And the parent post covers only a small range of what's available. Even the "sci-fi mecha stuff" that American media loves to portray all Japanese anime as usually has some kind of deeper meaning. (I'm talking about stuff like Gundam and Macross) One of the best things I've ever seen (period) was Wings of Honneamise - that didn't resemble anything I'd ever seen before.
It is too up to the original author. I can license my code under the GPL, then turn around and offer the exact same code under different terms. I can't prevent the other people from taking the GPLed code instead, but they'll have to live with the limits placed on the code by the GPL. Being the copyright holder, I can do pretty much whatever I want with it within the limits of copyright law.
The only real limit the GPL places on my power is that I cannot tell people "you can't use the GPLed version anymore, give it back".
The KDE/Qt thing was, if you look beyond all the hype, basically RMS telling the KDE guys that there could be some problems with this code at some point in the future. At least, that's the impression I got by reading things.
No, but I do know that independant groups have run through the source code routinely - and I do for some programs. The OpenBSD team has gone through some (ssh and sshd), and the Debian team others (packages with Debian-specific versions). That's more than you can say for Windows. Yes, most companies don't care - but many individuals should. -RickHunter
That's why, when you write a program, you make sure you specify what version of the license you're talking about. In things I write, I prefer not to include the "any later version" clause, for a variety of reasons.
Another issue with closed-source encryption programs - it can be hard to verify that its doing what it says its doing. How do you know the NSA or CIA hasn't muscled Microsoft into including a backdoor they can exploit? Can you prove they haven't, without source code access?
DeCSS is far more than being able to tinker with something to understand how it works. It involves the ability to USE a legally bought player and legally bought media, and just happens to screw up all the carefully set-up control structures created by the MPAA. Although the MPAA claims that you don't really own either the DVD or the player...
I'm betting you'll find just as many closed-source projects that are as bad, if not worse. Open-source is not a magical cure for all your coding woes, but it does help with a lot of things and has many high points. As you pointed out, Perl and Apache are well-engineered, as are the Linux and/or BSD kernels (dependant on opinion, though) and many other standard tools.
Yes, there are bad open-source projects started by people who are 20 or 21, but consider how much they'll probably learn in the course of those projects. Especially if some more experienced programmers get interested and start showing them ways to improve their processes and code.
Since when was corporate backing vital to the success of an open source project? Or, for that matter, equated with technical skills and knowledge? There are plenty of Open Source or Free Software programmers out there with an "in-depth knowledge of signal processing." Like a good number in both the BSD and Linux communities, as well as other places.
Why would they have to ditch X? Most Linux distros are flexible enough that they could offer a choice of graphics system to the person installing - which is exactly what I suspect will happen as soon as the Berlin Consrortium manages to get a usable release out the door. And if the alternate system had an X compatibility layer, so much the better. Or X could concievably be modified to allow for more user-friendly configuration - if I read your post right, this is one of the problems with it.
And once microsoft adds the features, the Open Source/Free Software communities can see how they did it (since the Linux kernel code is GPLed) and turn around and do it better.
Murder is against the law, though. He would be telling someone to commit murder, which is a crime. However, as pointed out elsewheres, apparently writing (apologies for the typo in my original post) a program to break an "access control measure" isn't illegal - just distributing it. So since he really isn't distributing it....
What's in your second paragraph was basically what I was suggesting... Although I used the example of a poem to make the "speach" angle clear.
I'm not sure the DMCA so much changes the rules, as it applies the old rules to the new, digital, age.
Yeah, right. Have you even read the DMCA? Or a summary of it? It basically says: "This is 'digital' not 'analog,' so we'll now treat it with a completely different set of rules because its better - which, by the way, happens to remove all the picky little rights of you people who buy copies of stuff."
-RickHunter
Re:Obvious Question: Who read the EULA?
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
Exactly. Most EULAs are written to discourage people from reading them. If Joe and Jane Average happened to actually read the EULAs on these games they bought, and saw some of the terms put in there, they might demand their money back! Or, even worse, raise a fuss about it and some government official might take notice! This is completely aside from the fact that much of the language used in EULAs cannot be reasonably expected to be fully decyphered by anything less than a team of trained lawyers. And that you cannot see them until after you've bought the product - many companies will refuse to give pre-purchase copies of their EULA to people.
Read The Software Conspiracy by Mark Minasi for some more details on EULAs. (Blatant plug, I know, but its a good book!)
