCP/IP. Telephone and IP frequently both rely on packet protocols like X.25 and ATM. The problem with TCP isn't because it is too slow, but because audio data is temporal. If a router went down somewhere for a few seconds, you don't want hear in fast-forward what the person was saying by the time it gets there. Audio packets have a time dependency after which it just doesn't matter. And as far as UDP, simple retransmission mechanisms are usually built in at the application level to deal with short-term packet loss and reordering.
The only big difference that pertains to your points is that the telephone networks typically have QOS contracts per connection that ensure that each connection will have the required bandwidth and latency needed, whereas internet does not have QOS or priority. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
Re:The internet isn't made for voice calls.(Score:3, Informative)by softsign (horbal at vlsi dot uwindsor dot ca) on Monday July 10, @08:57AM EDT (User Info) http://www.vlsi.uwindsor.ca/~horbal/ There is a protocol redesign in the works. That's what Internet2 is being designed for. And I don't mean IPv6. A lot of the big guns out there are busy developing infrastructure that will allow reliable Voice over IP, real-time video conferencing and other delay-sensitive apps to work reliably. Cisco's Packet magazine had an article on this a while back (it was the cover story on the last issue). I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of other articles on this too.
You will see Voice over IP a lot more in the next few years, simply because it's cheaper to implement than traditional, circuit-switched telephony. It's not a bad thing, really, because the telcos are going to have to make it work 100% of the time. That's the #1 concern. People have been getting dialtones all across this continent for 50 years now. It's simply not acceptable that suddenly you only get 9 out of 10 dialtones. It's got to be 100% or it won't fly.
-- |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
Java has a Telephony API, have you looked at that yet. I'm not sure if it is exactly what you want but it is a place to start. Here's a link: http://java.sun.com/products/jtapi/
http://www.linuxtelephony.com/
is a good place to start.
first a Dopple, then a Tripple, then Quadrupel - when will it stop?
I am not trying to be mean, but this is a horrible question. What do you mean by develop "your own technology"? Almost any programming project requires a certain amount of innovation (if its to mean anything, and be sellable by a company).
<p>
Secondly, like a previous "ask slashdot", you are confusing the method with the language. This is almost completely dependent on what the employees in your company. The question of whether to use Java is not so much a question of language, but whether you need it to work across platforms. However, keep in mind Java tends to be slow, and usually not such a great thing for realtime involving a lot of data.
<p>
If your company decides to use linux, there are many tools available for sound transfer. There are at least 2 or 3 sounds projects I know of. TCP/IP is almost free using any UN*X clone, and that sounds like the majority of your project.
Quicknet has a low - cost 1 port card that will do the trick with Linux and Windows drivers:
http://www.quicknet.com
Also check out Pika for 4 port cards with traditional analogue and VoIP capabilities with Windows and Linux drivers:
http://www.pikatech.com
Aslo check out the Bayonne project. Linux based Open Source telephony system with interfaces to Quicknet, Pika, and other cards:
http://bayonne.sourceforge.net/
Stephen Nodvin http://www.televid.com
Actually, with a good compression codec (which are quite common), VoIP can take up less bandwidth than a regular analog call. For instance, with CELP compression it's possible to have a full-duplex communication channel in 9600bps (600Bps * 8b/B * 2directions) + protocol overhead (IP + UDP header lengths anyone?) so on a typical 33600bps connection you could likely squeeze 3 simultaneous conversations. IMHO this is why there was a big push in the wireless telco industry to move to digital (what do they really care about call security?).
If you think about it, VoIP is more efficient than your "honest" + "proper voice line".
CELP == Code Excited Linear Predication
I believe it's been around for a while (1970's?).
Tim --
Another scary innovation.
As with all scientific advances, this throws up a whole load of interesting situations...
Depending on how sensitive and correct this device is, I can see some being installed in London, UK. Mention "terrorist" in England and you get some pretty draconian legal powers (such as extended questioning periods etc) to use and abuse.
So these are set up at airports... "To trap the terrorists"
Then set up at train stations... "To trap the terrorists"
Then set up at tube stations... "To trap the terrorists"
Before you know it, the terrorist threat has disappeared. Do they remove these machines? Hell, no lets have them sniff for drugs/homosexuality/Linux!
Think I'm paranoid? Then on my way to work, how come I drive through 3 manned police CCTV cameras left over from the "anti terrorist" Ring of Steel?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Join the revolution! Online Nation
This is the kind of stuff that should be illegal. Randomly sampling people as they walk by is no better than randomly searching peoples houses.
