They just post a few hundred angry messages when you put such articles up.
Remember, it's not the just editors that put articles up. Users have to submit the articles. If you're just whining about the articles here and never go looking for any news that might be cool to have on/., you're part of the problem.
If you read the copyright agreement when you downloaded or ran our
program you will see that Anti-spyware publishers/software houses
are NOT allowed to download, run or examine the software in any
way.
I am not a lawyer, I just read about law on Slashdot.
As far as I know, copyright law gives you the right to control transfer (copying) of the program. It doesn't give you the right to control how someone who is in possession of your program uses it.
Furthermore, since you as the copyright holder perfectly freely distribute the program from the URL http://www.spymon.com/downloads/install.exe, your company is the only one doing any distributing. You can hardly be infringing on your own copyrights. I'd like to see you try to get a criminal court to convict someone for downloading a file from your website using a public URL.
Oh, come on now. Here's all you need to ask yourself:
* Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, including with less flexible terms than you distribute it? Pick the BSD license.
* Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, as * long as they grant others at least the same rights you granted them? Pick the GPL.
Nearly correct, but your second one should be "as long as they grant others the same rights over their entire program, not just the part they got from you".
And you need the third one - Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, possibly as part of a larger program, as long as they grant others at least the same rights you granted them on the parts you made? Pick the LGPL.
The thing is though, that you also come across as an expert if you package the truth in fancy mumbo jumbo. If I tell a client the plain truth, in words they understand, I come across as amateur and as a person whose advice can be ignored compared to when I say the exact same thing using words that sound good, mean exactly the same, and are unknown to them, while dressing up in a suit. Even after working intensively with these people for a year.
The interesting corollary is that if you are an honest professional and your client does not know much about IT, it is your duty to your client to package good advice in a format that he doesn't understand, but will accept as gospel. Ironic but true.
That marketing practice is age old because it works, and people expect it from you. Don't think you can ignore it just because you're well meaning and knowledgeable.
For any real programming task, the question has to be: why do you care baout that? Is it, specifically, a bottleneck in your code as detected with profiling tools?
When the programming task is something like real-time image processing (computer vision), this kind of thing can make a serious difference. If 90% of your time is spent running these kinds of loops over and over again, an improvement in time will make a real difference on what combination of methods you have time for;
Hence his question. In those sort of situations, you have a detected bottleneck that you found out about with profiling tools. And you don't need ask Slashdot, you just try both options and see which profiles better. If it's not one of those situations, it's just wanking around.
OK, I'm just being an arse here, I know that the definition of "liberal" has been warped in the states, but I've never understood how this new political definition came about; socialist things are always attributed to the "liberals".
Well, as you probably know, 'liber' is Latin for 'free'. It's a pretty generic word, and a positive one; who wouldn't want to be called pro-freedom? (regardless of the fact that nowadays 'liberal' is used pretty negatively by many people, they won't usually claim to be against freedom)
But in politics, there are two big issues that have to do with freedom - free markets, and personal freedom. Someone who is against state intervention in the economy (for freedom) may still feel that drugs should be strictly controlled, or that only straight people should be allowed to marry (against freedom).
What's generally known as the political "left" is a group of ideas that's slightly more on the side of personal freedom, and slightly less on the side of free markets; and the political right is for a free economy and not as much for personal freedoms. In Europe, the right-wing version is called "liberal", in the US the left wing version is called "liberal".
Myself, I'm extremely for personal freedom, and for free markets, but I do believe that state intervention is necessary to keep them as free as possible. In ways, I'm much more of a free market madman than most on the political right - I believe that things like global warming can only be solved by means of the free market, and that to make that possible people and companies should be responsible for cleaning up their own CO2, by being forced by government to be CO2 neutral (if you're not, government would cleanup your CO2 output for you, but you will personally get the bill, and they're inefficient as heck). That way the free market would drive companies to clean production methods quickly, and people would pick the cleaner method by voting with their wallets. Free markets can solve a lot, we just need to apply them with more consistency.
Seriously, why would you spend all that time and money building a machine to sort 18,000 larvae per hour instead of just building an equally impressive FLY KILLING MACHINE.
These mosquites aren't rounded up, they're bred. And they're sterile. They will breed, but not produce offspring. Releasing thousands of them into the wild will reduce the offspring of the wild population. And that's just reiterating the summary...
