I thought that the real question here is how applicable the LGPL is in embedded devices. It's all fine and dandy on a full-fledged OS-type platform to say "you've got to link to this free code dynamically" or "this code needs to treat this free library as a swappable resource so that it may be modified by users at will" (clearly paraphrased), but what does it mean to link to a library dynamically on an embedded device? Doesn't the very nature of its embeddedness serve to make all dynamic references ostensibly static?
Moreover, seeing as modified libraries may not always be able to be copied/loaded/uploaded to an embedded device even if the source, etc. for all the free libs are provided, how can that device fulfill the requirements of the GPLs (these devices cannot provide a "suitable shared library mechanism")? Source that you are free to modify but not free to use does not sound particularly free (or useful) to me.
They want you to think it's "ten" instead of "x" (though saying "oh es ten ten point one" always makes me giggle, and then feel ashamed) but it's "X". Trust me. "X" for its lost heritage.
For the love of god, will somebody volunteer to re-raster the seal of the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologia dell'Inquinamento Luminoso for them? It's a mission of mercy, folks.
come on? this is news? nothing more important happened today?
besides all that, the/. intro to this letter clearly states that it is "from William Bill Gates himself". The letter is posted under microsoft and not under it's funny, laugh. anyone who glances at the article header and does not check out the facts (presumably trusting/. has already done this) will think this thing is for real. but no, in truth/. has taken to lying outright to its readers.
what a sham (and i'm not talking about the letter).
Who's seen _The Insider_? Remember 60 Minutes's objection to taking on big tabaco? They thought that if Tabaco won the suit they were planning to bring against them for airing the anti-tabaco story, then 60 Minutes itself and the network it ran on would be so finantialy deprived that Big Tabaco could buy the station and the program out-right. Microsoft has this kind of power, and/. is the single biggest thorn in its side on the web.
They have likely been waiting for an oppurtunity like this and now they are baiting us. Stand up to them. You may even get your day in court and a chance to strike down the DMCA. BUT LISTEN TO YOUR COUNSEL AS WELL! Your lawyers may advise you that MS is on the right side of the law on this one (as f#@$ed up as that law is). In such a case, you may have to turn the cheek so as to have the ability to fight greater injustice in the future.
REMEMBER: censorship -- especially censorship initiated by Microsoft -- would be a blow to/., but/.'s continued existence -- even with continued "minor" censorship such as is in evidence here -- will be a far greater blow to Microsoft and the unfair laws it hides behind in the long run.
Granted, companies and developers make mistakes. But lets be honest. They had that chunk of code because they intended to steal it or copy its functionality so that they didn't have to write it themselves. They may not have realized that it was GPL'd and therefore watched over by the ever-zealous gnumongers, but that developer sure as hell didn't wake up one morning with all this code on his screen and say "Wow, I guess I must have writen this and forgot about it." He knew he was taking it, and he would have gotten away with it were it not for the fact the author was in the right place at the right time and had his curiocity with him.
And do you think he's learned his lesson? You bet he has! When he steals someone else's code next time, he'll be more careful to hide it.
I personally cannot get enough of people exploring the spiritual side of computing. I think a lot of this is created through the interaction of brilliant people with the inherent mystique of computers -- which is provided through the abstraction from calculations that they afford us (see: the Zen AI Koans). Other spirituality can come through shared vocabulary and experience. Take, for example, the story of Magic|More Magic, or the use of the term ``Karma'' to describe your posting value here on/.
Donald Knuth has also had a profound impact on spiritual side of computing and programming. Programming wouldn't be what it is today without him, and he has always kept the ``Art'' of programming foremost in his mind, in front of the ``technique''.
He gave a lecture series entitled God and Computers at MIT from 6/10/99 to 17/11/99. Dr. Dobbs is carrying the Real Audio version of it on their technetcast site. Definitely worth a listen!
With the notable exception of End of Days, has anyone else noted that this had being an unbelievable year for movies? I'm convinced that `99 will go down in history as the year that turned out the most original, well made, moving movies EVER.
