No amount of GM can solve that problem. Once a species is gone it is GONE!
Until a sufficient amount of GM is done to recreate it, of course. Once a species is gone (especially a plant species), there it still likely to be some DNA left over, making its restoration relatively trivial as GM goes. Even if there isn't any residual DNA, a certain level of GM technology should allow the necessary gene sequence to be recreated.
(Not that I'm really disagreeing with your point, mind you, just pointing out a factual error.)
So not being allowed to link propriatary code to GPLed code is more free how?
The default condition (which is proprietary code, not public domain) allows no linking under any circumstances. GPL is more free in that it allows linking under the condition that the additional code be GPLed also.
Sure, if you're writing proprietary sotware, you can't use my GPLed code in it. But if my code were proprietary, you wouldn't be able to use it anyhow. You lose nothing by me GPLing my code.
They're pretty filling and taste reasonably good. At first. But after a week of having them for lunch every day, the thought of having them again is... less than appealing. Be careful not to overdo it.
Aren't you supposed to design an application before implemnting it in any way including putting data in a DB? I've worked at two
companies and had a ton of projects in school and none involved implemnting the database before the application was designed.
So I take it you've only worked on pristine new projects coded in a vacuum, then? While I've never known anyone (well, anyone who knew what they were doing) to start putting data into a new database before designing their app, I've encountered many cases of new apps being written to use existing databases, generally either because the new version needs to be backwards compatible with the old one or because the need has arisen to look at old data in a new way.
(Grumpy_Microbe has no visible posting history, so I'm not sure whether he's a troll or an astroturfer, but I feel like debunking this anyhow...)
in the KDE vs. GNOME debate, the two streams are incompatible (to a large extent). Either one could be eliminated in favour of the other
Incompatible? What are you talking about? I don't run either desktop, just a vanilla Window Maker, and I have no problems using either KDE or GNOME apps. Unless the projects are deliberately sabotaging each other, I could be running either environment and use the other's apps just as successfully as I do now. (If they were sabotaging each other, OSS means that I could defuse the spurious incompatibilities. Try doing that the next time that MS makes a change and "accidentally" breaks a competing application!)
And, secondly, someone has paraphrased the GPL as, "The Source will be with you. Always." If that big ol' GNOME foot stomps all over KDE, the KDE source will still be there and if I prefer KDE, I can keep using it. And even developing it! Neither one can be eliminated unless everyone comes to a unanimous decision that it's so awful they don't even want it blighting their backups.
With the centralized, shared source approach, upper management can make a decision and force the issue - something that's good for the company, the product, and the customers.
Uh-huh. After all, upper management knows far more about what's good for the users than the users ever could.
I agree with your statement that proprietary code is better for the company. But I'm more concerned with what's good for the users, and on that criterion, OSS wins, hands down.
The GPL only protects intellectual property belonging to the public domain
Nope. GPL code is not public domain, despite the many people who use the terms equivalently. GPL code is still under copyright, which is what allows the viral restrictions on its use to be imposed.
the concept of creating something and making money from it is core to success in today's economy. The GPL removes that right from the creators of the product.
Absolutely not. The GPL makes it difficult to make money by distributing work which has already been done, but does nothing to inhibit payment for doing the work. Even if you can't sell software as a product, you can still sell software development as a service.
And, of course, there's always the option to write your code from scratch without using any GPL code in the process. You are unconditionally barred from using Microsoft's source in your programs; why is it worse to allow you to use my code under the conditions of the GPL?
If you remove thier ability to leverage the creation of their software, and force each customer to pay the entire costs of the software
This one is just laughable... Because of traditionally restrictive proprietary licensing, "Microsoft, Oracle, and other large software development houses" already have to write all their components from scratch. If everything were GPL, Oracle would never have to reinvent another of Microsoft's wheels - each vendor would be able to leverage the others' work as well as their own. This leads to something similar to *nix shell commands: Lots of pieces that interoperate well with each other, allowing a large amount of custom software development to be done simply by wiring a number of existing components together. This is one of the major factors behind the success of Visual Basic, so why not encourage it to spread to all levels and types of software?