Of course, if you can build the fly killing machine, by all means do so.
if you want to do something for your professional career, don't waste your time with those kind of frameworks.
If you want to do something for your professional career, get familiar with as varied a collection of tools as you can. Know the pros and cons of each. Actually test their performance, make toy projects, steal ideas and patterns. Be opinionated, but prepared to honestly choose the best tool for the job you're given, and to explain why it is the best, to suits and to techies. A few hours getting to know something new is never wasted.
Before I knew God I had a fear of death from like when I was 6 years old. Before I knew everyone died, I thought people just got old. I wanted to be content to just live forever playing newer and better video games. [...] I found out God exists for a fact then I realized he promises eternal life!
Yay, back to just playing newer and better video games it is!
Also having a documentation will keep the leader itself on the correct path and not stray from it's original design.
It is extremely rare that the original design is the correct path.
Re:To hack or not to hack, that is the question!
on
Hacking - Art or Science?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem is that "hack" and "hacking" are extremely badly defined. In fact, it manages to have a few completely opposite meanings. A word that means both beautifully elegant sublimely crafted work, and crisis time horrible stopgap measure is not very well defined. Let alone the fact that the majority of people who use the word use it to mean breaking into computers. You can have heated fights about whether something is a hack or not, where both sides are equally right and completely opposite.
A bit like with both art and science actually, but not quite. Art is notoriously difficult to define, but we all still have a similar idea about what the word means. A bit of opinion - the fact that something is or isn't functional has no relation to whether it is or isn't art.
Science is well defined. Science is a process of finding out how things work, by thinking up a way how the world might be, and then testing that idea really rigorously. It's just that there's groups of people with agendas who try to make it look like there's a discussion alive, trying to get FSMism, creationism, moon landing denial, global warming denial, Bigfoot etc into scientific discussions. But that's just flamebait with an agenda.
So I'd say that hacking isn't really either, except that perhaps those really elegant beautiful hacks could be seen as art.
If you don't distribute MySQL, you're under no restriction whatsoever
If you do want to distribute, MySQL is GPL
Besides, MySQL goes out of their way to give you even more freedom to distribute it if you want to bundle it with stuff that has one of several incompatible licenses
We like to call ourselves professionsals, but compare our jobs to that of, say, a mechanical engineer.
The work is similar to that of an architect/builder, and we're managed by people who think it's similar to that of a brick layer.
"What do you mean, you don't know exactly how you're going to do it yet? Didn't they teach you that?" (right after telling me about some vaguely specified new project that preferaby has to go live this afternoon, that the marketing people have already sent letters about to customers but failed to inform us before now)
Have kids grown out of the idea of becoming astronauts?
Of course they have. It just isn't glamorous anymore. Manned space flight was done forty years ago. Modern day science fiction isn't about space flight but about computer networked big brother dystopias. Besides, modern media makes all scientists look nerdy and impopular. Why would a kid want to be an astronaut, of all professions?
Besides, it would be total mystery if Earth wasn't warming up due to human activity.
We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we know we're increasing its levels by a lot, it would be a massive shock to science to find out that those two didn't mean the planet was heating up.
Which means that there is only a 20% chance that the study that shows that "80% of studies are wrong" is right.
That's a pity though. Suppose the study was exactly right. Then the people who did that study have a way to tell which studies are true and which are not.
All we'd need to do then is submit all studies made to that panel, _before_ publication. We'd get to 100% immediately!
If it were somehow established that this is not giving the kids what they need, I definitely think there is a reason to step in and correct the parents' behavior.
Firstly, that hasn't been established.
Secondly, government doesn't know when you work or how much time you spend with your kids, so this seems to me a useless method.
What this is about is that there are different entities that may get possible indications of child abuse - police may note the kid is always hanging about outside, teachers see a kid that has a black eye a bit often, perhaps a two yearly physician checkup that shows some odd bruises, perhaps some neighbour suspecting something calls the child protection agency. By themselves, such things don't mean much, but if they were connected, someone might find out about a problem before it's too late.
The second thing that's being addressed is that sometimes the agencies involved are aware of a problem, are already keeping an eye on a family and have the parents in some program, perhaps trying to get the kid moved to foster parents - and then the family moves to a different city, where the local bureau of the agency never heard about them so that the process stops.
