Exactly. *online* stores. Amazon and the like. Not stores that have a physical presence, as well as a web-based marketing machine (and maybe the odd credit card service). Mind you, I'm talking about the *old* economy here, going online. Try finding a price on one of those.
The big deal is that what the web gaveth, the web tooketh away; you can't find a site anymore that produces prices, for fear that the competition or some pricegrabber site will write a little script that steals it all. Some stores really don't have anything more to offer than low prices and location. The web took away the relevance of location, and now it is taking away the relevance of their other asset - price. For you can always find it cheaper somewhere else. And instead of thinking to start offering service, or maybe package deals, they just start acting up against their (potential) customers.
When I was working in stocks (granted, this is the Amsterdam Exchange before Euronext we're talking about), you took a short position from the exchange itself and you couldn't get it for more than a day (if you could get it at all). I suppose if you're talking about a private broker, then you can effectively have a short position for as long as you like - mind you, your broker must like it too, or there won't be a deal - after all, it becomes more of a borrowing bet when you stretch it longer.
The guy was talking (out of his ass, obviously) about making a profit from a declining stock price. He also made it seem as if this happened over a longer period of time. Doing this by going short obviously isn't going to do it - markets want a balanced book by the end of the trading day. Options might do it, but only if you can find a trader who wants to sell you the right to purchase stock (now worth $20) in three months time (when you think it has declined to, say, $3) for $1 (if you want to make a profit of $2 a piece) - good luck with that.
And always been a good idea, but whitelists should be personal, with distributed advice and combined with greylisting and blacklisting algorithms. That is to say, I want the OS, when it installs, to have a few things in userland whitelisted, but only when I install something, can I add to the whitelist. You may throw in a bit of internet opinion, as in - 70% of users think that this program is Ok and 0% of users think that this program is malware, or sandbox this greylisted program until I whitelist it in a month's time. Same for email really. I want whitelisted 'from' addresses only. Plus any greylisted stuff that consists of one line only. And no blacklisted stuff (of course).
No. But since this is almost a private event, there should be more procedure: the organisation should decide that he is disturbing the event. Upon which the formal body that owns the place must say that he is now excluded from it, upon which the police is notified that the person must leave the premises lest he be privately charched with trespassing, after which the police must notify the person of this so he can leave. There is to be no self-motivated action by the police. Unless, of course, there is a local police law for the duration of the event that says that they can do so. But that's silly because the first route is sufficient.
Why ? Because almost every bit of the GNU tools, except maybe for the C library and the binutils package, has been replaceable with other tools for a long, long time now. Maybe not with the kind of quality that some of the GNU stuff brings (although in the case of bash, Gnome/Gtk, info, bison/flex that quality is debatable to say the least), but if the FSF were to push the issue, then I'm sure those alternatives would find their way to the top very quickly indeed. Stressing the fact that the original Linux kernel was compiled using gcc and uses a GNU userland is very 199*, I'm afraid. Linux and a lot of effort outside of Linux have grown a lot in the mean time and could be doing very well without GNU, thank you.
There's tcc, lcc and bcc. tcc also compiles the Linux kernel, or so I heard, but the resulting binaries aren't as fast as gcc's. Does it do c++, like the GNU compiler suite, and java and fortran too ?
The corporate world is full of people who don't recognize a computer when it isn't in full blown graphics mode, and seem to think that that is all anyone does with their computers. As long as there's a working Nvidia driver and they can plug in a mouse in the USB port, they're happy. After all, now their windows rotate and wobble and they can play the latest first person shooter games on the boss' time. The suggestion that I (or my friends and colleagues who do programming, or my parents who use it for browsing and printing photos) would have a need for Windows is laughable. In my case, I have a hard time using Windows or even a Mac, because most programming tools are a bitch to use under those operating systems - terminals are old fashioned or non existing, compilers don't ship by default, etcetera. In my parent's case, just de-lousing their PC from viruses and trojans would be an all-day task if they were running Windows; thankfully, they run a Mac.
I have nothing further to point out, except that someday soon, the internet is going to come to a standstill thanks to Windows.
