I think you were pretty hard on the grandparent. He sounds honestly confused, and wants to make his work available, but is worried someone will just grab it, change the name, sell it to a market, and screw him.
It seems like a perfectly valid worry, to me at least. And depending on why he cares, there are some options.
But, it is not a precise enough concern to deal with yet.
I don't have a problem with people using the code itself to make money, my only issue is with repackaging it to sell.
That sentence is kind of fuzzy. Are you concerned about the repackaging because you want to sell the binary? Get the credit? Know how many people are using your software?
The above questions assume that your problem is with someone literally compiling your code under a different name (after changing the GUI, etc. to match.) Do you care if someone adds a feature? Incorporates it into a collection of freeware programs that they then sell if they don't change your binary?
There are tons of licenses. The BSD license, in its original form, lets anyone do anything with it, as long as you get a credit. But if you wouldn't mind explaining more about what you are trying to prevent, we'll see if something matches.
I am not a lawyer! I am not trying to offer legal advice, just point you in the direction of websites which may or may not have legal advice specific to your problem. If there are any lawyers who can improve my disclaimer (pro bono I'm afraid), please let me know.
. Triage is one of the most important and time-consuming parts of dealing with bugs and security issues, and if you think Apple's finest programmers are running the first-line triage on the bug database, you're crazy. They have a whole staff with actual technical training and resources available whose sole job it is to do that triage, and basically what you're suggesting is that every single Apple employee should be trained in those skills and have those resources, or that the triage team should take over every form of communication "just in case".
While I enjoy a false dilemma as much as the next man, this is a ludicrious position. User X reports a problem. Admin Y on a webboard sees it, tells other Apple employee Z about it. Z tells Y that it is known, or unknown and they will deal with it, whatever. Y then a) Fills out a for so that other webboard admins know about the issue (if not done automatically as a sideeffect of telling Z), messages X to let him know what is going on, and, if it is a false issue, removes it or adds a comment to the story.
Think about what would happen if AT&T, Verizon and South Central Bell all went bankrupt at once. Think about the stock market. Think about the mutual funds which presently hold telecom stock and all the pension funds and non-profit endowments that are currently invested in them. Think about trying to get a job in the tech sector when you're competing with all the unemployed telecom workers.
Why is it when I advocate stricter laws governing corporate behavior, I'm guilty of the ultimate crime of "interfering with the free market" yet I am expected to bail out companies because if they fail they take out the country with them. If a company, or industry, is important enough to need a bailout, they are important enough to lose their absolute freedom as well.
Did you install Firefox, Ad-Aware and Spybot on the loaner as well (I presume so, because how did Tech Support know?) Maybe one of those was the cause, a new update. I know where I work, I refuse to help people who are running FireFox (while they are running it). Why, because two years ago, FireFox ate up resources and made it look like there was a leak in my software. Or maybe it was a FireFox plugin. Or it could have even been Java. I don't care. FireFox is not a necessity. So if FireFox is running, I don't let you file bug reports.
And yes, when we ship to clients, we often lock down the computers and don't allow them to install other software. Could they do so technically, sure. They have access to an admin account. But then we won't deal with it. There are enough things that can go wrong that anything I can control, I will.
Prophesying the end of the modern world is something so old that you can find contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle who also did the very same thing. This isn't really all that new.
While this is true, the fact that alarmists lived before me in no way speaks to whether I am right or wrong. Besides, the unspoken point you are making, without backing it up with evidence, is that those prophesies were somehow mere hysteria. However, sometimes societies changed because of the predictions, and sometimes circumstances changed in non-sustainable ways (discover a new contenient or two).
I've built an ark out of Ethernet cables and welcome all of slashdot onboard!
And two by two, the meme's were entered into the ark made from Ethernet. First boarded the "all your base are belong to us's", then the "welcome to our new [] overload's", and so on and so forth, until after "?????" boarded, at last "Profit" came on board. And lo, as "Profit" entered, so the ark was raised into such a ruckus, with some of the OSS repositories that had come on board disembarking from the ark, and some did turn into the dreaded "closed-source" thus infected the post flood world. Some even forked and did more than one of these.