It's those two problems that are addressed by connecting these specific file collections. They're very specific issues that have come out of investigations into the deaths of several children in recent years, as possible improvements.
And it has nothing to do with parents not spending enough time with their kids, or with Big Brother. The Slashdot title and blurb are of course incredibly off the mark, as usual.
That's not true. We spend less money fighting drugs and have a smaller drugs problem than the rest of Europe. There are some cities that have put limits on the number of 'coffee shops' they wanted in town center, and perhaps a few had to close, but then normal bars and all other businesses are regulated too.
What's popularly regarded as failed is integration of minorites (i.e., muslim immigrants) into our society. There's a big divide there, mutual fear and anger, and the feeling that the values of Dutch society aren't shared by traditional Islam. That's what the big mess in our society right now is. Not a few harmless coffee shops.
Because it's a free country. Until there's actually proof of child abuse, collecting hints is the best we can do. And divorces, unmarried parents etc, those aren't even special nowadays, and it's not the state's business to tell people how to live. It is their business to step in and protect a child once it's established that it's in trouble.
This isn't Puritania, even though we currently have Christians in power. Drugs are recreational and something you sell to tourists, and the prostitutes are unionized. And we have some types of Puritans (mostly muslims, the Christians of that type went to America a few centuries back). Good for them, please leave the rest of us alone.
The thing that sucks about this country though is that we recently passed from political correctness hell into populist hell. But so it goes...
Proof: this summer I was at a birthday party with 11 people, 6 of them female. And all of the people there had at least one computer at home that was at least dual boot. That's way way past the threshold for being mainstream.
The company I work at has 90% of the desktops running Linux and all of the servers, but then we're an Internet software development company.
They are now able to detect this swelling...how do we know it isn't normal.
We don't, of course. The bit below is from a mysterious item usually related to as "the fucking article", bolding mine:
The likely cause of the bulge is a pool of magma that, according to Deschutes National Forest geologist Larry Chitwood, is equal in size to a lake 1 mile across and 65 feet deep.
The magma lake is rising 10 feet each year, under tremendous pressure, and it deforms the Earth's surface as it expands, causing the bulge.
Other causes could be anything from the birth of a new volcano -- a fourth Sister in the making -- to a routine and anticlimactic pooling of liquid rock, researchers say.
"The honest and shortest answer is, we don't know,'' said Dan Dzurisin, a USGS geologist.
Slashdot Mirror
They just post a few hundred angry messages when you put such articles up.
Remember, it's not the just editors that put articles up. Users have to submit the articles. If you're just whining about the articles here and never go looking for any news that might be cool to have on /., you're part of the problem.
If you read the copyright agreement when you downloaded or ran our program you will see that Anti-spyware publishers/software houses are NOT allowed to download, run or examine the software in any way.
I am not a lawyer, I just read about law on Slashdot.
As far as I know, copyright law gives you the right to control transfer (copying) of the program. It doesn't give you the right to control how someone who is in possession of your program uses it.
Furthermore, since you as the copyright holder perfectly freely distribute the program from the URL http://www.spymon.com/downloads/install.exe, your company is the only one doing any distributing. You can hardly be infringing on your own copyrights. I'd like to see you try to get a criminal court to convict someone for downloading a file from your website using a public URL.
Is the center of mass really at exactly half the cow's height?
Of course! First, we assume a spherical cow...
Oh, come on now. Here's all you need to ask yourself:
* Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, including with less flexible terms than you distribute it? Pick the BSD license.
* Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, as * long as they grant others at least the same rights you granted them? Pick the GPL.
Nearly correct, but your second one should be "as long as they grant others the same rights over their entire program, not just the part they got from you".
And you need the third one - Do you want to let people distribute your software any way they want, possibly as part of a larger program, as long as they grant others at least the same rights you granted them on the parts you made? Pick the LGPL.
LGPL needs to be used more.
The thing is though, that you also come across as an expert if you package the truth in fancy mumbo jumbo. If I tell a client the plain truth, in words they understand, I come across as amateur and as a person whose advice can be ignored compared to when I say the exact same thing using words that sound good, mean exactly the same, and are unknown to them, while dressing up in a suit. Even after working intensively with these people for a year.
The interesting corollary is that if you are an honest professional and your client does not know much about IT, it is your duty to your client to package good advice in a format that he doesn't understand, but will accept as gospel. Ironic but true.
