Almost, but the trial goes on anyway. This would have been Microsoft's chance to defend themselves; because of this row, they now won't get a verbal chance (but can still submit written arguments). So it's as in your situation above; except, that you'd end up getting fined/jailed/license revoked or whatever despite the hearing not happeneing.
Not to mention, you can get exactly the same effect by messing with LD_PRELOAD, if you really want to do it the same way as Windows rather than one of the other ways that work for Linux.
Err, what sort of system are you using? First, most implementations of rm nowadays will refuse to delete / unless given special options; second, deleting the binary for rm doesn't get rid of running copies of the program itself (which in part, is why you can normally update a UNIX or Linux system without rebooting). The only thing I can think of that might act slightly like that would be Cygwin (where / is not really/, and which is based Windows where you can't delete running executables).
I used to go around and remove content that was cut and copied between pages by non original authors, because it violated the GFDL because the original authors information was not kept in the edit histories, naturally I was banned.
Why did you not just add the old history to the new history (either by putting it on the talk page with a link in the edit summary, adding it to the edit history, or by asking an admin to merge the histories for you)? You could have made your point, corrected the licensing situation, and not been trollish.
I know that when I posted a GPL-licensed image (PNG converted from pic) to Wikipedia (it was GPL-licensed by someone else, I had no say in the matter), I posted the pic source code to it on the image description page; the GPL requires that. When someone else converted it to SVG, they didn't; I suspect that's also correct, in that SVG images are generally modified by modifying the SVG, but PNG images created by rendering an image in a vector format are generally modified by modifying the original vector format.
As an interesting and tangentially related side note, there's immense trouble in trying to update the Wikipedia logo, because the information needed to make it has been lost (I'm not sure offhand whether they lost the source code, or the render settings, or both).
Unless the information in question was a copyright violation in the first place; if the person who posted it didn't have a license to license it under GFDL/CC-by-sa in the first place, they can't magically give Wikimedia or anyone else that right by posting it on Wikipedia. Apart from copyvios, though, you should be more or less correct. (There are plenty of good reasons to delete goatses from Wikipedia, by the way; the fact that it's a copyvio may or may not be the biggest, depending on your point of view.)
*The quoted material from wikipedia is reposted under the GNU Free Documentaion License. A full copy of the license is included below to comply with the licensing requirements.
Pretty much a perfect example of what's wrong with the GFDL; although arguably your quote from Wikipedia above was fair use, other legitimate reuses of it might not be. The GFDL was designed for books, where quoting the entire license is no problem; it wasn't designed for Slashdot comments, or newspaper articles, or any of a huge number of other possible situations.
I don't like features-withheld-until-paying programs; it means that the manufacturers have deliberately made the program worse than it could be. I may be unusual on this, though, I suppose.
It would certainly be technically possible to give someone a Linux distribution which contained some encrypted closed-source programs, and offer to give them the decryption key if they paid you money; I imagine it would be legally possible as well without violating any of the relevant licenses (especially if you were the copyright holder to the closed-source programs). After all, Linux's license doesn't make it illegal to use it to run closed-source software. I don't know of anyone who does this, though, nor do I think it would be a good idea.
The Terms of Use claim to be a contract. If they are, and if visitors agree to it, they can probably do anything. Obviously, those are two rather significant "if"s.
The source information is ridiculously general; it tends to be either blank, or list every source used anywhere in a very general way. If all the results cite two different versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica and also Wikipedia, how can we tell which particular Wikipedia page the information came from? (That's needed to know the author list and thus know the information required by Wikipedia's license, whether it's GFDL or CC-by-sa.)
Well, my experience has been that Linux PDF readers work much better than Windows PDF readers. I don't use Foxit because I don't like the licensing of it; Adobe Reader is awful as always, and Sumatra is nice although its UI needs work and it often renders differently to other readers. On the other hand, both Evince and KPDF are excellent at reading PDFs; they get out of the way and render PDFs as I expect them to render. (I wonder if KPDF is available for Windows yet, or if it will be in the future? That might be worth looking at...)