Additionally, firefox, with a plugin, ties directly into the Tor network, so it's deemed a security risk.
Tor is a security risk (reference the people who snooped all the unencrypted e-mail passwords.) Can you protect against it with encryption, yes, but that doesn't mean you should invite the *insert favorite national enemy* agents to listen in.
And when said teacher was informed by the student that it WAS "suitable technology", what did the mature, responsible teacher do?
FireFox was not "suitable technology". It doesn't matter if FF is superior for reasons XYZ, the teacher is not comfortable with it, while the student surely knows how to use IE. It is not the teacher's job to know about every browser (I use Opera, for instance), and approve its use. The teacher knows how IE works well enough not to think that they were going to get tricked by a student.
School is not just about solving problems, but also showing the teacher how you solve problems (for instance, showing work in math). Sometimes it is the teacher's responsibility to become educated, such as if a student uses calculus in econ or physics and the high school teacher does not know it, because it shows a deeper understanding of the material and produces better results. However, peripheral issues are not like that. If a teacher is unable to comfortably audit a student's web research, then that teacher is able to help the student less effectively, and it would be the student's fault for making more work for a probably underpaid and overstressed teacher.
For example, I prefer base 60 (divisible by 1-6 evenly, way superior to base 10). But math teachers always insisted I use base 10, because then they could follow what was going on without learning 50 new symbols.
Of course this would be a non-issue if Windows didn't automatically run software when you put a CD in the drive; this is just another reason why auto-run is an insanely bad idea.
I don't even think XP SP2 does that by default anymore.
As a side note, I have decided to contribute my tax return $$'s to EFF and several similar ongoing efforts we all benefit from.
Don't forget that those donations will be tax-deductible, which will increase the size of your rebate, which you will then donate, which will be tax-deductible, which will increase...
Oh, right, on Slashdot people know that infinite sums of fractions can sum to whole numbers. Still, one of my favorite ways of confusing the less mathematically inclined.
(And yes, as a subpoint, I do understand that fractional cents get dropped, thus it is not an infinite series...)
Regulators will respond and Rogers will be forced to back down, leaving everyone -- regulators, investors, competitors, consumers -- slightly more pissed off with it than before.
No, that's not the way it works. Rogers will make a large donation to the Republican and the Democratic party, thus insuring it access to whomever wins, and the politicians will put pressure on the regulators...
Hopefully next year we'll find out if the iPod is just a fad or if it has legs too. How long does something have to be popular to officially not be called a fad?
The iPod is a fad. People buy it more for its asthetic instead of functional reasons (or because they are fans of Macs). But let's be honest, it is just an MP3 player, and honestly, one of poor quality besides (admittedly, I gave up on them when an early one failed on me.) A fad can last a few years, but in ten years all the kids will be amazed that iPods were "hip". I mean, that double-tapedeck boombox thing is still going strong, right?
. Then call a local high school and a local college, and do the same.
I doubt that Harvard is interested in his second-hand books. Same for MIT, and the 30-odd other colleges close enough to Cambridge. Where he lives there is not a shortage of good librarys anyone can access.
Actually, to some degree that is their purpose. Not to equalize people's skills, but to equalize the amount of work people can put in. Unfortunately, it is difficult to do one without doing the other. Why equalize the amount of work people can do, such as not letting you go over your 8 hour day for five minutes to ship before the end of the quarter. Because it is posisble to measure 8 hours of work, but impossible to quanitify the "emergency" nature of the work. Except they can monitarily. So they make a company pay overtime, the idea being that that is a dividing line between vital, time-sensitive work and just trying to get more work out of you.