That marketing practice is age old because it works, and people expect it from you. Don't think you can ignore it just because you're well meaning and knowledgeable.
When the programming task is something like real-time image processing (computer vision), this kind of thing can make a serious difference. If 90% of your time is spent running these kinds of loops over and over again, an improvement in time will make a real difference on what combination of methods you have time for;
Hence his question. In those sort of situations, you have a detected bottleneck that you found out about with profiling tools. And you don't need ask Slashdot, you just try both options and see which profiles better. If it's not one of those situations, it's just wanking around.
OK, I'm just being an arse here, I know that the definition of "liberal" has been warped in the states, but I've never understood how this new political definition came about; socialist things are always attributed to the "liberals".
Well, as you probably know, 'liber' is Latin for 'free'. It's a pretty generic word, and a positive one; who wouldn't want to be called pro-freedom? (regardless of the fact that nowadays 'liberal' is used pretty negatively by many people, they won't usually claim to be against freedom)
But in politics, there are two big issues that have to do with freedom - free markets, and personal freedom. Someone who is against state intervention in the economy (for freedom) may still feel that drugs should be strictly controlled, or that only straight people should be allowed to marry (against freedom).
What's generally known as the political "left" is a group of ideas that's slightly more on the side of personal freedom, and slightly less on the side of free markets; and the political right is for a free economy and not as much for personal freedoms. In Europe, the right-wing version is called "liberal", in the US the left wing version is called "liberal".
There's a well known webpage with the "world's smallest political quiz" that illustrates this.
Myself, I'm extremely for personal freedom, and for free markets, but I do believe that state intervention is necessary to keep them as free as possible. In ways, I'm much more of a free market madman than most on the political right - I believe that things like global warming can only be solved by means of the free market, and that to make that possible people and companies should be responsible for cleaning up their own CO2, by being forced by government to be CO2 neutral (if you're not, government would cleanup your CO2 output for you, but you will personally get the bill, and they're inefficient as heck). That way the free market would drive companies to clean production methods quickly, and people would pick the cleaner method by voting with their wallets. Free markets can solve a lot, we just need to apply them with more consistency.
Seriously, why would you spend all that time and money building a machine to sort 18,000 larvae per hour instead of just building an equally impressive FLY KILLING MACHINE.
These mosquites aren't rounded up, they're bred. And they're sterile. They will breed, but not produce offspring. Releasing thousands of them into the wild will reduce the offspring of the wild population. And that's just reiterating the summary...
Of course, if you can build the fly killing machine, by all means do so.
if you want to do something for your professional career, don't waste your time with those kind of frameworks.
If you want to do something for your professional career, get familiar with as varied a collection of tools as you can. Know the pros and cons of each. Actually test their performance, make toy projects, steal ideas and patterns. Be opinionated, but prepared to honestly choose the best tool for the job you're given, and to explain why it is the best, to suits and to techies. A few hours getting to know something new is never wasted.
Before I knew God I had a fear of death from like when I was 6 years old. Before I knew everyone died, I thought people just got old. I wanted to be content to just live forever playing newer and better video games. [...] I found out God exists for a fact then I realized he promises eternal life!
Yay, back to just playing newer and better video games it is!
Also having a documentation will keep the leader itself on the correct path and not stray from it's original design.
It is extremely rare that the original design is the correct path.
The problem is that "hack" and "hacking" are extremely badly defined. In fact, it manages to have a few completely opposite meanings. A word that means both beautifully elegant sublimely crafted work, and crisis time horrible stopgap measure is not very well defined. Let alone the fact that the majority of people who use the word use it to mean breaking into computers. You can have heated fights about whether something is a hack or not, where both sides are equally right and completely opposite.
A bit like with both art and science actually, but not quite. Art is notoriously difficult to define, but we all still have a similar idea about what the word means. A bit of opinion - the fact that something is or isn't functional has no relation to whether it is or isn't art.
Science is well defined. Science is a process of finding out how things work, by thinking up a way how the world might be, and then testing that idea really rigorously. It's just that there's groups of people with agendas who try to make it look like there's a discussion alive, trying to get FSMism, creationism, moon landing denial, global warming denial, Bigfoot etc into scientific discussions. But that's just flamebait with an agenda.
So I'd say that hacking isn't really either, except that perhaps those really elegant beautiful hacks could be seen as art.