Well, here's my Ribbon complaint unrelated to change: it requires two clicks, rather than one, to access something on a tab you aren't on. The way it worked before, the menus contained everything (two clicks, if you know where things are and you turned that horrible autocollapse off), the toolbars contained the things you mostly used (one click). So most of the time, you can do what you need in a single click without the Ribbon there. With the Ribbon, it takes one click if you're doing something on the same tab as you were using before, and two otherwise; for me, that averages to more clicks on average. So someone who knew where things were under the old UI, especially if they set up their toolbars correctly, could be more productive than someone using the new UI who also knows where everything is. I'm not sure how much easier (or harder) the Ribbon makes things to find in the first place; you'd need a large community of people who had never used either version of Office before to test. But for people who already know where things are, it's a disadvantage. (For all I know, the Ribbon's better for people who never bothered to learn; if that's the majority of Office users, the Ribbon may be an improvement overall. But it isn't better for me!)
Yep, if you want to see Alpha really struggle, try "minimize x squared minus (x plus 3)"; if you translate its parsing of that back into English, you get "minimise x squared times the subtraction of x plus three", which doesn't even make sense. Here's its result: "min {x^2 Subtract[x+3]|-2=x=2} ~~ minimum | {4. Subtract[1.],4. Subtract[5.],Part[]^2 Subtract[Part[]+3.]} at x~~{}[[1]]". No, that doesn't make sense even in Mathematica; there are a lot of literal array-out-of-bounds in there.
I asked it "multiply 6 by 9 in base 13". It told me that it interpreted my question as a request to convert Times(6, 9) to base 13, but didn't actually tell me what the answer was (there was no "Result" section). When I downloaded the PDF of the answer, there was a "Result": "CalculateBaseForm(54Times, 13)".
I hope this is a temporary glitch; if Wolfram Alpha is having trouble using Mathematica, what hope do the rest of us have?
Yep, that pretty much matches up with what I thought. I didn't realise the DOS commands were quite that bad at error handling, though; presumably, they were improved somewhat before I started using them.
Not quite. Fail causes it to report the error to the program that attempted the operation; this is what POSIXy systems like UNIX and Linux do for everything (which is why you don't get abort/retry/fail at the Linux command line). A well-written program will normally exit at that point, which is why abort and fail look like they're doing much the same thing. A badly-written program will attempt to interpret the failure code as data, with potentially interesting results.
Nowadays many C compilers give warnings for certain operations that can fail, if the program is discarding the failure/success value rather than looking at it. (Higher-level languages like C generally throw an exception at that point, so it doesn't need special action on the part of the programmer to warn about the lack of.)
Well, here on Ubuntu, the.exe extension is actually associated with WINE. (And, of course, the actual native executables mostly have no extension, but you can easily determine what they are using file or just by looking for the +x flag.)
Caldera bought most of the old SCO (and later became The SCO Group); however, Tarentella was not included in that sale, and so, being part of the old "Santa Cruz Operation" has absolutely nothing to do with the new and rather confusingly named "The SCO Group" (formerly Caldera), who bought only the UNIX business from the old SCO. According to Wikipedia, they were eventually bought by Sun; so I suppose, technically Oracle owns them nowadays.
When will it have a 200% market share? And what will have happened to the world of computers to make such unlikely statistics possible?
Extrapolations like that tend to break down after a while; they aren't particularly useful unless we know whether that will break down after 35 days or 35 years.
Yes, charging for the first copy works. But you can't stop anyone who gets that first copy giving it away to other people after that; of course, it's entirely plausible that they'll keep it secret, or that other people will prefer to get future copies from you rather than the first person to get a copy, but IMO it's insane for a business to rely on that. (I'm agreeing with you here, just covering a slightly different point.)
Slashdot Mirror
Almost, but the trial goes on anyway. This would have been Microsoft's chance to defend themselves; because of this row, they now won't get a verbal chance (but can still submit written arguments). So it's as in your situation above; except, that you'd end up getting fined/jailed/license revoked or whatever despite the hearing not happeneing.
