"you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
Even assuming every open-source project immediately changes that to "version 3 or later", the source that was available *before* the change is still licensed under version 2. The company won't be able to upgrade to later v3-licensed versions, of course - but they will be able to fork it just before the change point.
This is still similar to changing EULA terms with a service pack, but it's not quite as bad . . . not that most people will see it that way, and rightly so. This is a blisteringly stupid move for any group whose goal isn't "let's force all software to be free". (Which is, of course, their goal.)
Yeah, because everyone is fucking pussyfooting around them for fear of offending them.
Anti-male jokes are fine. Anti-white-guy jokes are fine. Anti-geek jokes are fine. But oh please, let's not offend the poor poor women and black people, they're too fragile!
Sure, go ahead, ban jokes about black people. Ban jokes about women. While we're at it, let's ban any jokes about Slashdotters not having girlfriends. Or not showering.
Well, if I recall correctly, it's distance^4 - because RFID doesn't carry its own power supply, it has to receive power (distance^2) and then rebroadcast (distance^2). distance^2*distance^2 = distance^4.
I dunno where distance^6 comes from, that's new to me.
Oh, I agree, and I'd actually considered doing that. But the computers were rarely shut down or logged out of - there was no permission system, so we just left 'em logged in 24/7. And that would have involved getting ghost software, and doing a hard drive sweep, and so on and so forth, and I just wasn't interested in spending that much time on it.
I admined a high school computer lab for a while. We had a bunch of Win98 boxes with very flaky hardware - out of 15 machines I usually had to reformat and reinstall one every week or so. We did have a linux box for permanent storage, but largely, the proper solution to file storage was "bring a floppy" or "email it to yourself" or "upload it to geocities".
It's worth pointing out that there were signs all OVER the room, including one on each computer, reading "do not save your work on this computer, save on the Linux server or ask a tech for help".
And so inevitably, one day a computer melted down as usual (Windows just wouldn't boot) and, as was usual at this time, I didn't bother trying to fix it because it just wasn't worth it. Wipe, reinstall, done.
And then a day or two later I ended up with a teacher yelling at me because someone had written a paper on that computer and, natch, saved it on the hard drive, despite all the warnings. She demanded that I retype it from him ("retype"? Turned out he'd written it on paper, then merely typed it in on the computer - he still had the original!) and I refused.
It's worth pointing out that I wasn't just a volunteer. I wasn't even an official volunteer. They had no real admins at this computer lab - I was just a highschooler who had gotten tired of only having two working computers out of 20, and had taken it on myself to make the lab work again.
But no, apparently just keeping the lab working, linux box and all, wasn't enough. Now they wanted me to copy all possible data anyone could want off the hard drive, and keep it forever. Including favorites, other apps, documents - everything.
(Which I said "no" to, and also said "no" when they decided to require a two-week paperwork process for fixing any computer, and eventually they kicked me out of the lab and half the computers were broken in a week. Lab never was the same after that.)
But there you have it. Lost data? Don't say "oh, I was warned this wasn't a good place to save things." Don't say "well, shit happens, I'll go retype it from my paper version." Just try to make someone else redo it for you.
Personally, my technique tends to be "do search, hit download, allow other things to happen in my life for a few weeks". I'll often have a hundred things downloading at once, gradually, and every once in a while I'll open up my "completed" directory and decide what I'm in the mood to watch. Total time: fifteen seconds per file, with maybe fifteen seconds of annoyance if it turns out to be a fake (which, with the exception of porn, has never happened - and invariably it ends up being other porn of a similar style, and, hey, porn) with a lot of lag between when I decide I might be interested in a movie and when I actually get around to watching it. Which works.
Or rather, I did - I haven't really bothered lately, I get enough just with impulse DVD buys at Fry's. So hey.
Find a representative subset of standard search engine queries. Find a representative subset of humanity. Show subset of humanity the results of subset-of-search-engine queries, with any identifying HTML removed, and ask them to choose which resultset for each query was the best. Gather results.
That's about as objective as you could possibly get.
However, this doesn't account for users being smart at refining searches.
I kept school assignments on it. I kept books on it for bus trips. I kept contact info on it, I kept notes on it. I kept maps on it and bus schedules. I kept basically everything on it, and found it invaluable.
Then I got out of college and got a job and a car. At home, of course, I had a computer. At work I had a computer also. So I just stored stuff on computers, or online. I didn't take the bus anymore, so I didn't read books on it, I read paper books instead. Sure, I couldn't carry thirty around in my pocket, but I didn't need to anymore.