A question - what if he wrote a poem... That just happened to describe how to right a program to circumvent SmartFilter's encryption? Wouldn't that fall under the same "speech is protected" laws that let PGP export their program?
Block extream sports sites, but allow goatse.cx? Did a troll write this list?:p
Its all so clear now... Censorware was produced by a collective of trolls... It makes so much sense!
-RickHunter
Re:I have a question...
on
New Crypto-OS
·
· Score: 2
Here's what you reply:
If you dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of every large city in the UK, that would reduce pornography/child abuse/whatever too, wouldn't it? I'm guessing that now you think we should all do that...
And see what the think of it. Then explain to them that the RIP act allows the UK government to jail those that it dislikes for totally arbitrary reasons. It lets law enforcement do the same... And you can't even tell anyone why you've been imprisoned without facing even stronger sentances.
-RickHunter
Re:Drunk on the WINE of human happiness
on
Wine In New Skins
·
· Score: 2
Umm... Why? And how exactly do you plan to make the developers of Wine stop working on a program they want to work on? Emulated software never beats native software. No matter how good the emulation gets, there's always going to be some advantage to running native software. Remember - when OS/2 was released, it ran Win3.1 binaries at least as well as Windows itself. Yet there were still quite a lot of OS/2 native programs released. (And there still are a surprising amount, for a "dead" OS)
Oh, and BTW, many members of the "linux community" develop software not because there's a demand for it, but because they need something done that current software doesn't quite fulfill. If Windows software filled that need, they'd presumably be using Windows. But they aren't, which should tell you something. Many are out to write good software, not take over the world.
-RickHunter
Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it.
on
The Future Of The GUI?
·
· Score: 2
We listen. So do the people running the KDE and GNOME projects. Remember that pretty much every modern GUI is somehow a rip-off of the original by Xerox. This includes both Windows and MacOS, as well as most Unix GUIs. As for KDE and GNOME, both have (IIRC) publically stated that their first objective is to match Windows and MacOS in usability terms before they move on and start trying new things, although both are already doing some new things... Windows (the versions I've used, at least) doesn't nearly match the number of interface options available with either KDE or GNOME.
And then we can hopefully show the court the box, the EULA in it that we couldn't see before we purchased the hardware, and the drivers we wrote so we could use our legally-purchased hardware with our legally purchased computer. Of course, this is assuming that the lawsuit in question doesn't wind up before someone like Kaplan, who bows to the "respectable" people. (Read: the ones with the cash)
They were generally under typical use... Your point about GUIs being designed for the lowest common denominator is valid, but what about those who aren't the lowest common denomninator? Should we have to suffer with an interface that just doesn't work in a way we're comfortable with? Having the defaults target "the typical person" is fine, but if you don't provide options for more advanced users, you'll just wind up frustrating people.
Yes, but it also depends on what the user's used to. I use the keyboard for a lot of menu access anyway, and I tend to only use the mouse for stuff the interface won't let me do with the keyboard. Or when web browsing. As for Macs, I know two or three people who have timed themselves, and actually have good enough fine motor control that it is faster for them to go for a menu at the top of a window than to ram the mouse to the top of the screen, then adjust its position and find what they want.
A lot of it is Open Source? Maybe under the APL, but I won't get started on that...
Anyway, from what I've read, all of the GUI systems, the graphics layers, and everything else that goes between the user and the kernel, aside from standard GNU and Unix utilities, is proprietary.
Yes, their stock was seriously overvalued during what turned into a.com-IPO-blitz. Fortunately, they're one of the few ".com"s (I hesitate to call them that because of this) that had a (semi-)solid business model and product. Yes, its untested - but its still solid. They're making money and growing slowly, even if they aren't growing to match that initial stock price.
Lets put it this way: the only danger involved with Cassini was likely generated by the media, who heard "nuclear material" and "launched into space", saw a ratings-garunteed story, and ran with it. As has been pointed out before, the level of radioactives was really quite low - as was the danger. Radioactives are a natural part of nature... one that just happens to be dangerous to humans in large quantities.
Heck, anyone who thinks it remains constant over any period of time needs to do the same. We're coming out of a "little ice age" right now. we're taking measurements after fifty-one hundred years of city growth and climate change, and we're comparing them to measurements taken by far more primitive equipment "way back then." I'm not saying there's no global warming, but the media hype definitely jumped the gun, and now they seem to be desperately damage-controlling.