This is precisely what is described by "Illegal search" (and maybe even seizure, as they are effectively taking pieces of you as you walk by). In a perfect world, I doubt this would stand up in court, as the "due process" required has to be done on an individual basis, not on a broad scope of mostly innocent people.
What kind of people use their engineering talent to make such things? I would refuse. People do not see the long term cyclical nature of government. Everyone should take an Ancient Western Civilization class. Watch how the ancient civilizations grew, became strong, then became oppresive, then were overthrown for the greater good of humanity. This stuff will only prolong the suffering of humanity when the current civilization's time has come, making it difficult for the cycle to advance to the next level. Instead we end up in a totalitarian, invasive sitiuation.
Don't forget the children who have to live in this world we create...
[RAID on the Forest of Horrors] - Legend of the Web Dragon
Re:Guilty before proven innocent?(Score:4, Insightful)by JatTDB (jat@removeme.rune.org) on Monday July 10, @09:16AM EDT (User Info)
This is similar to the arguments surrounding traffic stops. In most areas in the US, it is perfectly legal for the police to stop and check every driver on the road, as long as they check EVERY driver who comes to the checkpoint. It sucks, but the courts have upheld it. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
Re:Guilty before proven innocent?(Score:3, Insightful)by Spasemunki (spasemunkiathushmaildotcom) on Monday July 10, @10:43AM EDT (User Info) http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~collier
In most areas in the US, it is perfectly legal for the police to stop and check every driver on the road, as long as they check EVERY driver who comes to the checkpoint. It sucks, but the courts have upheld it. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
You americans have an opportunity to make a real stand here, and it will solve the problem of people spying on your DNA - simply BAN the cross referencing of a DNA database with public info, like for instance, your social security number. If your DNA cannot be used to identify you, this won't be a problem from the standpoint of raw information collection for marketting purposes (although might be valid statistically, for instance, all the caffiene molecules being secreted through the pores of coders in the development building.. heh heh)
As for explosives testing.. the american people need to vote on what they want more: Freedom or safety. You can be perfectly safe, more or less, but you'll be living in a police state. But, this is something the country will decide, personally, I'd rather live in a rural setting where the man doesn't have as many rights to get on my land.
The drug issue is worse though, and it's why I'll never move to the US. What if I toss a couple grams of an illicit substance in your car and then call the cops? What if I sprinkle you with coke in an elevator? The shit will hit the fan, and with the way the US drug laws work currently, your life is over and you very well might lose your car, if I phrase my "anonymous tip" correctly.
Something to think about..
...don't panic
Time to get rid of my skin again!
Not that these are actually in use yet, but I can see it someday if we keep going down this path. It seems like we in the U.S. keep giving up more and more of our personal liberties to have a sense of "safety." Americans are whipped into frenzy by the focus of local TV news on sensationalistic crime reporting. Americans believe they are under seige from gun-toting, crack-smoking gangbangers.
There is a real, everyday, easy to do, practical thing you can do: Remind everyone you know that violent crime is at a twenty-year low in this country. Most of you have probably heard this, but you'd be surprised at how often it shocks people you meet. Here's a CNN.com article to link to. (I'm sure there are better ones, but I can't find 'em right now. Or point 'em to the FBI's Universal Crime Reports. Really. Do it.
Honestly, scanning your identity this way is about the last thing you should be worried about. The main goal of testers like these is to be able to scan people rapidly, like the metal detectors at airports. They want to be able to tell if someone is trying to smuggle bombs or drugs onto an airplane. That means that you need to know the answer from your test now, not in an hour or two when the guy's already had a chance to pass his stuff to some third party.
At the present, and for the forseeable future, it's just not possible to make a DNA-based individual ID in anything like real time. Even in the lab with nearly ideal samples doing that kind of thing takes time, and a lot of that is not something that can be easily reduced; certain chemical and physical reactions take time and can't be sped up. That puts a pretty strong damper on using this as a DNA vacum to violate people's rights.
