Most likely, a pointy-haired hero armed with only his sword and a rag-tag bunch to back him up will attack the nuclear waste to death, after finding the vague hints we've left for no reason in our oceanfloor palace. I wouldn't worry about it.
The geekiest way I ever got free access to anything was in junior high, when I downloaded the source for a skeleton terminal program for Turbo Pascal 6, which used a fossil driver. I hacked the super-basic terminal to play a MajorBBS game called Archery, which was quite hard for humans, but perfectly winnable for a machine; the game cost credits, and on the occasion that you won would pay out quite a bit more.
I got someone to give me some starter credits, because I had no way to pay for a BBS account those days (I mostly called free ones). Then, I ran my terminal, let it play archery perfectly for a while, and ended up with millions of credits. The sysop didn't notice, or care if he did, and I played those stupid MajorBBS games for free:-)
This wasn't illegal, or "hacking" in the sense used in this article, but at the time I was pretty pleased with myself.
Yeah, this sort of thing goes on at lots of places, as you imply, not just Google. I think there's also a "cool" factor--when you work at a cool company where half the employees are drinking the "we're all geniuses" kool-aid like Google (and there are lots of others, I don't mean to single out Google either), you may know about existing alternatives and decide you can do better, and the time investment to build and maintain that technology is justified.
Tagged "notinventedhere", as NIH syndrome is the name I first heard for this anti-pattern.
However, it wouldn't be so bad to have a bootloader with an option to fall back to the last working version, even if this option is normally bypassed. I'm not familiar with the internals of the PS3, so I don't know how difficult this would be, but it wouldn't have been hard to design a console in which this was simple to do, so I can't see why they wouldn't have.
I don't work there anymore (this was a couple years ago), but I can assure you, regardless of the logic behind it, the legal department was never interested in my input;-)
Working at a company with multiple physically distant colos, our legal dept informed us that we could not alter GPL code and push it to the servers without distributing the source publicly, because copying it over to the physically distant servers could be (and was presumed to be) "distribution". So, even "owning" every box it ran on, and giving binaries to no one else, legal felt distribution was taking place--or at least, felt it was a serious enough interpretation that they wouldn't want us to get sued after assuming it was false.
How would that prevent rotating registrars for tasting? If you have a five-day tasting window, and the prohibition is for 30 days, that would only require six registrars, right?
I don't think they do, in entirety. Music is subject to compulsory licensing. Now, compulsory licensing may not have come up in this particular case, but the GPL and compulsory licensing are not compatible, so Radiohead licensing their work under the GPL wouldn't have the effect they think it would.
IANAL, and I don't claim to understand copyright law, either, but you can look up compulsory licensing on Wikipedia, which links to the relevant text of the copyright code. Of course, the code is interpreted by case law and such, so that's not enough to really "understand copyright", but that's all I've got, I'm afraid. Worse yet, I can't even assert that only US law applies, though in this case I think it's true.
Judging from the discussion here, most of the comments that come across as confident or assertive are made by people who don't really understand what they are talking about. I wouldn't describe everyone's comments that way, and I've got nothing against confidence backed by actual knowledge, but on the whole I think Slashdot would be better off with a dose of humility.
This is a pretty major point, for a minority of individuals. I'll use myself as an example:
My handwriting is inverted, which is to say I start my characters at the bottom, and tend to spiral outward from the center, which is the sort of thing they still try to un-teach the same way they used to try to un-teach left-handedness. While it's possible for me to learn a system like the Palm's, I didn't know this before I bought a Palm III, and though I used it a lot, it was always fairly hard for me.
In other words, Palm's system made recognition much simpler on the technology side, but this sort of system is simply not workable as a solution for the population as a whole. (For individuals, yes, but . ..)
Is anyone else annoyed that they can't remove idle / entertainment categories from display in preferences? Or do I have some sort of preference set that gives me an older interface without these options, and everyone else has already figured out how to ignore them?
For a science fictional reason why these answers might not be "nothing", take a look at Greg Egan's short stories _Luminous_ and _Dark Integers_. If nothing else, they're pretty entertaining:-)
I'm not a lawyer, so I won't try to refute this, but I will ask for more information. Can you provide a reference to case law or US code on the subject? If not, can you provide any other form of cite for the defense you outline? I'm sympathetic but skeptical.
Ah, yes. The Independent article did, in fact, appear in 2006, three days after the Wikipedia entry; when I wrote that you were mistaken, I verified the dates only from the Wikipedia history and the Independent article, because TFA was too slow to load. (This time, I was more patient, and it loaded after only waiting for three minutes.) So, the "three days" in the summary is correct, while TFA mistakenly says 2007 instead of 2006 three times (!).
. . . Unusual, isn't it? The summary is more accurate than the article!