Shared source is an excellent way for customers to have an influence in the development process
No it's not. Unless the customers can make and redistribute their own changes to the software (or hire a consultant to do it for them), all new code still has to go through the vendor. Any code which conflicts with the company's plans (or some manager takes a personal dislike to it or a marketer thinks it's the wrong color or...) will be dropped by the wayside and never make it into a released product, regardless of how much benefit it might provide to the users. That's no different from today.
I suspect that this won't need eyeball tracking. The image is being projected onto your retina. You move your eyeball to look off to the side. Image is now projected onto a different section of your retina.
The net effect should be roughly equivalent to if the image was projected onto a pair of glasses: It remains stationary if you just move your eyes, but moves along with your head.
You have an interesting position, but I'm afraid I'll have to tell you it's wrong.
See, my parents were a couple of dope-smoking hippies. They quit when I was about 4, but, until that point, they were always quite happy to share with me. I have a couple uncles who continued smoking pot for several years after that (and I wouldn't be surprised if they still do) and if I happened by while they were smoking, they were also quick to let me join in.
The reason that "most people that try it are discovering it without any cultural background" is because it's not legal. My experience strongly suggests that, if marijuana were legalized, it would be at most one generation before the "wiser and older" users are there to instruct the newcomers. I wouldn't be surprised to find that this is also true of most other drugs.
(Yes, I realize I'm probably feeding a troll, but...)
We know our sources are better because:
We work with the stuff ourselves. First hand experience is more reliable than the vast majority of second- or third-hand sources.
If you know a lot about a subject, you can assess the credibility of a source more accurately than someone with little to no knowledge of the subject. Even if that someone is a professional journalist.
I won't deny that the journalists are better at finding sources than we are - that's their specialty, after all. But, once that source has been found, they're not as good at evaluating the source as an expert on the subject would be. The expert can tell the difference between incomprehensible babble and high-level brilliance. To most journalists, though, they're both incomprehensible.
And that's assuming that all journalists are concerned purely with identifying and reporting The Truth. There are those who suspect that, in the real world, many (perhaps even most) journalists are more concerned with ratings than with facts and will routinely choose the most sensational version of a story regardless of its credibility...
You are misinformed. Copyright is the only reason that the GPL is meaningful. Copyright grants the holder sole authority over how his work may be distributed. Most people stick with a standard "you can't distribute it" stance on works for which they hold the copyright. GPL, OTOH, grants license for distribution to anyone willing to accept certain constraints (source must be available, no further restrictions, etc.). Without copyright, the GPL has no force because a non-copyrighted work can be freely distributed under any terms the distributor may choose.
The further requirements you mention for "Truly 'GNU' GPL programs" do not negate copyright by any means - the registration requirement you mention is that the software's copyright must be registered. A further requirement which you didn't mention is that ownership of the copyright must be transferred to the GNU Foundation. This seems to me a fairly stong indication that GPL does indeed rely on copyright.
(IANAL, TINLA. If I have made any substantial errors, anyone who knows more about this than I do is invited to correct me.)
The CBC article mentioned in the blurb contains links to two other articles on this case. Both of them are better than CBC's if you're interested in the story behind the case rather than just the ruling.
It's completely different. If marijuana is growing in the middle of a corn field, you can look at the two plants and see that one is corn and one is something else - you may not know that it's marijuana, but it sure as hell ain't corn. Natural canola plants and Monsanto Round-Up Ready(TM) canola plants look identical to each other. The only ways to tell them apart are to spray Round Up(TM) herbicide on them (in which case the natural plant dies and Monsanto's doesn't) or perform a genetic analysis. It's not something that can be determined by casual observation.
The CD that ships with the NIC is a custom (Debian-based, IIRC) Linux install. If you don't like the limitiations it includes (it's configured as a plug-n-play web browser, so a lot of things are missing or inaccessible), copy the CD's contents to another machine's hard drive, modify the contents, turn it into an ISO, and burn your own NIC CD.