Slashdot Mirror
And the parent post covers only a small range of what's available. Even the "sci-fi mecha stuff" that American media loves to portray all Japanese anime as usually has some kind of deeper meaning. (I'm talking about stuff like Gundam and Macross) One of the best things I've ever seen (period) was Wings of Honneamise - that didn't resemble anything I'd ever seen before.
-RickHunter
It is too up to the original author. I can license my code under the GPL, then turn around and offer the exact same code under different terms. I can't prevent the other people from taking the GPLed code instead, but they'll have to live with the limits placed on the code by the GPL. Being the copyright holder, I can do pretty much whatever I want with it within the limits of copyright law.
The only real limit the GPL places on my power is that I cannot tell people "you can't use the GPLed version anymore, give it back".
The KDE/Qt thing was, if you look beyond all the hype, basically RMS telling the KDE guys that there could be some problems with this code at some point in the future. At least, that's the impression I got by reading things.
-RickHunter
No, but I do know that independant groups have run through the source code routinely - and I do for some programs. The OpenBSD team has gone through some (ssh and sshd), and the Debian team others (packages with Debian-specific versions). That's more than you can say for Windows. Yes, most companies don't care - but many individuals should.
-RickHunter
That's why, when you write a program, you make sure you specify what version of the license you're talking about. In things I write, I prefer not to include the "any later version" clause, for a variety of reasons.
-RickHunter
Another issue with closed-source encryption programs - it can be hard to verify that its doing what it says its doing. How do you know the NSA or CIA hasn't muscled Microsoft into including a backdoor they can exploit? Can you prove they haven't, without source code access?
-RickHunter
DeCSS is far more than being able to tinker with something to understand how it works. It involves the ability to USE a legally bought player and legally bought media, and just happens to screw up all the carefully set-up control structures created by the MPAA. Although the MPAA claims that you don't really own either the DVD or the player...
-RickHunter
I'm betting you'll find just as many closed-source projects that are as bad, if not worse. Open-source is not a magical cure for all your coding woes, but it does help with a lot of things and has many high points. As you pointed out, Perl and Apache are well-engineered, as are the Linux and/or BSD kernels (dependant on opinion, though) and many other standard tools.
Yes, there are bad open-source projects started by people who are 20 or 21, but consider how much they'll probably learn in the course of those projects. Especially if some more experienced programmers get interested and start showing them ways to improve their processes and code.
-RickHunter
Since when was corporate backing vital to the success of an open source project? Or, for that matter, equated with technical skills and knowledge? There are plenty of Open Source or Free Software programmers out there with an "in-depth knowledge of signal processing." Like a good number in both the BSD and Linux communities, as well as other places.
-RickHunter
Why would they have to ditch X? Most Linux distros are flexible enough that they could offer a choice of graphics system to the person installing - which is exactly what I suspect will happen as soon as the Berlin Consrortium manages to get a usable release out the door. And if the alternate system had an X compatibility layer, so much the better. Or X could concievably be modified to allow for more user-friendly configuration - if I read your post right, this is one of the problems with it.
-RickHunter
And once microsoft adds the features, the Open Source/Free Software communities can see how they did it (since the Linux kernel code is GPLed) and turn around and do it better.
-RickHunter
Murder is against the law, though. He would be telling someone to commit murder, which is a crime. However, as pointed out elsewheres, apparently writing (apologies for the typo in my original post) a program to break an "access control measure" isn't illegal - just distributing it. So since he really isn't distributing it....
What's in your second paragraph was basically what I was suggesting... Although I used the example of a poem to make the "speach" angle clear.
-RickHunter
I'm not sure the DMCA so much changes the rules, as it applies the old rules to the new, digital, age.
Yeah, right. Have you even read the DMCA? Or a summary of it? It basically says: "This is 'digital' not 'analog,' so we'll now treat it with a completely different set of rules because its better - which, by the way, happens to remove all the picky little rights of you people who buy copies of stuff."
-RickHunter
Exactly. Most EULAs are written to discourage people from reading them. If Joe and Jane Average happened to actually read the EULAs on these games they bought, and saw some of the terms put in there, they might demand their money back! Or, even worse, raise a fuss about it and some government official might take notice! This is completely aside from the fact that much of the language used in EULAs cannot be reasonably expected to be fully decyphered by anything less than a team of trained lawyers. And that you cannot see them until after you've bought the product - many companies will refuse to give pre-purchase copies of their EULA to people.