In short:
Sounds good to me!
We like to call ourselves professionsals, but compare our jobs to that of, say, a mechanical engineer.
The work is similar to that of an architect/builder, and we're managed by people who think it's similar to that of a brick layer.
"What do you mean, you don't know exactly how you're going to do it yet? Didn't they teach you that?" (right after telling me about some vaguely specified new project that preferaby has to go live this afternoon, that the marketing people have already sent letters about to customers but failed to inform us before now)
No mod points, but thanks for that one :-D
Note that the rings of Saturn have an atmosphere. All those tiny flecks together have enough gravity to sustain a shared atmosphere.
Funny universe we live in...
Have kids grown out of the idea of becoming astronauts?
Of course they have. It just isn't glamorous anymore. Manned space flight was done forty years ago. Modern day science fiction isn't about space flight but about computer networked big brother dystopias. Besides, modern media makes all scientists look nerdy and impopular. Why would a kid want to be an astronaut, of all professions?
Besides, it would be total mystery if Earth wasn't warming up due to human activity.
We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we know we're increasing its levels by a lot, it would be a massive shock to science to find out that those two didn't mean the planet was heating up.
Which means that there is only a 20% chance that the study that shows that "80% of studies are wrong" is right.
That's a pity though. Suppose the study was exactly right. Then the people who did that study have a way to tell which studies are true and which are not.
All we'd need to do then is submit all studies made to that panel, _before_ publication. We'd get to 100% immediately!
If it were somehow established that this is not giving the kids what they need, I definitely think there is a reason to step in and correct the parents' behavior.
Firstly, that hasn't been established.
Secondly, government doesn't know when you work or how much time you spend with your kids, so this seems to me a useless method.
What this is about is that there are different entities that may get possible indications of child abuse - police may note the kid is always hanging about outside, teachers see a kid that has a black eye a bit often, perhaps a two yearly physician checkup that shows some odd bruises, perhaps some neighbour suspecting something calls the child protection agency. By themselves, such things don't mean much, but if they were connected, someone might find out about a problem before it's too late.
The second thing that's being addressed is that sometimes the agencies involved are aware of a problem, are already keeping an eye on a family and have the parents in some program, perhaps trying to get the kid moved to foster parents - and then the family moves to a different city, where the local bureau of the agency never heard about them so that the process stops.
It's those two problems that are addressed by connecting these specific file collections. They're very specific issues that have come out of investigations into the deaths of several children in recent years, as possible improvements.
And it has nothing to do with parents not spending enough time with their kids, or with Big Brother. The Slashdot title and blurb are of course incredibly off the mark, as usual.
That's not true. We spend less money fighting drugs and have a smaller drugs problem than the rest of Europe. There are some cities that have put limits on the number of 'coffee shops' they wanted in town center, and perhaps a few had to close, but then normal bars and all other businesses are regulated too.
What's popularly regarded as failed is integration of minorites (i.e., muslim immigrants) into our society. There's a big divide there, mutual fear and anger, and the feeling that the values of Dutch society aren't shared by traditional Islam. That's what the big mess in our society right now is. Not a few harmless coffee shops.
Because it's a free country. Until there's actually proof of child abuse, collecting hints is the best we can do. And divorces, unmarried parents etc, those aren't even special nowadays, and it's not the state's business to tell people how to live. It is their business to step in and protect a child once it's established that it's in trouble.
This isn't Puritania, even though we currently have Christians in power. Drugs are recreational and something you sell to tourists, and the prostitutes are unionized. And we have some types of Puritans (mostly muslims, the Christians of that type went to America a few centuries back). Good for them, please leave the rest of us alone.
The thing that sucks about this country though is that we recently passed from political correctness hell into populist hell. But so it goes...
I entirely agree.
Proof: this summer I was at a birthday party with 11 people, 6 of them female. And all of the people there had at least one computer at home that was at least dual boot. That's way way past the threshold for being mainstream.
The company I work at has 90% of the desktops running Linux and all of the servers, but then we're an Internet software development company.
They are now able to detect this swelling...how do we know it isn't normal.
We don't, of course. The bit below is from a mysterious item usually related to as "the fucking article", bolding mine:
Sure, if you also pay for all the associated costs.
Cleanup costs of pollution should be factored into the price of fuel, the car etc.