Re:Total waste volume
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 1
I expect that it will be less damaging in the long run, whether the woman who came up with the idea pushes for it or not. (And she just might, simply because of pressure from people sharing your view of the paper phone as an ecological disaster waiting to happen.) Why do I believe this? Because, if a biodegradable ink can be developed (which the current ink may already be), then the battery becomes the only source of hazardous waste in the device. Everything else is, essentially, just newspaper.
Now if we can just come up with a way to make cheap paper batteries, too...
(Yes, I know that paper can also be a problem. But it's not half as bad as the sorts of things you find on the average circuit board.)
It's actually slightly worse than that... If you click on the 'it won't look as cool' link, you get dumped on TechRepublic's front page - it doesn't appear to even try to send you to the article you were originally headed for.
I'm not sure that I agree with Hard_Code, but I think he has an interesting and valid analogy, so long as you note the "If no data is lost". Consider:
DOS attacks and sit-ins both prevent people from accessing a resource. This may also cause a loss of business in either case, whether by DOSing an e-commerce site or staging a sit-in near the entrance to a store. Clearing up the situation requires expenditure of resources either way - admins blocking IPs or police/security removing bodies.
Web page defacements are very benign compared to spray-painted graffiti, provided that a copy of the original page is preserved - the defacement can be cleaned up simply by moving the correct file back into place, while physical graffiti requires substantially more effort to remove.
You are entirely correct in equating database alterations to throwing a brick through a window. Both of these are destructive acts. But what is destroyed by a DOS attack or replacing a web page while keeping a copy of the original version?
I hate to say it, but the Linux games market is partly to blame... What games are (coming) out for Linux?
Quake series - 1st person shooter
Heretic 2 - 3rd person shooter^Wslasher
Tribes 2 - ??? person shooter
Soldier of Fortune - 1st person shooter
Heavy Gear 2 - Looks like an FPS, but supposedly doesn't play like one
See a pattern here? Granted, there are a few exceptions (Civ: CTP, HOMM3), but the commecial Linux gaming market is thoroughly dominated by FPS (and derivatives). FPS is fine for the occasional stress relief, but some of us prefer other types of games for serious play.
Where are the good strategic and tactical wargames for Linux? Not empire-building (Civ) and without silly restrictions on moving your units (HOMM), but solid wargames, whether real-time (Total Annihilation), turn-based (Steel Panthers), or somewhere in between (M.A.X., Shogun: Total War).
I know they're out there for Windows (I see them on the shelf every time I walk by and try to convince myself that they'd be worth the trouble of rebooting to play), but the commercial Linux gaming market seems to only be interested in cranking out Yet Another FPS.
There's more than one type of gamer. If the commercial Linux gaming companies want to expand, maybe they should think about porting more than one type of game.
For ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into
several sections:
perl Perl overview (this section)
perldelta Perl changes since previous version
perl5005delta Perl changes in version 5.005
perl5004delta Perl changes in version 5.004
perlfaq Perl frequently asked questions
etc. In similar fashion, man gmt could reference gmtfoo (for 'gmt foo'), gmt bar, and so forth.
(*sigh* Even as "Plain Old Text", the formatting is hosed. That's supposed to be two colums above.)
The problem is that even the free (beer) version of kylix is not (and will probably never be) Free (speech). If Borland wanted to, they could change the compiler internals in such a fashion that all existing kylix code no longer compiles or, worse, so that it compiles, but has back doors automatically installed by the compiler. (Pure paranoia: Borland is the same company that had the back door in Interbase for years before it was open-sourced and the back door was discovered.)
Even without Borland doing anything shady, there's the problem that, if an error is discovered in the compiler, there's not a damn thing we can do about it until Borland decides to fix it for us. If the marketing department someday takes over, they might not ever take time off from piling on features to fix the problem.