But that doesn't answer why it is desirable, just wh the line is drawn there. The reason it is desirable is because otherwise there is a market failure. The unit cost for an hour of your time (to you) is so small in relation to the fixed costs (morgage, food, supporting a family, etc.) that all workers end up producing far more then they should, i.e. when the marginal cost of the hour of work is higher than the value they get for that hour.
Same thing happens with farms, and many other areas with huge discrepincies between fixed and marginal costs.
I really hate this horribly miss informed quote. it's ~30% of the people have 50% of the money. Of course it's also ~20% of the people that pay 50% of the tax load.
The top 1% have 39.7%, the next 19% have 51.5%, leaving 8.8% for the lower 80%. However, those numbers are five years old and I heard that wealth was being concentrated. I don't understand the tax rate analogy. If the people who own 91.2% of the country are only paying 50% of the taxes, that's fubar. Also, that leaves out payroll taxes, I'm sure.
Did you also know that over 65% of the Forbes 1000 are new money, meaning they made their money and didn't inherit it as is often the miss conception[sic].
Define "inherited it". Bill Gates made a huge fortune, however, a large part of the reason he could was that his dad was a fairly affluent lawyer, so he had support. In any case, I don't understand why them not inheriting it in any way implies anything. It is not as though inheritence is the only issue ever raised with capitialism, or even one of the major ones.
Did you know the vast majority of rapes are commited by - tadzoum - the husband !
The wife of the US (now former? during Bush's administration) Surgeon General left her husband claiming that he would anally rape her. That is, she would wake up in the middle of the night in the middle of, well, anal sex. Her husband's defense? He was trying to have regular old vaginal sex with her, and missed. Leaving aside the fact that that is still verboten morally and legally, there is the extra irony of his job before moving into government. He was a gynocologist.
I agree. The code I'm proudest of was a set of horrible hacks (due to the language choosen), has no comments, but it worked perfectly and was solid. (It had no comments because I wrote it in 3 days while on a caffine high and it "needing to get done". When I went back to comment it (after my nap while the build was made/shipped to QA) I didn't understand what I had done.)
But that was the code I was proudest of. I'm also very proud of the program I am working on and the architecture it has. I'm proud that it is documented, and well-designed, and has classes where random hacks go to die, etc. But I think the thing is, the better your architecture/planning, the less proud you can be of any piece of code, because it fits in well, and thus is not clever. But the prouder (more proud?) you can be of the project.
Don't forget, you should also store all your variables in an array so they are easy to access ( prefereably global if you have 2 or more functions in your program). That way, you can cut down on the number of switch statements (which break the cashe leading to slower runtime). For instance, instead of switch (arg1) { case 0: a = b + c; break; case 1: b = a + c; break; } you can just use var[arg1] = var[abs(arg1 - 1)] + var[2]; etc.
The rule where I work is that the naming/commenting conventions must be strictly followed (generally 1/2 of my time). Generally, we have a plan going in, the architecture gets 80% of the way done, and hacks are added to deal with the hardest 20% because of time crunches.
The former is wrong because while it's great that we now know what each little piece of your code does, it's still a challenge to see the forest for the trees in all but the most trivial cases (it also means that after several refactors you end up with a whole lot of miniature orphaned functions littering up your code that are never called and that do nothing but that everyone's afraid of deleting). A good method name doesn't tell the reader why the method is there or what its intended usage is. The latter is wrong as well, because suddenly naturally flowing code is broken up to the point where comments become a distraction and make the code harder to read (incidentally, this is why I started using justified end-of-line comments... it helps with the distraction).
Actually, I think that is the same problem that coveres the "comment every 4 lines" methodology. Where I currently work we have the "comment every 4 lines" thing going (and in comment blocks right justfied to column 81 no less). I've grown accustomed to reading the code, so they are not distracting. However, they are almost always useless:
/* Line of *'s that the lameness filter rejects. */ /* Class declaration... */ /* Line of *'s that the lameness filter rejects. */
class CClassName
Meanwhile, in a function, code will look like this:
/* Line of *'s that the lameness filter rejects. */ /* Call function X() if i > 0... */ /* Line of *'s that the lameness filter rejects. */
if ( i > 0 ) X();
Which is sometimes the only comment given when you need to know that X calls Y which calls Z, and that function Z produces some error unless i > 0, etc.