Not to mention, you can get exactly the same effect by messing with LD_PRELOAD, if you really want to do it the same way as Windows rather than one of the other ways that work for Linux.
Err, what sort of system are you using? First, most implementations of rm nowadays will refuse to delete / unless given special options; second, deleting the binary for rm doesn't get rid of running copies of the program itself (which in part, is why you can normally update a UNIX or Linux system without rebooting). The only thing I can think of that might act slightly like that would be Cygwin (where / is not really /, and which is based Windows where you can't delete running executables).
I used to go around and remove content that was cut and copied between pages by non original authors, because it violated the GFDL because the original authors information was not kept in the edit histories, naturally I was banned.
Why did you not just add the old history to the new history (either by putting it on the talk page with a link in the edit summary, adding it to the edit history, or by asking an admin to merge the histories for you)? You could have made your point, corrected the licensing situation, and not been trollish.
I know that when I posted a GPL-licensed image (PNG converted from pic) to Wikipedia (it was GPL-licensed by someone else, I had no say in the matter), I posted the pic source code to it on the image description page; the GPL requires that. When someone else converted it to SVG, they didn't; I suspect that's also correct, in that SVG images are generally modified by modifying the SVG, but PNG images created by rendering an image in a vector format are generally modified by modifying the original vector format.
As an interesting and tangentially related side note, there's immense trouble in trying to update the Wikipedia logo, because the information needed to make it has been lost (I'm not sure offhand whether they lost the source code, or the render settings, or both).
Unless the information in question was a copyright violation in the first place; if the person who posted it didn't have a license to license it under GFDL/CC-by-sa in the first place, they can't magically give Wikimedia or anyone else that right by posting it on Wikipedia. Apart from copyvios, though, you should be more or less correct. (There are plenty of good reasons to delete goatses from Wikipedia, by the way; the fact that it's a copyvio may or may not be the biggest, depending on your point of view.)
*The quoted material from wikipedia is reposted under the GNU Free Documentaion License. A full copy of the license is included below to comply with the licensing requirements.
Pretty much a perfect example of what's wrong with the GFDL; although arguably your quote from Wikipedia above was fair use, other legitimate reuses of it might not be. The GFDL was designed for books, where quoting the entire license is no problem; it wasn't designed for Slashdot comments, or newspaper articles, or any of a huge number of other possible situations.
I don't like features-withheld-until-paying programs; it means that the manufacturers have deliberately made the program worse than it could be. I may be unusual on this, though, I suppose.
It would certainly be technically possible to give someone a Linux distribution which contained some encrypted closed-source programs, and offer to give them the decryption key if they paid you money; I imagine it would be legally possible as well without violating any of the relevant licenses (especially if you were the copyright holder to the closed-source programs). After all, Linux's license doesn't make it illegal to use it to run closed-source software. I don't know of anyone who does this, though, nor do I think it would be a good idea.
The Terms of Use claim to be a contract. If they are, and if visitors agree to it, they can probably do anything. Obviously, those are two rather significant "if"s.
The source information is ridiculously general; it tends to be either blank, or list every source used anywhere in a very general way. If all the results cite two different versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica and also Wikipedia, how can we tell which particular Wikipedia page the information came from? (That's needed to know the author list and thus know the information required by Wikipedia's license, whether it's GFDL or CC-by-sa.)
Well, my experience has been that Linux PDF readers work much better than Windows PDF readers. I don't use Foxit because I don't like the licensing of it; Adobe Reader is awful as always, and Sumatra is nice although its UI needs work and it often renders differently to other readers. On the other hand, both Evince and KPDF are excellent at reading PDFs; they get out of the way and render PDFs as I expect them to render. (I wonder if KPDF is available for Windows yet, or if it will be in the future? That might be worth looking at...)