That is why kylix's commercial nature bothers some people.
Would that I could give you a +1 Funny... (Reread the last sentence - I suspect you meant to say that MS thinks Linux is an embarrassment to their business model.)
Doing? It's out. Can't remember how many months ago, but it just about knocked me flat on my ass to see "GURPS Traveller" on the shelf. Partly because it'd been so long since I saw anything to do with Traveller, but mostly because Traveller's unchanging, take-four-years-off-to-get-a-new-skill characters are so diametrically opposed to the constantly-evolving characters in GURPS.
If it's LGPL, then you can isolate the code in a shared library and Open-Source that, while keeping the rest closed. It does have to be a shared library, however; static ones won't do.
IANAL, but, by my reading of the LGPL, the preceding statement is false. LGPL code can be statically linked with proprietary code, but, if you do so, you must provide unlinked object files for the application and instructions for using those object files with a different version of the LGPL library.
Actually, your drive usage figures are off. TiVo runs live viewing through the hard drive too, so it is always writing to the hard drive and always reading from it, even if you're not recording or viewing.
But, yeah - my TiVo has been running its hard drive 24/7 for about as long as they've been available on the market (a year and a half?) without any definitively drive-related problems. (I've recently started to run into occasional freezes or heavy artifacting that could be from drive read errors, but I haven't tried to verify the cause. I just know that if I back up and watch the same bit again, it's fine the second time around.)
Slashdot Mirror
Step 2: Send mail to postmaster@mailhost.
(If this doesn't work, you can try various other usernames, but their system is broken. RFC 822 requires that postmaster must be a valid address.)
Until a sufficient amount of GM is done to recreate it, of course. Once a species is gone (especially a plant species), there it still likely to be some DNA left over, making its restoration relatively trivial as GM goes. Even if there isn't any residual DNA, a certain level of GM technology should allow the necessary gene sequence to be recreated.
(Not that I'm really disagreeing with your point, mind you, just pointing out a factual error.)
The default condition (which is proprietary code, not public domain) allows no linking under any circumstances. GPL is more free in that it allows linking under the condition that the additional code be GPLed also.
Sure, if you're writing proprietary sotware, you can't use my GPLed code in it. But if my code were proprietary, you wouldn't be able to use it anyhow. You lose nothing by me GPLing my code.
They're pretty filling and taste reasonably good. At first. But after a week of having them for lunch every day, the thought of having them again is... less than appealing. Be careful not to overdo it.
So I take it you've only worked on pristine new projects coded in a vacuum, then? While I've never known anyone (well, anyone who knew what they were doing) to start putting data into a new database before designing their app, I've encountered many cases of new apps being written to use existing databases, generally either because the new version needs to be backwards compatible with the old one or because the need has arisen to look at old data in a new way.
in the KDE vs. GNOME debate, the two streams are incompatible (to a large extent). Either one could be eliminated in favour of the other
Incompatible? What are you talking about? I don't run either desktop, just a vanilla Window Maker, and I have no problems using either KDE or GNOME apps. Unless the projects are deliberately sabotaging each other, I could be running either environment and use the other's apps just as successfully as I do now. (If they were sabotaging each other, OSS means that I could defuse the spurious incompatibilities. Try doing that the next time that MS makes a change and "accidentally" breaks a competing application!)
And, secondly, someone has paraphrased the GPL as, "The Source will be with you. Always." If that big ol' GNOME foot stomps all over KDE, the KDE source will still be there and if I prefer KDE, I can keep using it. And even developing it! Neither one can be eliminated unless everyone comes to a unanimous decision that it's so awful they don't even want it blighting their backups.
With the centralized, shared source approach, upper management can make a decision and force the issue - something that's good for the company, the product, and the customers.
Uh-huh. After all, upper management knows far more about what's good for the users than the users ever could.
I agree with your statement that proprietary code is better for the company. But I'm more concerned with what's good for the users, and on that criterion, OSS wins, hands down.