MS is a for profit, publicly held company whose number one priority is to return value to their shareholders, i.e. make money.
Actually, MS (until a few years ago) was very bad at this, never paying dividends, etc. Oh, the company was worth quite a bit, but they never returned the value to the shareholders, instead, using that cash on hand to grow.
With the number of frequencies available all one broadcaster would have to do is shift the frequency used.
True, but presumably having all your listeners know that 99.412341 is your station already has value.
Where one of them could prove they were using that frequency first the court could require the second one of move to another frequency.
But my example in no way excludes that both started broadcasting on the same day. Even if they didn't, it matters what day their broadcast was able to reach a certain area (a big radio station in the center of town wants to expand it's broadcast, and I'm a small station on the end of town. The big station was broadcasting first, but I was broadcasing first here.) Otherwise, my collection of 100,000 microtransmitters with a 1000 yrd range can wait for another station to get big and then expand into their turf while offering to sell the station. Or maybe it could be first in a predetermined region, with the regions and how close the frequencies could be being determined by some Federal agency...
Ever hear of Homesteading?
Yup, if you read my posts I expressly say I'd rather have the FCC than a "first-come first-serve" mentality to the airwaves. I hate the concept of homesteading without an annual ad valorem tax.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you were pretty hard on the grandparent. He sounds honestly confused, and wants to make his work available, but is worried someone will just grab it, change the name, sell it to a market, and screw him.
It seems like a perfectly valid worry, to me at least. And depending on why he cares, there are some options.
But, it is not a precise enough concern to deal with yet.
That sentence is kind of fuzzy. Are you concerned about the repackaging because you want to sell the binary? Get the credit? Know how many people are using your software?
The above questions assume that your problem is with someone literally compiling your code under a different name (after changing the GUI, etc. to match.) Do you care if someone adds a feature? Incorporates it into a collection of freeware programs that they then sell if they don't change your binary?
There are tons of licenses. The BSD license, in its original form, lets anyone do anything with it, as long as you get a credit. But if you wouldn't mind explaining more about what you are trying to prevent, we'll see if something matches.
I am not a lawyer! I am not trying to offer legal advice, just point you in the direction of websites which may or may not have legal advice specific to your problem. If there are any lawyers who can improve my disclaimer (pro bono I'm afraid), please let me know.
The thought of two Natalie Portmans covered in hot grits overwhelmed me when I tried to add it before, you insensitive clod.
While I enjoy a false dilemma as much as the next man, this is a ludicrious position. User X reports a problem. Admin Y on a webboard sees it, tells other Apple employee Z about it. Z tells Y that it is known, or unknown and they will deal with it, whatever. Y then a) Fills out a for so that other webboard admins know about the issue (if not done automatically as a sideeffect of telling Z), messages X to let him know what is going on, and, if it is a false issue, removes it or adds a comment to the story.
Why is it when I advocate stricter laws governing corporate behavior, I'm guilty of the ultimate crime of "interfering with the free market" yet I am expected to bail out companies because if they fail they take out the country with them. If a company, or industry, is important enough to need a bailout, they are important enough to lose their absolute freedom as well.
Did you install Firefox, Ad-Aware and Spybot on the loaner as well (I presume so, because how did Tech Support know?) Maybe one of those was the cause, a new update. I know where I work, I refuse to help people who are running FireFox (while they are running it). Why, because two years ago, FireFox ate up resources and made it look like there was a leak in my software. Or maybe it was a FireFox plugin. Or it could have even been Java. I don't care. FireFox is not a necessity. So if FireFox is running, I don't let you file bug reports.
And yes, when we ship to clients, we often lock down the computers and don't allow them to install other software. Could they do so technically, sure. They have access to an admin account. But then we won't deal with it. There are enough things that can go wrong that anything I can control, I will.