While I agree with the parent in almost every way, you should note that recommending advil as a way to die is most assuredly NOT telling them "how to do it less painfully". That's a rather painful way to go. (Tylenol is worse.)
Personally, I'm glad people told me how painful, for example, a tylenol overdose would be, when I was younger and suicidal. It was probably the most persuasive thing anyone could have told me at the time to keep me from doing it. If my friend hadn't told me about that, I'd have gone through with it, and either have my stomach pumped or have died in agony, neither of which was what I wanted as an annoying, angsty, suicidal teen.
Suicide, in general, is pretty messy and painful, hard, and most methods tend not to kill but only make life much, much worse when you survive. I think telling people this is a good thing, because most suicidal people want to *end* pain, not cause themselves more of it, so the facts can help dissuade people. On top of that, simply talking about suicide (rather than getting angry and trying to censor discussion of it) can allow suicidal people to vent and maybe take off their tunnel-vision goggles, and makes it more possible for them to seek help.
I agree for the most part, and have a similar config. But I do use menus! When it became hard to find a good keyboard without microsoft and menu keys, I bound windows to meta, and I bound the menu key to open my root menu. So for example to start a new rxvt, I hit menu, followed by enter. (I used to have separate shortcuts to start various apps, but the menu is nice.)
The most important part of the fvwm interface for me is focus-follows-mouse, along with shift-arrow to move the cursor by 10%, or alt-arrow to move the screen by 100%. This lets me navigate spatially laid out windows (which must never overlap; I hate cluttered work space). So, I have no pager, as I switch windows by moving the cursor with keys--or occasionally with the mouse, but I have mouse-related RSI problems, so mostly keys. My desktop is entirely unadorned, in fact!
As I see it, working with 3x3 desks with non-overlapping windows, compared to a single desktop with overlapping windows, is very much like comparing a large wide-open physical workspace to a small desk with cluttered piles of paper, constantly going through the mess to find what's important. It's impossible for me to understand people who prefer the latter! (Apparently, most people?)
I've been watching them weekly since their hilarious "Rejected Wiiplay Games" movie. They're also the Desert Bus For Hope people. Anyway, they're somewhat hit-or-miss, but mostly hit IMO: http://loadingreadyrun.com/
Slashdot Mirror
Simple! Perpetual orbit with booster rockets. It's a lot like missing the ground.
They already made two! (Electric Boogaloo!)
While that may be an informed (if incorrect) guess, why guess at all when the facts are at hand? Article didn't load?
Most likely, a pointy-haired hero armed with only his sword and a rag-tag bunch to back him up will attack the nuclear waste to death, after finding the vague hints we've left for no reason in our oceanfloor palace. I wouldn't worry about it.
The geekiest way I ever got free access to anything was in junior high, when I downloaded the source for a skeleton terminal program for Turbo Pascal 6, which used a fossil driver. I hacked the super-basic terminal to play a MajorBBS game called Archery, which was quite hard for humans, but perfectly winnable for a machine; the game cost credits, and on the occasion that you won would pay out quite a bit more.
I got someone to give me some starter credits, because I had no way to pay for a BBS account those days (I mostly called free ones). Then, I ran my terminal, let it play archery perfectly for a while, and ended up with millions of credits. The sysop didn't notice, or care if he did, and I played those stupid MajorBBS games for free :-)
This wasn't illegal, or "hacking" in the sense used in this article, but at the time I was pretty pleased with myself.
Yeah, this sort of thing goes on at lots of places, as you imply, not just Google. I think there's also a "cool" factor--when you work at a cool company where half the employees are drinking the "we're all geniuses" kool-aid like Google (and there are lots of others, I don't mean to single out Google either), you may know about existing alternatives and decide you can do better, and the time investment to build and maintain that technology is justified.
Tagged "notinventedhere", as NIH syndrome is the name I first heard for this anti-pattern.
However, it wouldn't be so bad to have a bootloader with an option to fall back to the last working version, even if this option is normally bypassed. I'm not familiar with the internals of the PS3, so I don't know how difficult this would be, but it wouldn't have been hard to design a console in which this was simple to do, so I can't see why they wouldn't have.
I don't work there anymore (this was a couple years ago), but I can assure you, regardless of the logic behind it, the legal department was never interested in my input ;-)
Working at a company with multiple physically distant colos, our legal dept informed us that we could not alter GPL code and push it to the servers without distributing the source publicly, because copying it over to the physically distant servers could be (and was presumed to be) "distribution". So, even "owning" every box it ran on, and giving binaries to no one else, legal felt distribution was taking place--or at least, felt it was a serious enough interpretation that they wouldn't want us to get sued after assuming it was false.
How would that prevent rotating registrars for tasting? If you have a five-day tasting window, and the prohibition is for 30 days, that would only require six registrars, right?
At my last job, BCP guidelines required both: a minimum of four servers for anything, two of which must be at a physically distant datacenter.