OTOH, you can bet that the war against drugs and the war against terrorism will be used as excuses. Pretty soon you won't be able to get on a plane without being subjected to a battery of tests to make sure that you're not trying to put anything illegal onto the plane. Oops, you're a mining engineer who uses explosives at work? Prepare to be hassled every time you try to fly. Your pot smoking brother came over to visit? Prepare to be stopped and have your luggage examined. In the long term those kinds of minor erosions of personal protection are a much more dangerous threat to privacy than some hypothetical DNA screening.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
But when we wrote it, it was basically an advertisement for ourselves, a way of saying "Hey, look what I can do. I can do the same thing for you" to some company.
Looks like Mister Allison isn't a big believer in business being able to make a profit from an OSS business model. I'm not sure this is a healthy thing for the OSS movement, especially when voiced by someone with some visibility like Warrick.
Now, i can't naysay how he sees thing. Currently the money is definitly more likley to come from a company hiring an Open Source programmer who's got a good track record writing free software, but I'm hoping (and betting on) ESR's services-based model. Allison says it breeds non-user firendly code. Hogwash. Only if your company or programming team is unscrupulous or lazy.
I am hoping that most leading OSS companies like VA and Red Hat don't fit into that particular category. We've all had enough of unscrupulous and lazy software companies. Or at least I have.
So yeah, Warrick is right about why he got a job, but by saying that's the way it should work, he may be pronouncing self-fulfilling prophesy.
I hope not. We all have too much to lose if OSS can't make the big leap to big business.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
Chill out, it's just a different opinion....(Score:3, Interesting)by Carnage4Life on Monday July 10, @05:21AM EDT (User Info) http://www.google.com/search?q=dare+obasanjo&meta=lr%3D%26hl%3Den
When I read posts like yours I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at how religously people can take the decisions of other people. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
You know, i'd like to see some hard numbers as to just how many people have actually purchased a Qt License from Troll Tech.. And, more specifically, if that number is sufficiently large enough to really warrant keeping Qt something other than GPL'ed.
The only thing standing in the way (as I see it) of KDE being the dominant desktop for Linux is this persistant, irritating, annoying, pointless debate over the nature of the Qt libraries. Its a boat anchor that has been dragged behind KDE for far, far too long. Get it over with, guys.
Its only by pure luck that GNOME development has been centered more on building pointless foo-foo options as of late, rather can concentrating on basic usability issues. Both efforts have boat anchors. One has to do with politics, the other has to do with direction.
Want KDE to win? Make Qt free. Game over.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA Desktop Enhancement Graphics For Linux (Now at MetaLab/UNC!)
don't free Qt, just don't use it(Score:3, Insightful)by jetson123 (br_9801 at hotmail dot com) on Monday July 10, @06:59AM EDT (User Info) I agree that calls for Qt to be placed under some different license are not justified: Troll Tech can license their software whatever way they want. But users of Qt and KDE should realize that the Troll Tech QPL license is bad for open source and for Linux. If Linux had been licensed like Qt, it would have never caught on. And if KDE succeeds at displacing other Linux desktops, it will largely spell the end of Linux as a competitive, open source client desktop operating system: if you have to pay Troll Tech under the conditions they require you to pay, as a developer, you might as well go with BeOS or Windows, pay less money, get more development tools, and (in the case of Windows) cover a much bigger market segment. However, I disagree with your statement that "Troll Tech has been very nice to the Linux community". Troll Tech was merely business savvy and opportunistic. Adoption of Qt by KDE was one sweet deal for the company: they made software available to people who otherwise wouldn't pay for it anyway, they got a huge user community, lots of naive university students started hacking free software in it, and they got lots of feedback, bugfixes, and improvements, and adoption by several big companies in return. Without the exposure from KDE, Qt would have remained just one of many mediocre, tool-poor cross platform toolkits with a tiny user community. Troll Tech's "donation" paid handsomely for them. The open source community has nothing to excuse for or be thankful for.
Altogether, I agree: don't ask Troll Tech to free Qt, or KDE to change their license. Instead, just don't use those systems. Develop and support truly free desktop software instead. |
| [ Reply to This | Parent ] |
It is encouraging to see a success story about making money in the open source world. I believe that the industry should move towards open source as much as possible, and I completly understand how companies withstand the urge to go open source.
I have planned on going the same route that the author took in my software developement career. I am planning on doing some development work on some open source projects as an experience and resume builder so that I can fill in the part that talks about experience on my resume. It is a perfect place for new programmers to gain useful experience programming, but I have concerns about a market that is totally open source.
For all products to be open source is scarey. Now I know that open source doens't necesarily mean free. It means letting everyone know what your software is doing, possibly fixing it for their own use. This type of use is great. But what should a company do if they are making some true innovations. Release that software for the world to look at.