While this is true, the fact that alarmists lived before me in no way speaks to whether I am right or wrong. Besides, the unspoken point you are making, without backing it up with evidence, is that those prophesies were somehow mere hysteria. However, sometimes societies changed because of the predictions, and sometimes circumstances changed in non-sustainable ways (discover a new contenient or two).
And two by two, the meme's were entered into the ark made from Ethernet. First boarded the "all your base are belong to us's", then the "welcome to our new [] overload's", and so on and so forth, until after "?????" boarded, at last "Profit" came on board. And lo, as "Profit" entered, so the ark was raised into such a ruckus, with some of the OSS repositories that had come on board disembarking from the ark, and some did turn into the dreaded "closed-source" thus infected the post flood world. Some even forked and did more than one of these.
Tor is a security risk (reference the people who snooped all the unencrypted e-mail passwords.) Can you protect against it with encryption, yes, but that doesn't mean you should invite the *insert favorite national enemy* agents to listen in.
FireFox was not "suitable technology". It doesn't matter if FF is superior for reasons XYZ, the teacher is not comfortable with it, while the student surely knows how to use IE. It is not the teacher's job to know about every browser (I use Opera, for instance), and approve its use. The teacher knows how IE works well enough not to think that they were going to get tricked by a student.
School is not just about solving problems, but also showing the teacher how you solve problems (for instance, showing work in math). Sometimes it is the teacher's responsibility to become educated, such as if a student uses calculus in econ or physics and the high school teacher does not know it, because it shows a deeper understanding of the material and produces better results. However, peripheral issues are not like that. If a teacher is unable to comfortably audit a student's web research, then that teacher is able to help the student less effectively, and it would be the student's fault for making more work for a probably underpaid and overstressed teacher.
For example, I prefer base 60 (divisible by 1-6 evenly, way superior to base 10). But math teachers always insisted I use base 10, because then they could follow what was going on without learning 50 new symbols.
I don't even think XP SP2 does that by default anymore.
Don't forget that those donations will be tax-deductible, which will increase the size of your rebate, which you will then donate, which will be tax-deductible, which will increase...
Oh, right, on Slashdot people know that infinite sums of fractions can sum to whole numbers. Still, one of my favorite ways of confusing the less mathematically inclined.
(And yes, as a subpoint, I do understand that fractional cents get dropped, thus it is not an infinite series...)
When children without credit cards started being one of their target consumer groups?
No, that's not the way it works. Rogers will make a large donation to the Republican and the Democratic party, thus insuring it access to whomever wins, and the politicians will put pressure on the regulators...
... oh, Candian. Sorry, carry on.
The iPod is a fad. People buy it more for its asthetic instead of functional reasons (or because they are fans of Macs). But let's be honest, it is just an MP3 player, and honestly, one of poor quality besides (admittedly, I gave up on them when an early one failed on me.) A fad can last a few years, but in ten years all the kids will be amazed that iPods were "hip". I mean, that double-tapedeck boombox thing is still going strong, right?
I doubt that Harvard is interested in his second-hand books. Same for MIT, and the 30-odd other colleges close enough to Cambridge. Where he lives there is not a shortage of good librarys anyone can access.
Actually, to some degree that is their purpose. Not to equalize people's skills, but to equalize the amount of work people can put in. Unfortunately, it is difficult to do one without doing the other. Why equalize the amount of work people can do, such as not letting you go over your 8 hour day for five minutes to ship before the end of the quarter. Because it is posisble to measure 8 hours of work, but impossible to quanitify the "emergency" nature of the work. Except they can monitarily. So they make a company pay overtime, the idea being that that is a dividing line between vital, time-sensitive work and just trying to get more work out of you.