I mean, think about it. It all started back around the time of Armageddon and Deep Impact. now don't worry, I'm not nominating these two as examples. I thought they both bit like sharp cheddar (which is to say they were bad), but right after that, movies started to get REALLY GOOD. We had Shakespeare in Love, Pleasantville (maybe that was `98?), Elizabeth, Saving Private Ryan (which I hated, but was well made), The Perfect Husband, A Midsummer Night's Dream (the bicycles were strange, but the rest was pretty damn faithful), Episode I (I come to bury Lucas, not to praise him), the Matrix, The Candidate, The Blair Witch Project (well conceived, even if it did drag on a bit), American Pie, South Park, Idle Hands, American Beauty (OH MY GOD what a great movie!!!), The Insider, Three Kings, Princess Mononoke (OH MY GOD what another great movie!!!), Being John Malkovitch, American Movie, The Iron Giant, Dogma, Toy Story 2, and Man on the Moon (alright, that hasn't come out yet, but I'm such an Andy Kaufman fan that I'm sure it will be good:-)
And that's just a list off the top of my head! I mean, go to the IMDB and see if you can find a year that has more of your favorite movies.
And if you want any further proof of 1999's magical movie power, just take a look at some of the movies that, by all rights, should have sucked ROYALY -- like The Matrix, Inspector Gadget, and Toy Story 2.
A good cyberpunk thriller has to be made, especially one staring Keanu ``Johnny Mnemonic'' Reeves. And yet The Matrix pulls it off wonderfully! It should have sucked, but `99 made it work!
And Inspector Gadget? I don't need to go into all the ways a live action version of that could have been messed up. but though it wasn't one of my favorites THIS year, it did get the same kind of laughs that the old cartoon got. And it easily could have been a favorite on a lesser year when nothing came out -- say `96 or whenever it was that gave us Space Jam.
And Toy Story 2... What can I say? The first rocked wonderfully. And then they wanted to do a SEQUAL!?!? When has that ever worked? I'll tell you when: in the wonderful year of our lord, 1999 . The year when no movies could go wrong!
You know, I hadn't thought about the interoperability issue. That's a good point.
Though ideally, IMHO, interoperability of all palm devices from nokias to digicams should be through interfaces, not media. When you have a palm-sized device, your media has to be sub-palm-sized. This inevitably makes it more fragile, more expensive (in all senses of the word), and less efficient then the standard media we use everyday. I guess I just feel that micromedia, like IOmega's click, is technically cool, but practically a pain in the rear.
On the other hand, if palm devices just interfaced with each other, the devices themselves become the media, which is much more convenient in the hand-held market. Let's say I want to give my friend an MP3. Would I rather: A: pull out a $90.00 ram card, write the file to it, pop the card out and give it to her, or B: point my IR thingee at her device and let it fly?
Clearly IR (as an IRDA standard) is not going to hold us for much longer. Already it seems rather slow and tedious to me. But imagine if all devices had one of those iMac AirPorts in them, or even a fire-wire port to plug a connector cable into. I would be a happy man and I wouldn't have to worry about buying/breaking/loosing media!
Of course the real fun in this would be to have a server that hosted other players' systems. You wouldn't just be playing to rack up frags, you'd be playing to protect your vital processes from being killed by other players!
Don't get to prematurely excited. Keep in mind that the battery life of this thing HAS to be considerably less than the current ``one month'' battery life of the PalmIIIx. In addition I don't see anything available for this device that is not already (?) available for the Handspring Springboard(tm) thingee. Frankly I think the Springboard is a more open interface and already has market acceptance (despite its only just shipping this week). you can have a Palm clone and plug memory into it, or your can get a Visor made by Trip ``The Original Pilot'' Hawkins himself, have a greater variety of plugable devices to choose from, and pick from one of 5 fruity flavors of plastic molding to boot. I wonder which people will choose...?
Hey, yeah! There's some of that free speach Mr. Katz was talking about.
You know what I like about the freedom of the `Net? It lets me abstract myself from normal human values as an anonymous persona so that I can laugh at stuff (like this) that I would otherwise be ashamed to think of as funny. -- skia@netscape.net
Pardon me for being perhaps a bit too American here, but I'm really starting to wonder what all this politics has to do with me. I'm a part of the open source movement, right? And there's not a movement yet that has been or can be copyrighted (or lefted or what have you).
Sure, there are good reasons to have ``politicians'' in our ranks. One glaring one that comes to mind is that I'm no lawyer and I can't make heads or tails of most license agreements. I was happy to hear the view of both sides of the APSL issue, because looking at it myself, I didn't know what rights I had.