The GPL only protects intellectual property belonging to the public domain
Nope. GPL code is not public domain, despite the many people who use the terms equivalently. GPL code is still under copyright, which is what allows the viral restrictions on its use to be imposed.
the concept of creating something and making money from it is core to success in today's economy. The GPL removes that right from the creators of the product.
Absolutely not. The GPL makes it difficult to make money by distributing work which has already been done, but does nothing to inhibit payment for doing the work. Even if you can't sell software as a product, you can still sell software development as a service.
And, of course, there's always the option to write your code from scratch without using any GPL code in the process. You are unconditionally barred from using Microsoft's source in your programs; why is it worse to allow you to use my code under the conditions of the GPL?
If you remove thier ability to leverage the creation of their software, and force each customer to pay the entire costs of the software
This one is just laughable... Because of traditionally restrictive proprietary licensing, "Microsoft, Oracle, and other large software development houses" already have to write all their components from scratch. If everything were GPL, Oracle would never have to reinvent another of Microsoft's wheels - each vendor would be able to leverage the others' work as well as their own. This leads to something similar to *nix shell commands: Lots of pieces that interoperate well with each other, allowing a large amount of custom software development to be done simply by wiring a number of existing components together. This is one of the major factors behind the success of Visual Basic, so why not encourage it to spread to all levels and types of software?
Shared source is an excellent way for customers to have an influence in the development process
No it's not. Unless the customers can make and redistribute their own changes to the software (or hire a consultant to do it for them), all new code still has to go through the vendor. Any code which conflicts with the company's plans (or some manager takes a personal dislike to it or a marketer thinks it's the wrong color or...) will be dropped by the wayside and never make it into a released product, regardless of how much benefit it might provide to the users. That's no different from today.
The net effect should be roughly equivalent to if the image was projected onto a pair of glasses: It remains stationary if you just move your eyes, but moves along with your head.
See, my parents were a couple of dope-smoking hippies. They quit when I was about 4, but, until that point, they were always quite happy to share with me. I have a couple uncles who continued smoking pot for several years after that (and I wouldn't be surprised if they still do) and if I happened by while they were smoking, they were also quick to let me join in.
The reason that "most people that try it are discovering it without any cultural background" is because it's not legal. My experience strongly suggests that, if marijuana were legalized, it would be at most one generation before the "wiser and older" users are there to instruct the newcomers. I wouldn't be surprised to find that this is also true of most other drugs.
We know our sources are better because:
I won't deny that the journalists are better at finding sources than we are - that's their specialty, after all. But, once that source has been found, they're not as good at evaluating the source as an expert on the subject would be. The expert can tell the difference between incomprehensible babble and high-level brilliance. To most journalists, though, they're both incomprehensible.
And that's assuming that all journalists are concerned purely with identifying and reporting The Truth. There are those who suspect that, in the real world, many (perhaps even most) journalists are more concerned with ratings than with facts and will routinely choose the most sensational version of a story regardless of its credibility...
You are misinformed. Copyright is the only reason that the GPL is meaningful. Copyright grants the holder sole authority over how his work may be distributed. Most people stick with a standard "you can't distribute it" stance on works for which they hold the copyright. GPL, OTOH, grants license for distribution to anyone willing to accept certain constraints (source must be available, no further restrictions, etc.). Without copyright, the GPL has no force because a non-copyrighted work can be freely distributed under any terms the distributor may choose.
The further requirements you mention for "Truly 'GNU' GPL programs" do not negate copyright by any means - the registration requirement you mention is that the software's copyright must be registered. A further requirement which you didn't mention is that ownership of the copyright must be transferred to the GNU Foundation. This seems to me a fairly stong indication that GPL does indeed rely on copyright.
(IANAL, TINLA. If I have made any substantial errors, anyone who knows more about this than I do is invited to correct me.)
The CBC article mentioned in the blurb contains links to two other articles on this case. Both of them are better than CBC's if you're interested in the story behind the case rather than just the ruling.