For example, Oracle may or may not have the most scalable and fastest database. But lets say that their programmers have developed some new methods that enable there database server to be faster and more scalable than the competition. How do the open source gurus claim that opening that software up would help Oracle. This is precisely the part that I have yet to understand. It is the same as patenting a new device. It lets the inventor or inventing company protect there investment for awhile so that even doing the research to begin with is worth it. The patent gives the garantee that the innovation is protected.
The article didn't help clarify my view of the issues with open source either. There method of dealing with the problem is by having some products open source and free and other products closed source and for sale. This doesn't really answer the question of how to deal with open source software and make money, unless this happens to be the final solution.
For example, Microsft opens the source to DirectX, IE, etc.. but keeps the source on NT and Office. Of course, this isn't really the core of what they do, it would be like giving out some toys, but not the real thing. Do people think this is the answer to the open source questions, or do people really think everything can go open source?
cp -R /* /dev/null
Because those weren't available on all platforms when Qt was written (it has always been cross platform, earlier versions had both macro- and template-based containers, for those compilers that didn't support templates back then).
Besides, QString is UniCode (while std::string is not, since it's just std::basic_string) and reference counted, so you get a performance bonus as well.
As for bidirectional scripts: there's some support in KDE I think, but as I don't speak any of the involved languages I'm not too sure about it, ask someone. Heck, write to Trolltech and ask them to pay you for writing it!
-- KDE programmer and computer science student in Klagenfurt, Austria.
The story sez:
But in Atlanta, the new research showed storms popping up around the city on otherwise clear days.
There is an explanation for this.
It is called the John Rocker effect.
(Sue me, I'm a baseball fan.)
A major contributing factor is that developers recklessly chop down trees to make room for suburbs, the scientists said. Trees provide shade from the heat and absorb many of the sun's harmful rays. Without them, the effect is a sort of urban desert.
I come from a very rural part of Canada--the smallest province in fact, and on Prince Edward Island we have lots of trees, and not much in the way of urban sprawl.
My first experience in the big city came quite a few years back when I moved to Calgary, Alberta, and in retrospect I feel very lucky. Calgary has an imense amount of greenspace within it's limits--heck we still see deer and get the occasional bear in the 'berbs.
However, coming from the countryside as I do, I have to say I do miss the trees. If I lived in a larger or more urban city, I'd likley have worse bouts of homesickness :)
People who grow up in cities often don't see nature the same way I do. Parks are very organized in comparison to raw Canadian wilderness. That said, I'd love to see more green in the urban landscape--and there does seem to be a larger move towards this kind of 'greening of the urban jungle.'
I remember a report several years back about a high-tech company in Toronto adding an atrium to their front lobby--one that was essentially a giant watershed (read swamp). A fascinating concept--no less than the idea of planting trees and creating parks on the roof's of office buildings.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's nice to see everyone--urban pesant and country hick living in the big city, see the benefits of greening our cities.
Maybe one more would be weather moderation. With the thunderstorm raging outside my window right now, that would be a welcome change :)
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
The problem with doing this sort of research is the tremendous amount of variables (it's why we can't forecast the weather more than a few days in advance); how exactly it changes seem to differ from region to region. Some industrial cities in Britain show cool islands, presumably from the water released by industrial processes. Cities in western desert areas often have lower temperatures due to increased vegetation and surface water (though the increased humidity often makes it more uncomfortable). If you have access to a good library, Robert Balling is probably the best known researcher working on it today; for fundamentals on urban climate, anything by Helmut Landsberg on the subject would probably be informative.
The problem is really, what are we going to do about this? A few storms are one thing, but a lot of cities are probably going to be running out of water in a few decades due to the fact that nobody wants to tell people things they don't want to hear; things like maybe the environmental health of a region is more important than having a really nice lawn or golf course, or that just because you've had a constant supply of water for the past 100 years, that it's going to continue. There's a very good reason that only recently have desert areas started attracting real estate development; through most of history they haven't been sustainable. And just because we have better plumbing and air conditioning that didn't exist a hundred years ago doesn't mean the environment has gotten better for us on an environmental level.
I guess I'm seriously off-topic, but I sometimes obsess with this subject the way some people obsess with the GPL license or open source...