But let's not get carried away here. It good to get our ``politicians'' into flame wars. That is, in a very real sense, what politicians are meant to do. But after all is said and done, I'm still just a coder that's hacking on some source that I'm going to end up giving away. Our motivations are our own, and no matter what politician (or corperation or monopoly) wins the votes in the end, that's still what I'm going to be doing.
So I'm greatful to the advice BP and ESR have given us re: APSL, but let us not go around yelling ``Look! Apple killed open source!'' Even if (in the highly unlikely event that) BP and ESR never again see eye to eye and the OSI crashes around their ears, that doesn't really change what we do, does it?
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Moreover, seeing as modified libraries may not always be able to be copied/loaded/uploaded to an embedded device even if the source, etc. for all the free libs are provided, how can that device fulfill the requirements of the GPLs (these devices cannot provide a "suitable shared library mechanism")? Source that you are free to modify but not free to use does not sound particularly free (or useful) to me.
That's Eight Megabytes And Continuously Swapping. You see, then it spells EMACS. It's much more funny when acronyms do that.
They want you to think it's "ten" instead of "x" (though saying "oh es ten ten point one" always makes me giggle, and then feel ashamed) but it's "X". Trust me. "X" for its lost heritage.
come on? this is news? nothing more important happened today?
/. intro to this letter clearly states that it is "from William Bill Gates himself". The letter is posted under microsoft and not under it's funny, laugh. anyone who glances at the article header and does not check out the facts (presumably trusting /. has already done this) will think this thing is for real. but no, in truth /. has taken to lying outright to its readers.
besides all that, the
what a sham (and i'm not talking about the letter).
Who's seen _The Insider_? Remember 60 Minutes's objection to taking on big tabaco? They thought that if Tabaco won the suit they were planning to bring against them for airing the anti-tabaco story, then 60 Minutes itself and the network it ran on would be so finantialy deprived that Big Tabaco could buy the station and the program out-right. Microsoft has this kind of power, and /. is the single biggest thorn in its side on the web.
/., but /.'s continued existence -- even with continued "minor" censorship such as is in evidence here -- will be a far greater blow to Microsoft and the unfair laws it hides behind in the long run.
They have likely been waiting for an oppurtunity like this and now they are baiting us. Stand up to them. You may even get your day in court and a chance to strike down the DMCA. BUT LISTEN TO YOUR COUNSEL AS WELL! Your lawyers may advise you that MS is on the right side of the law on this one (as f#@$ed up as that law is). In such a case, you may have to turn the cheek so as to have the ability to fight greater injustice in the future.
REMEMBER: censorship -- especially censorship initiated by Microsoft -- would be a blow to
--
Josh Emmons skia@skia.net
Granted, companies and developers make mistakes. But lets be honest. They had that chunk of code because they intended to steal it or copy its functionality so that they didn't have to write it themselves. They may not have realized that it was GPL'd and therefore watched over by the ever-zealous gnumongers, but that developer sure as hell didn't wake up one morning with all this code on his screen and say "Wow, I guess I must have writen this and forgot about it." He knew he was taking it, and he would have gotten away with it were it not for the fact the author was in the right place at the right time and had his curiocity with him.
And do you think he's learned his lesson? You bet he has! When he steals someone else's code next time, he'll be more careful to hide it.
Donald Knuth has also had a profound impact on spiritual side of computing and programming. Programming wouldn't be what it is today without him, and he has always kept the ``Art'' of programming foremost in his mind, in front of the ``technique''.
He gave a lecture series entitled God and Computers at MIT from 6/10/99 to 17/11/99. Dr. Dobbs is carrying the Real Audio version of it on their technetcast site. Definitely worth a listen!
--
I mean, think about it. It all started back around the time of Armageddon and Deep Impact. now don't worry, I'm not nominating these two as examples. I thought they both bit like sharp cheddar (which is to say they were bad), but right after that, movies started to get REALLY GOOD. We had Shakespeare in Love, Pleasantville (maybe that was `98?), Elizabeth, Saving Private Ryan (which I hated, but was well made), The Perfect Husband, A Midsummer Night's Dream (the bicycles were strange, but the rest was pretty damn faithful), Episode I (I come to bury Lucas, not to praise him), the Matrix, The Candidate, The Blair Witch Project (well conceived, even if it did drag on a bit), American Pie, South Park, Idle Hands, American Beauty (OH MY GOD what a great movie!!!), The Insider, Three Kings, Princess Mononoke (OH MY GOD what another great movie!!!), Being John Malkovitch, American Movie, The Iron Giant, Dogma, Toy Story 2, and Man on the Moon (alright, that hasn't come out yet, but I'm such an Andy Kaufman fan that I'm sure it will be good :-)
And that's just a list off the top of my head! I mean, go to the IMDB and see if you can find a year that has more of your favorite movies.