It's completely different. If marijuana is growing in the middle of a corn field, you can look at the two plants and see that one is corn and one is something else - you may not know that it's marijuana, but it sure as hell ain't corn. Natural canola plants and Monsanto Round-Up Ready(TM) canola plants look identical to each other. The only ways to tell them apart are to spray Round Up(TM) herbicide on them (in which case the natural plant dies and Monsanto's doesn't) or perform a genetic analysis. It's not something that can be determined by casual observation.
The CD that ships with the NIC is a custom (Debian-based, IIRC) Linux install. If you don't like the limitiations it includes (it's configured as a plug-n-play web browser, so a lot of things are missing or inaccessible), copy the CD's contents to another machine's hard drive, modify the contents, turn it into an ISO, and burn your own NIC CD.
Now if we can just come up with a way to make cheap paper batteries, too...
(Yes, I know that paper can also be a problem. But it's not half as bad as the sorts of things you find on the average circuit board.)
The world really needs fewer sites like that.
You are entirely correct in equating database alterations to throwing a brick through a window. Both of these are destructive acts. But what is destroyed by a DOS attack or replacing a web page while keeping a copy of the original version?
- Quake series - 1st person shooter
- Heretic 2 - 3rd person shooter^Wslasher
- Tribes 2 - ??? person shooter
- Soldier of Fortune - 1st person shooter
- Heavy Gear 2 - Looks like an FPS, but supposedly doesn't play like one
See a pattern here? Granted, there are a few exceptions (Civ: CTP, HOMM3), but the commecial Linux gaming market is thoroughly dominated by FPS (and derivatives). FPS is fine for the occasional stress relief, but some of us prefer other types of games for serious play.Where are the good strategic and tactical wargames for Linux? Not empire-building (Civ) and without silly restrictions on moving your units (HOMM), but solid wargames, whether real-time (Total Annihilation), turn-based (Steel Panthers), or somewhere in between (M.A.X., Shogun: Total War).
I know they're out there for Windows (I see them on the shelf every time I walk by and try to convince myself that they'd be worth the trouble of rebooting to play), but the commercial Linux gaming market seems to only be interested in cranking out Yet Another FPS.
There's more than one type of gamer. If the commercial Linux gaming companies want to expand, maybe they should think about porting more than one type of game.
(*sigh* Even as "Plain Old Text", the formatting is hosed. That's supposed to be two colums above.)
It'll be a free download. The $99 gets you a box and (probably) manuals in addition to the CD.
Even without Borland doing anything shady, there's the problem that, if an error is discovered in the compiler, there's not a damn thing we can do about it until Borland decides to fix it for us. If the marketing department someday takes over, they might not ever take time off from piling on features to fix the problem.
That is why kylix's commercial nature bothers some people.
Would that I could give you a +1 Funny... (Reread the last sentence - I suspect you meant to say that MS thinks Linux is an embarrassment to their business model.)
Doing? It's out. Can't remember how many months ago, but it just about knocked me flat on my ass to see "GURPS Traveller" on the shelf. Partly because it'd been so long since I saw anything to do with Traveller, but mostly because Traveller's unchanging, take-four-years-off-to-get-a-new-skill characters are so diametrically opposed to the constantly-evolving characters in GURPS.
IANAL, but, by my reading of the LGPL, the preceding statement is false. LGPL code can be statically linked with proprietary code, but, if you do so, you must provide unlinked object files for the application and instructions for using those object files with a different version of the LGPL library.
This is the sort of thing that nondisclosure agreements cover. Noncompete agreements are something else entirely.
Nondisclosure: You can't steal the company's intellectual property
Noncompete: You can't work for any other company in the same industry
But, yeah - my TiVo has been running its hard drive 24/7 for about as long as they've been available on the market (a year and a half?) without any definitively drive-related problems. (I've recently started to run into occasional freezes or heavy artifacting that could be from drive read errors, but I haven't tried to verify the cause. I just know that if I back up and watch the same bit again, it's fine the second time around.)