But that doesn't answer why it is desirable, just wh the line is drawn there. The reason it is desirable is because otherwise there is a market failure. The unit cost for an hour of your time (to you) is so small in relation to the fixed costs (morgage, food, supporting a family, etc.) that all workers end up producing far more then they should, i.e. when the marginal cost of the hour of work is higher than the value they get for that hour.
Same thing happens with farms, and many other areas with huge discrepincies between fixed and marginal costs.
The top 1% have 39.7%, the next 19% have 51.5%, leaving 8.8% for the lower 80%. However, those numbers are five years old and I heard that wealth was being concentrated. I don't understand the tax rate analogy. If the people who own 91.2% of the country are only paying 50% of the taxes, that's fubar. Also, that leaves out payroll taxes, I'm sure.
Define "inherited it". Bill Gates made a huge fortune, however, a large part of the reason he could was that his dad was a fairly affluent lawyer, so he had support. In any case, I don't understand why them not inheriting it in any way implies anything. It is not as though inheritence is the only issue ever raised with capitialism, or even one of the major ones.
The wife of the US (now former? during Bush's administration) Surgeon General left her husband claiming that he would anally rape her. That is, she would wake up in the middle of the night in the middle of, well, anal sex. Her husband's defense? He was trying to have regular old vaginal sex with her, and missed. Leaving aside the fact that that is still verboten morally and legally, there is the extra irony of his job before moving into government. He was a gynocologist.
Any excuse I have to tell that story I take.
I agree. The code I'm proudest of was a set of horrible hacks (due to the language choosen), has no comments, but it worked perfectly and was solid. (It had no comments because I wrote it in 3 days while on a caffine high and it "needing to get done". When I went back to comment it (after my nap while the build was made/shipped to QA) I didn't understand what I had done.)
But that was the code I was proudest of. I'm also very proud of the program I am working on and the architecture it has. I'm proud that it is documented, and well-designed, and has classes where random hacks go to die, etc. But I think the thing is, the better your architecture/planning, the less proud you can be of any piece of code, because it fits in well, and thus is not clever. But the prouder (more proud?) you can be of the project.
Don't forget, you should also store all your variables in an array so they are easy to access ( prefereably global if you have 2 or more functions in your program). That way, you can cut down on the number of switch statements (which break the cashe leading to slower runtime). For instance, instead of switch (arg1) { case 0: a = b + c; break; case 1: b = a + c; break; } you can just use var[arg1] = var[abs(arg1 - 1)] + var[2]; etc.
The rule where I work is that the naming/commenting conventions must be strictly followed (generally 1/2 of my time). Generally, we have a plan going in, the architecture gets 80% of the way done, and hacks are added to deal with the hardest 20% because of time crunches.
Actually, I think that is the same problem that coveres the "comment every 4 lines" methodology. Where I currently work we have the "comment every 4 lines" thing going (and in comment blocks right justfied to column 81 no less). I've grown accustomed to reading the code, so they are not distracting. However, they are almost always useless:
Meanwhile, in a function, code will look like this: Which is sometimes the only comment given when you need to know that X calls Y which calls Z, and that function Z produces some error unless i > 0, etc.Actually, MS (until a few years ago) was very bad at this, never paying dividends, etc. Oh, the company was worth quite a bit, but they never returned the value to the shareholders, instead, using that cash on hand to grow.
True, but presumably having all your listeners know that 99.412341 is your station already has value.
But my example in no way excludes that both started broadcasting on the same day. Even if they didn't, it matters what day their broadcast was able to reach a certain area (a big radio station in the center of town wants to expand it's broadcast, and I'm a small station on the end of town. The big station was broadcasting first, but I was broadcasing first here.) Otherwise, my collection of 100,000 microtransmitters with a 1000 yrd range can wait for another station to get big and then expand into their turf while offering to sell the station. Or maybe it could be first in a predetermined region, with the regions and how close the frequencies could be being determined by some Federal agency...
Yup, if you read my posts I expressly say I'd rather have the FCC than a "first-come first-serve" mentality to the airwaves. I hate the concept of homesteading without an annual ad valorem tax.