And if you want any further proof of 1999's magical movie power, just take a look at some of the movies that, by all rights, should have sucked ROYALY -- like The Matrix, Inspector Gadget, and Toy Story 2.
A good cyberpunk thriller has to be made, especially one staring Keanu ``Johnny Mnemonic'' Reeves. And yet The Matrix pulls it off wonderfully! It should have sucked, but `99 made it work!
And Inspector Gadget? I don't need to go into all the ways a live action version of that could have been messed up. but though it wasn't one of my favorites THIS year, it did get the same kind of laughs that the old cartoon got. And it easily could have been a favorite on a lesser year when nothing came out -- say `96 or whenever it was that gave us Space Jam.
And Toy Story 2... What can I say? The first rocked wonderfully. And then they wanted to do a SEQUAL!?!? When has that ever worked? I'll tell you when: in the wonderful year of our lord, 1999 . The year when no movies could go wrong!
Though ideally, IMHO, interoperability of all palm devices from nokias to digicams should be through interfaces, not media. When you have a palm-sized device, your media has to be sub-palm-sized. This inevitably makes it more fragile, more expensive (in all senses of the word), and less efficient then the standard media we use everyday. I guess I just feel that micromedia, like IOmega's click, is technically cool, but practically a pain in the rear.
On the other hand, if palm devices just interfaced with each other, the devices themselves become the media, which is much more convenient in the hand-held market. Let's say I want to give my friend an MP3. Would I rather:
A: pull out a $90.00 ram card, write the file to it, pop the card out and give it to her, or
B: point my IR thingee at her device and let it fly?
Clearly IR (as an IRDA standard) is not going to hold us for much longer. Already it seems rather slow and tedious to me. But imagine if all devices had one of those iMac AirPorts in them, or even a fire-wire port to plug a connector cable into. I would be a happy man and I wouldn't have to worry about buying/breaking/loosing media!
Of course the real fun in this would be to have a server that hosted other players' systems. You wouldn't just be playing to rack up frags, you'd be playing to protect your vital processes from being killed by other players!
Don't get to prematurely excited. Keep in mind that the battery life of this thing HAS to be considerably less than the current ``one month'' battery life of the PalmIIIx. In addition I don't see anything available for this device that is not already (?) available for the Handspring Springboard(tm) thingee. Frankly I think the Springboard is a more open interface and already has market acceptance (despite its only just shipping this week). you can have a Palm clone and plug memory into it, or your can get a Visor made by Trip ``The Original Pilot'' Hawkins himself, have a greater variety of plugable devices to choose from, and pick from one of 5 fruity flavors of plastic molding to boot. I wonder which people will choose...?
You know what I like about the freedom of the `Net? It lets me abstract myself from normal human values as an anonymous persona so that I can laugh at stuff (like this) that I would otherwise be ashamed to think of as funny.
--
skia@netscape.net
nobody mentioned that the beer Bender was drinking in the bar was called ``Old FORTRAN''.
Now that's something you'd never see in The Simpsons!
Sure, there are good reasons to have ``politicians'' in our ranks. One glaring one that comes to mind is that I'm no lawyer and I can't make heads or tails of most license agreements. I was happy to hear the view of both sides of the APSL issue, because looking at it myself, I didn't know what rights I had.
But let's not get carried away here. It good to get our ``politicians'' into flame wars. That is, in a very real sense, what politicians are meant to do. But after all is said and done, I'm still just a coder that's hacking on some source that I'm going to end up giving away. Our motivations are our own, and no matter what politician (or corperation or monopoly) wins the votes in the end, that's still what I'm going to be doing.
So I'm greatful to the advice BP and ESR have given us re: APSL, but let us not go around yelling ``Look! Apple killed open source!'' Even if (in the highly unlikely event that) BP and ESR never again see eye to eye and the OSI crashes around their ears, that doesn't really change what we do, does it?