Bah. My sig says nothing of any particular interest either. I wish I could be more deeply involved or something.
The first scenario means that when you sell your closed source gizmo, you'll still have to have some fine print somewhere, that says: 'Copyright blah blah'. With regards to your second scenario, the million Euro question seems to be whether the term 'redistribution' means 'redistribution unchanged' (I have a CD with source code, I make a copy, I give a copy to you) or 'redistribution with modifications' (I download source, make plenty of relevant changes to it, and put the new version up for download on my server). At what point can you claim enough ownership of the new code in order to justify a license change ? Or (one of a) dual license removal ? Or is it perhaps that the term 'redistribution' doesn't cover enough ground ?
That's not entirely true; globalization _does_ strive to level the economic playing field and certain areas of the world _are_ simply more suitable to do certain things with than others. It makes great sense to designate places of the world for certain types of production, given climate and presence of ore.
You seem to be trolling a bit but no, there is an alternative; keep the kernel GPLv2 and fork the GNU userland just before they go to GPLv3. That isn't such a herculean task as it at first might seem: much of the GNU stuff is at an end, so to speak; textutils, binutils, the shells and compilers are all pretty much finished works. Even Linus said that there may not be a Linux v3, because it's 'done'. Much of the applications that otherwise play on top of Linux are either windowed (which is a whole story onto itself - the quality of Gnome is debatable to put it friendlily) or services (most of those aren't made by the FSF at all). And there exist good alternatives for the GNU userland, as well - shells, compilers, you name it. The FSF may think they're holding Linux by the ears, but they're not.
Exacly. BerkeleyDB is one of the very pillars of the open source industry, and it comes with exactly such a license. Don't like it ? Yield some of the power you desire and use GDBM instead.
That's not a database; that's a log. If your database is supposed to never remove things from it, you're better off trying to invent a system that can cheaply apply deltas to itself, than forever keep pushing things on top of itself.
Oh I'm sure that libertarianism is having an influence on society. But its pure implementation would be as disastrous to it as communism has been - it just doesn't take into account the human factor, which is (partly and not completely but still) stupid, lazy, greedy, lusty. A coherent society longs for a bit of culture inside its laws.
Because so many nerds are oblivious to society, and libertarianism is a very oblivious political philosophy. It starts off with assuming anarchy, and then replaces any occurence of 'violence' with 'money'. Never mind that a libertarian society would inherit an old system in which people already have, or don't have a lot of money. Never mind that people would like to be able to _trust_ certain institutions a tad beyond 'I've paid them'. Never mind that people expect all sorts of emotional things from leaders that money won't ever be able to buy.
But it can work for you, if you're insular, unemotional, marketable and oblivious, but take any of these characteristics away from a person and libertarianism starts to fall apart for them. And that's the majority of society I'm talking about. It might not seem that way on slashdot, but it is.
This whole debate shows that licensing of software is a very shaky legal subject indeed. The whole copyright issue of it is clear - that belongs to the author(s). But books don't get compiled into binaries, and aren't licensed to an unknown group of readers; they're sold as hardcopies and read as-is. The icky thing here is the concept of a license: at best a social contract: a list of conditions of use under which I promise I won't sue you for copyright infringement. At worst completely unenforceable. Because what if my conditions are impossible to meet or inhumane or illegal in themselves ? Did anybody ever stop to consider whether it is at all possible to release something under a dual license ?
Next week: a completely new scheduler, written by Ingo, in 05:12:43.33213, called the 'Astoundingly Fair Scheduler', which doesn't look at all like this new improvement, especially - hey look ! Something shiny ! And in two weeks time, a defence written by Linus Torvalds, detailing why the AFS is so much better than the RFS, and why Ingo can be trusted so much more when it comes to maintaining stuff like that.
Slashdot Mirror
99% of online stores post prices.
Exactly. *online* stores. Amazon and the like. Not stores that have a physical presence, as well as a web-based marketing machine (and maybe the odd credit card service). Mind you, I'm talking about the *old* economy here, going online. Try finding a price on one of those.