I don't think they do, in entirety. Music is subject to compulsory licensing. Now, compulsory licensing may not have come up in this particular case, but the GPL and compulsory licensing are not compatible, so Radiohead licensing their work under the GPL wouldn't have the effect they think it would.
IANAL, and I don't claim to understand copyright law, either, but you can look up compulsory licensing on Wikipedia, which links to the relevant text of the copyright code. Of course, the code is interpreted by case law and such, so that's not enough to really "understand copyright", but that's all I've got, I'm afraid. Worse yet, I can't even assert that only US law applies, though in this case I think it's true.
Judging from the discussion here, most of the comments that come across as confident or assertive are made by people who don't really understand what they are talking about. I wouldn't describe everyone's comments that way, and I've got nothing against confidence backed by actual knowledge, but on the whole I think Slashdot would be better off with a dose of humility.
This is a pretty major point, for a minority of individuals. I'll use myself as an example:
My handwriting is inverted, which is to say I start my characters at the bottom, and tend to spiral outward from the center, which is the sort of thing they still try to un-teach the same way they used to try to un-teach left-handedness. While it's possible for me to learn a system like the Palm's, I didn't know this before I bought a Palm III, and though I used it a lot, it was always fairly hard for me.
In other words, Palm's system made recognition much simpler on the technology side, but this sort of system is simply not workable as a solution for the population as a whole. (For individuals, yes, but . . .)
Is anyone else annoyed that they can't remove idle / entertainment categories from display in preferences? Or do I have some sort of preference set that gives me an older interface without these options, and everyone else has already figured out how to ignore them?
This follows a similar release by the French in March 2007, which can be found here: http://www.cnes-geipan.fr/
For a science fictional reason why these answers might not be "nothing", take a look at Greg Egan's short stories _Luminous_ and _Dark Integers_. If nothing else, they're pretty entertaining :-)
I'm not a lawyer, so I won't try to refute this, but I will ask for more information. Can you provide a reference to case law or US code on the subject? If not, can you provide any other form of cite for the defense you outline? I'm sympathetic but skeptical.
Ah, yes. The Independent article did, in fact, appear in 2006, three days after the Wikipedia entry; when I wrote that you were mistaken, I verified the dates only from the Wikipedia history and the Independent article, because TFA was too slow to load. (This time, I was more patient, and it loaded after only waiting for three minutes.) So, the "three days" in the summary is correct, while TFA mistakenly says 2007 instead of 2006 three times (!).
. . . Unusual, isn't it? The summary is more accurate than the article!
Sorry, you made a mistake. Both the wikipedia diff and the article are from Nov 2006. "Three days" is correct.
While I agree with the parent in almost every way, you should note that recommending advil as a way to die is most assuredly NOT telling them "how to do it less painfully". That's a rather painful way to go. (Tylenol is worse.)
Personally, I'm glad people told me how painful, for example, a tylenol overdose would be, when I was younger and suicidal. It was probably the most persuasive thing anyone could have told me at the time to keep me from doing it. If my friend hadn't told me about that, I'd have gone through with it, and either have my stomach pumped or have died in agony, neither of which was what I wanted as an annoying, angsty, suicidal teen.
Suicide, in general, is pretty messy and painful, hard, and most methods tend not to kill but only make life much, much worse when you survive. I think telling people this is a good thing, because most suicidal people want to *end* pain, not cause themselves more of it, so the facts can help dissuade people. On top of that, simply talking about suicide (rather than getting angry and trying to censor discussion of it) can allow suicidal people to vent and maybe take off their tunnel-vision goggles, and makes it more possible for them to seek help.
The analogy "pretending to be a 1981 IBM PC" is a bad one. iPhone dev isn't that open!
The most important part of the fvwm interface for me is focus-follows-mouse, along with shift-arrow to move the cursor by 10%, or alt-arrow to move the screen by 100%. This lets me navigate spatially laid out windows (which must never overlap; I hate cluttered work space). So, I have no pager, as I switch windows by moving the cursor with keys--or occasionally with the mouse, but I have mouse-related RSI problems, so mostly keys. My desktop is entirely unadorned, in fact!
As I see it, working with 3x3 desks with non-overlapping windows, compared to a single desktop with overlapping windows, is very much like comparing a large wide-open physical workspace to a small desk with cluttered piles of paper, constantly going through the mess to find what's important. It's impossible for me to understand people who prefer the latter! (Apparently, most people?)
I resemble that remark!
If you're being sarcastic, I completely missed it. Otherwise? Bookmarks.
I've been watching them weekly since their hilarious "Rejected Wiiplay Games" movie. They're also the Desert Bus For Hope people. Anyway, they're somewhat hit-or-miss, but mostly hit IMO: http://loadingreadyrun.com/