Cities are a minor effect on the weather when it comes to man made alterations. The weather is "critically dependent on initial conditions" (chaos theory) So, to find the things that man has done you need to look far into the past and find the event with the greatest impact in its time. I believe it is sheep grazing. In Kuwait the US Army has a firing range where no Bedouin shepherds are allowed. The Impact area is verdant and lush. It looks a lot like the great plains (USA) do. Outside of the impact area sheep over graze, ripping vegetation out by the roots, leaving baked dust and sand. This has gone on for thousands of years. Kuwait is very near the Tigris and Euphrates rives, the cradle of civilization. The entire middle east is man (domestic sheep) made desert. About the time god cast man out of Eden he also decided that being a shepherd was better than being a farmer(Cain and Able). I speculate that early man even in Africa domesticated animals and possible even created the Sahara. The loss of Eden was not from god, but man destroying Eden. Cities are recent have a small effect compared to the thousands of years man made deserts have had to work their magic on the environment.
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of Government.
When I came here from Cali, the first year I was here (1991, fresh outta high school), we had an awe inspiring monsoon season. That was the last good monsoon I remember (though there was one a couple of years later that literally turned the street in front of my employer's office into a river, but a I digress).
I remember extreme thunder and lightning, and super heavy rains for many days straight (not constant rain, just rain that when it came down, it came down HARD) - the kind of storm where you turn out the lights, go outside, and watch.
At the time, I was living downtown. There wasn't a whole huge amount of development around the city like there is today. This year, I moved to a house north of the city - out in the more desert area (you know, we have like - coyotes, rabbits, ground squirrels, bats, birds by the ton - and saguaros in the front yard). This season hasn't been any better. Sure, it has been cooler (we are in our monsoon season right now), but it hasn't been rainy. On the days where it seems like it would rain, the clouds appear to part, and go "around" the city.
I blame it on all of the development - the leveling of desert to put in homes (the house I am in is close to 30 years old - when it was built, the desert was all around it, and the edge of Phoenix was a good 10 miles or more away), getting rid of foliage and scrub, leaving pavement, and a kind of "designed" desert area (where all the saguaroes are "just so" - and things are arranged "just right" - and no cholla allowed, lest someone get hurt!) - none of which helps to prevent what I think of as a "heat bubble" effect - which the clouds drift around.
Only on days where the cloud buildup has happenned in the previous night do we have any chance of a good rain during the monsoon. Even then, it is only a trickle...
I want my thunder and lightning back - dammit! (hey, I got UPS's on my system - come and get me!)...
Cr0sh the F0ckers!
The built-up area of cities produces 'islands' of higher temperatures, for a number of reasons, among which are:
Manmade materials like concrete, asphalt, bricks, etc. absorb solar energy much more readily than vegetation.
Water almost completely runs off because there's so much concrete everywhere, instead of standing around and slowly evaporating. Evaporation can make a significant contribution to cooling.
Waste heat from vehicles, residences, etc. doesn't help the situation.
Urban heat islands are pretty well understood. You can get nice images of them--temperature contrasts, that is--from AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) remotely-sensed imagery.
cf. W.B. Myer, "Urban heat island and urban health: Early American perspective", Professional Geographer 43, 1991, p. 38 if yer curious for a little more.
Throw more heat up into moist summertime air and that's a good prescription for thunderstorms.
There seems to be lots of evidence in Oklahoma that manmade stuff effects the weather. For example tornados will follow highways. A picture taken on the founding day of Ponca City shows no trees at all. The land was thick grass at the time (the bufflo had not been clearing it for years) but that was cleared to farm. The result was the dustbowl. The solution to that problem was lots of trees. In Kansas now you can see lines of trees along the edge of the farms on the section line roads. Its amazing how well a few trees stop the wind from building up. The large number of man made lakes in Oklahoma have also increased the rainfall in the area.
As far as dropping something from a plane into a tornado, I don't like the idea of that. The tops of the cloud cells that make tornados in Oklahoma are offten 50,000 ft and have large amounts of windsheer. Flying in a huracane is one thing but a tornado is just too intense. When the F15s get retired nasa may try to adapt one to radio control for just this theory but I think the current plans involve the plane not getting back.
Re:I heard there was a way to minimze tornados...(Score:3, Insightful)by The_Messenger (kmfms.com@drew) on Monday July 10, @03:19AM EDT (User Info) http://soldc.sun.com F-15E's have enough power to accelerate while flying straight up, but I still wouldn't send one into a tornado. ;) Above it, maybe. How high to you have to get to escape the winds and flying cows? I don't think it would require a low orbiter...