The big deal is that what the web gaveth, the web tooketh away; you can't find a site anymore that produces prices, for fear that the competition or some pricegrabber site will write a little script that steals it all. Some stores really don't have anything more to offer than low prices and location. The web took away the relevance of location, and now it is taking away the relevance of their other asset - price. For you can always find it cheaper somewhere else. And instead of thinking to start offering service, or maybe package deals, they just start acting up against their (potential) customers.
When I was working in stocks (granted, this is the Amsterdam Exchange before Euronext we're talking about), you took a short position from the exchange itself and you couldn't get it for more than a day (if you could get it at all). I suppose if you're talking about a private broker, then you can effectively have a short position for as long as you like - mind you, your broker must like it too, or there won't be a deal - after all, it becomes more of a borrowing bet when you stretch it longer.
The guy was talking (out of his ass, obviously) about making a profit from a declining stock price. He also made it seem as if this happened over a longer period of time. Doing this by going short obviously isn't going to do it - markets want a balanced book by the end of the trading day. Options might do it, but only if you can find a trader who wants to sell you the right to purchase stock (now worth $20) in three months time (when you think it has declined to, say, $3) for $1 (if you want to make a profit of $2 a piece) - good luck with that.
Shorting can usually only be done on the same trading day. Otherwise, you're talking futures.
A bit like Sun-rays then. Thanks for the info.
And always been a good idea, but whitelists should be personal, with distributed advice and combined with greylisting and blacklisting algorithms. That is to say, I want the OS, when it installs, to have a few things in userland whitelisted, but only when I install something, can I add to the whitelist. You may throw in a bit of internet opinion, as in - 70% of users think that this program is Ok and 0% of users think that this program is malware, or sandbox this greylisted program until I whitelist it in a month's time. Same for email really. I want whitelisted 'from' addresses only. Plus any greylisted stuff that consists of one line only. And no blacklisted stuff (of course).
I thought they were a widget set. Or do they name anything Athena that comes out of MIT, thinking it's nice and Greek an' all ?
No. But since this is almost a private event, there should be more procedure: the organisation should decide that he is disturbing the event. Upon which the formal body that owns the place must say that he is now excluded from it, upon which the police is notified that the person must leave the premises lest he be privately charched with trespassing, after which the police must notify the person of this so he can leave. There is to be no self-motivated action by the police. Unless, of course, there is a local police law for the duration of the event that says that they can do so. But that's silly because the first route is sufficient.
It's an entirely reasonable request.
Which can also promptly be rejected.
Why ? Because almost every bit of the GNU tools, except maybe for the C library and the binutils package, has been replaceable with other tools for a long, long time now. Maybe not with the kind of quality that some of the GNU stuff brings (although in the case of bash, Gnome/Gtk, info, bison/flex that quality is debatable to say the least), but if the FSF were to push the issue, then I'm sure those alternatives would find their way to the top very quickly indeed. Stressing the fact that the original Linux kernel was compiled using gcc and uses a GNU userland is very 199*, I'm afraid. Linux and a lot of effort outside of Linux have grown a lot in the mean time and could be doing very well without GNU, thank you.
There's tcc, lcc and bcc. tcc also compiles the Linux kernel, or so I heard, but the resulting binaries aren't as fast as gcc's. Does it do c++, like the GNU compiler suite, and java and fortran too ?
The corporate world is full of people who don't recognize a computer when it isn't in full blown graphics mode, and seem to think that that is all anyone does with their computers. As long as there's a working Nvidia driver and they can plug in a mouse in the USB port, they're happy. After all, now their windows rotate and wobble and they can play the latest first person shooter games on the boss' time. The suggestion that I (or my friends and colleagues who do programming, or my parents who use it for browsing and printing photos) would have a need for Windows is laughable. In my case, I have a hard time using Windows or even a Mac, because most programming tools are a bitch to use under those operating systems - terminals are old fashioned or non existing, compilers don't ship by default, etcetera. In my parent's case, just de-lousing their PC from viruses and trojans would be an all-day task if they were running Windows; thankfully, they run a Mac.
I have nothing further to point out, except that someday soon, the internet is going to come to a standstill thanks to Windows.