Read The Software Conspiracy by Mark Minasi for some more details on EULAs. (Blatant plug, I know, but its a good book!)
-RickHunter
A question - what if he wrote a poem... That just happened to describe how to right a program to circumvent SmartFilter's encryption? Wouldn't that fall under the same "speech is protected" laws that let PGP export their program?
-RickHunter
Block extream sports sites, but allow goatse.cx? Did a troll write this list? :p
Its all so clear now... Censorware was produced by a collective of trolls... It makes so much sense!
-RickHunter
Here's what you reply:
If you dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of every large city in the UK, that would reduce pornography/child abuse/whatever too, wouldn't it? I'm guessing that now you think we should all do that...
And see what the think of it. Then explain to them that the RIP act allows the UK government to jail those that it dislikes for totally arbitrary reasons. It lets law enforcement do the same... And you can't even tell anyone why you've been imprisoned without facing even stronger sentances.
-RickHunter
Umm... Why? And how exactly do you plan to make the developers of Wine stop working on a program they want to work on? Emulated software never beats native software. No matter how good the emulation gets, there's always going to be some advantage to running native software. Remember - when OS/2 was released, it ran Win3.1 binaries at least as well as Windows itself. Yet there were still quite a lot of OS/2 native programs released. (And there still are a surprising amount, for a "dead" OS)
Oh, and BTW, many members of the "linux community" develop software not because there's a demand for it, but because they need something done that current software doesn't quite fulfill. If Windows software filled that need, they'd presumably be using Windows. But they aren't, which should tell you something. Many are out to write good software, not take over the world.
-RickHunter
We listen. So do the people running the KDE and GNOME projects. Remember that pretty much every modern GUI is somehow a rip-off of the original by Xerox. This includes both Windows and MacOS, as well as most Unix GUIs. As for KDE and GNOME, both have (IIRC) publically stated that their first objective is to match Windows and MacOS in usability terms before they move on and start trying new things, although both are already doing some new things... Windows (the versions I've used, at least) doesn't nearly match the number of interface options available with either KDE or GNOME.
-RickHunter
And then we can hopefully show the court the box, the EULA in it that we couldn't see before we purchased the hardware, and the drivers we wrote so we could use our legally-purchased hardware with our legally purchased computer. Of course, this is assuming that the lawsuit in question doesn't wind up before someone like Kaplan, who bows to the "respectable" people. (Read: the ones with the cash)
-RickHunter
They were generally under typical use... Your point about GUIs being designed for the lowest common denominator is valid, but what about those who aren't the lowest common denomninator? Should we have to suffer with an interface that just doesn't work in a way we're comfortable with? Having the defaults target "the typical person" is fine, but if you don't provide options for more advanced users, you'll just wind up frustrating people.
-RickHunter
Yes, but it also depends on what the user's used to. I use the keyboard for a lot of menu access anyway, and I tend to only use the mouse for stuff the interface won't let me do with the keyboard. Or when web browsing. As for Macs, I know two or three people who have timed themselves, and actually have good enough fine motor control that it is faster for them to go for a menu at the top of a window than to ram the mouse to the top of the screen, then adjust its position and find what they want.
-RickHunter
A lot of it is Open Source? Maybe under the APL, but I won't get started on that...
Anyway, from what I've read, all of the GUI systems, the graphics layers, and everything else that goes between the user and the kernel, aside from standard GNU and Unix utilities, is proprietary.
-RickHunter
Yes, their stock was seriously overvalued during what turned into a .com-IPO-blitz. Fortunately, they're one of the few ".com"s (I hesitate to call them that because of this) that had a (semi-)solid business model and product. Yes, its untested - but its still solid. They're making money and growing slowly, even if they aren't growing to match that initial stock price.
-RickHunter
Lets put it this way: the only danger involved with Cassini was likely generated by the media, who heard "nuclear material" and "launched into space", saw a ratings-garunteed story, and ran with it. As has been pointed out before, the level of radioactives was really quite low - as was the danger. Radioactives are a natural part of nature... one that just happens to be dangerous to humans in large quantities.
-RickHunter
Heck, anyone who thinks it remains constant over any period of time needs to do the same. We're coming out of a "little ice age" right now. we're taking measurements after fifty-one hundred years of city growth and climate change, and we're comparing them to measurements taken by far more primitive equipment "way back then." I'm not saying there's no global warming, but the media hype definitely jumped the gun, and now they seem to be desperately damage-controlling.
-RickHunter