Hmph. :\ Why should we try to control the weather? I think that's awfully arrogant. If science acheives this, we're just asking for nature to bitchslap us; think "Titanic", but with reprecussions affecting more than a few hundred rich tourists (and Leonardo Dicaprio, of course).
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He might mean it's being pushed down from 'Brown Cloud' level to street level.
hmmm... ground-level o3 does tend to occupy the top-bit of inverted thermal domes... a good thing as it tends to keep it out of our lungs. In theory though, ozone should only be a problem if you have:
1. the thermal inversiona from hell
2. A much-bigger-than-normal amount being produced.. ie, 250 vand de graff generators running a street level.
I vote for number 1 since if there were 250 van de graff generators being run at street level anywhere cmdrTaco would have run it as a story... viz:
posted by cmdrTaco on Monday July 10 @04:22AM
from the It-makes-my-hair-stand-on-end-but-in-a-good-way dept.
BozoTheClown writes "The Mayfield Daily Blatt has this story about an high school science teacher who is trying for the Guiness record for "largest baloon stuck to wall with static electricity". He has a full size replica of the Hindenberg (no, not hydrogen filled, thank god) and, get this, 250 full-sized van de graff generators... better than rubbing the blimp on your head!" 250? Wow, that's like a Beowulf cluster of van de graff generators!!
(Read More... | 2 of 1045 comments | Stunts )
"Why should we limit computers to the lies people tell them through keyboards" Bill Gospar, 1965, MIT
Tom's Hardware did a moderately detailed benchmark of SDRAM vs. RDRAM a while back.
Which is better? It depends on both the montherboard configuration and on what you're doing.
Intel's high-end RDRAM motherboard beat the hell out of SDRAM systems. It had two interleaved RIMM slots, doubling effective bandwidth.
Intel's more recent SDRAM offerings have generally been pretty bad. Via chipsets put out a good effort, but were still beaten out by the high-end RDRAM systems and the BX board.
The best SDRAM offering was a 440 BX board overclocked to 133 FSB. Tom swears it's stable. YMMV.
As far as load is concerned, RDRAM is optimized for throughput, SDRAM is optimized for latency. Something that hits many cache rows in more or less random order taking only a little data from each will work well with SDRAM. Something that processes large amounts of data in more or less linear order will work well with RDRAM. It depends on what you're doing.
My personal opinion? RDRAM is a bad implementation of a good idea. In five years we might see something better. For now, by DDR SDRAM. YMMV.
Re:This is sensitive to many things.(Score:3, Informative)by Shoeboy (drhelpful@portalofevil.com) on Sunday July 09, @11:24PM EDT (User Info) http://microsoft.com
Intel's high-end RDRAM motherboard beat the hell out of SDRAM systems. It had two interleaved RIMM slots, doubling effective bandwidth. |
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Re:This is sensitive to many things.(Score:3, Informative)by Mr Z (moc.tenemirp@c2u41mi) on Monday July 10, @12:22AM EDT (User Info) http://www.primenet.com/~im14u2c/
Adding a second RIMM channel also reduces the likelihood you'll take a "bank hit" in the RDRAM, and it allows the chipset to prefetch on the second channel if it thinks there's going to be a subsequent access over there when it sees an access on the first channel. Of course, CPU and chipset designers have never been all that good at ESP. And, as on-chip caches grow larger, the traffic at the CPU boundary looks increasingly random because all of the redundant and predictable traffic has been absorbed/filtered by the cache, making ESP all the more important. (And yes, I mean Extra Sensory Perception, as in the chipset needs to psychically know where the CPU's going next.) The other comments about making the channel wider rather than deeper to reduce latency also apply. --Joe-- Wanna program the Intellivision? Get an Intellicart! |
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I think Intel needs to come clean as to why exactly it's still pushing Rambus memory so hard.
Other than the fact that they own Rambus? How about profits from licensing Rambus technology? How about using patents to put the squeeze on SDRAM manufacturers? How about designing future CPU's and chipsets so that rambus is the ONLY memory that is supported?
We love to bash M$ because we are visibly affected by their evilness on a daily basis, but I think most people would be suprised by the kind of nasty stuff that Intel gets away with (just ask intergraph!)
Maybe I'm just not enough of a hardware junkie, but are a few percentage points difference that big