Bah. My sig says nothing of any particular interest either. I wish I could be more deeply involved or something.
The first scenario means that when you sell your closed source gizmo, you'll still have to have some fine print somewhere, that says: 'Copyright blah blah'. With regards to your second scenario, the million Euro question seems to be whether the term 'redistribution' means 'redistribution unchanged' (I have a CD with source code, I make a copy, I give a copy to you) or 'redistribution with modifications' (I download source, make plenty of relevant changes to it, and put the new version up for download on my server). At what point can you claim enough ownership of the new code in order to justify a license change ? Or (one of a) dual license removal ? Or is it perhaps that the term 'redistribution' doesn't cover enough ground ?
That's not entirely true; globalization _does_ strive to level the economic playing field and certain areas of the world _are_ simply more suitable to do certain things with than others. It makes great sense to designate places of the world for certain types of production, given climate and presence of ore.
You seem to be trolling a bit but no, there is an alternative; keep the kernel GPLv2 and fork the GNU userland just before they go to GPLv3. That isn't such a herculean task as it at first might seem: much of the GNU stuff is at an end, so to speak; textutils, binutils, the shells and compilers are all pretty much finished works. Even Linus said that there may not be a Linux v3, because it's 'done'. Much of the applications that otherwise play on top of Linux are either windowed (which is a whole story onto itself - the quality of Gnome is debatable to put it friendlily) or services (most of those aren't made by the FSF at all). And there exist good alternatives for the GNU userland, as well - shells, compilers, you name it. The FSF may think they're holding Linux by the ears, but they're not.
Exacly. BerkeleyDB is one of the very pillars of the open source industry, and it comes with exactly such a license. Don't like it ? Yield some of the power you desire and use GDBM instead.
We'll get Lotus Notes into OpenOffice now - run for the Hills !
You forgot: [Exhales]
As long as it means operating the escape key with one of Angelinas boobies, I'm all for it !
That's not a database; that's a log. If your database is supposed to never remove things from it, you're better off trying to invent a system that can cheaply apply deltas to itself, than forever keep pushing things on top of itself.
Yeah, not to nitpick but, you see; 'i', being a variable-name, would be a properly camel-cased 'I' from the point of view of the spellchecker.
Oh I'm sure that libertarianism is having an influence on society. But its pure implementation would be as disastrous to it as communism has been - it just doesn't take into account the human factor, which is (partly and not completely but still) stupid, lazy, greedy, lusty. A coherent society longs for a bit of culture inside its laws.
Because so many nerds are oblivious to society, and libertarianism is a very oblivious political philosophy. It starts off with assuming anarchy, and then replaces any occurence of 'violence' with 'money'. Never mind that a libertarian society would inherit an old system in which people already have, or don't have a lot of money. Never mind that people would like to be able to _trust_ certain institutions a tad beyond 'I've paid them'. Never mind that people expect all sorts of emotional things from leaders that money won't ever be able to buy.
But it can work for you, if you're insular, unemotional, marketable and oblivious, but take any of these characteristics away from a person and libertarianism starts to fall apart for them. And that's the majority of society I'm talking about. It might not seem that way on slashdot, but it is.
This whole debate shows that licensing of software is a very shaky legal subject indeed. The whole copyright issue of it is clear - that belongs to the author(s). But books don't get compiled into binaries, and aren't licensed to an unknown group of readers; they're sold as hardcopies and read as-is. The icky thing here is the concept of a license: at best a social contract: a list of conditions of use under which I promise I won't sue you for copyright infringement. At worst completely unenforceable. Because what if my conditions are impossible to meet or inhumane or illegal in themselves ? Did anybody ever stop to consider whether it is at all possible to release something under a dual license ?
Next week: a completely new scheduler, written by Ingo, in 05:12:43.33213, called the 'Astoundingly Fair Scheduler', which doesn't look at all like this new improvement, especially - hey look ! Something shiny ! And in two weeks time, a defence written by Linus Torvalds, detailing why the AFS is so much better than the RFS, and why Ingo can be trusted so much more when it comes to maintaining stuff like that.