Well, here's my Ribbon complaint unrelated to change: it requires two clicks, rather than one, to access something on a tab you aren't on. The way it worked before, the menus contained everything (two clicks, if you know where things are and you turned that horrible autocollapse off), the toolbars contained the things you mostly used (one click). So most of the time, you can do what you need in a single click without the Ribbon there. With the Ribbon, it takes one click if you're doing something on the same tab as you were using before, and two otherwise; for me, that averages to more clicks on average. So someone who knew where things were under the old UI, especially if they set up their toolbars correctly, could be more productive than someone using the new UI who also knows where everything is. I'm not sure how much easier (or harder) the Ribbon makes things to find in the first place; you'd need a large community of people who had never used either version of Office before to test. But for people who already know where things are, it's a disadvantage. (For all I know, the Ribbon's better for people who never bothered to learn; if that's the majority of Office users, the Ribbon may be an improvement overall. But it isn't better for me!)
Yep, if you want to see Alpha really struggle, try "minimize x squared minus (x plus 3)"; if you translate its parsing of that back into English, you get "minimise x squared times the subtraction of x plus three", which doesn't even make sense. Here's its result: "min {x^2 Subtract[x+3]|-2=x=2} ~~ minimum | {4. Subtract[1.],4. Subtract[5.],Part[]^2 Subtract[Part[]+3.]} at x~~{}[[1]]". No, that doesn't make sense even in Mathematica; there are a lot of literal array-out-of-bounds in there.
It works if you enter it as "solve x squared equals two for x".
I asked it "multiply 6 by 9 in base 13". It told me that it interpreted my question as a request to convert Times(6, 9) to base 13, but didn't actually tell me what the answer was (there was no "Result" section). When I downloaded the PDF of the answer, there was a "Result": "CalculateBaseForm(54Times, 13)". I hope this is a temporary glitch; if Wolfram Alpha is having trouble using Mathematica, what hope do the rest of us have?
Yep, that pretty much matches up with what I thought. I didn't realise the DOS commands were quite that bad at error handling, though; presumably, they were improved somewhat before I started using them.
Not quite. Fail causes it to report the error to the program that attempted the operation; this is what POSIXy systems like UNIX and Linux do for everything (which is why you don't get abort/retry/fail at the Linux command line). A well-written program will normally exit at that point, which is why abort and fail look like they're doing much the same thing. A badly-written program will attempt to interpret the failure code as data, with potentially interesting results. Nowadays many C compilers give warnings for certain operations that can fail, if the program is discarding the failure/success value rather than looking at it. (Higher-level languages like C generally throw an exception at that point, so it doesn't need special action on the part of the programmer to warn about the lack of.)
Well, here on Ubuntu, the .exe extension is actually associated with WINE. (And, of course, the actual native executables mostly have no extension, but you can easily determine what they are using file or just by looking for the +x flag.)
Caldera bought most of the old SCO (and later became The SCO Group); however, Tarentella was not included in that sale, and so, being part of the old "Santa Cruz Operation" has absolutely nothing to do with the new and rather confusingly named "The SCO Group" (formerly Caldera), who bought only the UNIX business from the old SCO. According to Wikipedia, they were eventually bought by Sun; so I suppose, technically Oracle owns them nowadays.
Now, what feature drives Linux?
It's an excellent platform for programming on. That probably won't attract the majority of people, but it's what attracted me.
You use IE5?
When will it have a 200% market share? And what will have happened to the world of computers to make such unlikely statistics possible?
Extrapolations like that tend to break down after a while; they aren't particularly useful unless we know whether that will break down after 35 days or 35 years.
Yes, charging for the first copy works. But you can't stop anyone who gets that first copy giving it away to other people after that; of course, it's entirely plausible that they'll keep it secret, or that other people will prefer to get future copies from you rather than the first person to get a copy, but IMO it's insane for a business to rely on that. (I'm agreeing with you here, just covering a slightly different point.)
Of course it is. After all, Mathematica isn't whitespace-sensitive; so you just need a very very wide terminal.