I used the map once in a while, but rarely. Most of the time I just printed out maps at work and used those.
A few times I almost left it in the car until its battery ran down (which took a week or two). Then I'd put it on its charging stand and it would sit there for a month until I wanted it for one random thing, and it would sit in the car again.
Eventually someone broke into my house and, along with the other stuff they stole, they stole it. I considered replacing it . . . but decided against it. I don't really need one anymore.
It was incredibly valuable when I didn't want to carry around a laptop and wanted lots of data at my fingertips. Now? Now I've got a corporate laptop and don't even use that most of the time.
I emailed a bunch of people and ended up meeting precisely one. We hung out a few times and eventually I realized I wasn't really in a good state for a relationship, so we ended the whole "thinking about going out" bit and just became friends. We don't talk much now, but every few months one of us says "hey, how's it going" over AIM and we chat. She's a nice person.
I value friendships pretty highly, and money not very highly, so I'd call it worth it. But not an amazing bargain, and I feel I kinda got lucky near the end.
Right now I'm trying eHarmony, which is amusingly weird and bad in some ways. It's amazing how few people actually respond, which is a problem because you can't just go find more, you have to wait for the system to show them to you.
Honestly, my favorites so far are Spring Street Networks (the backend behind The Onion and Fark's personals, and many others) and Craig's List. Craig's List is especially fun because you can put the craziest random stuff up and actually get responses, plus it's utterly free.
I do work at Google, and you're dead right. My options and bonuses add quite a nice multiplier onto my salary. Add to that how much I'm saving on (damn good) food and just plain how good it is to work there . ..
Who needs salary? I've got more important things.
Incidentally, those people saying "omg housing = $$$" are, technically, right. If you want to get a house dead-center in Palo Alto, Mountain View, or SF, you're going to be forking over crazy cash. On the other hand if you don't mind a bit of a commute you can easily get something quite a bit cheaper.
I don't actually remember, it's been a very very long time since I read it. The only things I remember is that the ship AI was named PHANTOM, the ship AI's drones were named PHARTS, and that humans and dolphins were two of the races.
Good luck finding it, if you want to try.:P (I just looked on google and couldn't dig it out.)
I don't actually remember, it's been a very long time since I read it. The only things I remember is that the ship AI was named PHANTOM, the ship AI's drones were named PHARTS, and that humans and dolphins were two of the races.
Good luck finding it, if you want to try.:P (I just looked on google and couldn't dig it out.)
Reminds me of a scifi book I read a while back. One of the side atmosphere bits was that each sentient species (I think there were 5) had one thing they did that really bothered the other races.
One race, for example, lived about ten times as long as anyone else.
One of them never took anything seriously.
The human race? We made clever acronyms. For everything.
Drove the other races completely mad. "It doesn't NEED an acronym! We can just give it a name! Oh my god, is that a RECURSIVE ACRONYM? I can't work under these conditions."
Article summary: "Nuclear is a bad idea because a lot of nuclear plants are getting old and will need to be replaced. Also, if everyone had solar and wind and personal gas turbines, we wouldn't need nuclear. Oh yeah, and politicians are evil and trying to exploit this for their own benefit."
(1) Those nuclear plants are getting old anyway, and will need to be replaced anyway. That has nothing to do with what they're going to be replaced with.
(2) Not everyone does have those, and I rather doubt everyone's going to suddenly buy those. Great idea for new houses, lousy idea for existing ones.
(3) And there aren't any politicians trying to make a fast buck off green power either? That's practically what a politician's job *is*.
Where's the section that looks at a realistic breakdown of realistic costs and goals? Where's the section that makes any attempt to compare the two besides "hey! look! NUCLEAR POWER ISN'T PERFECT!"
Not the bad kind - during school she'd keep it down, maybe only get high a few times a month. During break though? Oh man. One break - two weeks long - she flew back home to be with her boyfriend, and, apparently, spent the entire two weeks in her boyfriend's apartment getting high.
Windows and doors closed, of course. About half a step away from a smokebox.
She was clever enough to do laundry before getting on the plane back. What she's forgotten about was her jacket - hanging up against the wall the entire time. And, predictably, the drug dogs went absolutely fucking wild. Seriously, a *human* could smell it.
But she didn't have any pot on her at the time, so what could they do?
We got a good laugh out of that once she got back, though. Can only wonder what kind of internal security lists she's on now.
Now, if everyone in the world were to do the same thing, the airport security would just have to give up . . . if we can only get everyone in the world to do the equivalent online, we're set:)
I was on a flight where they couldn't get the emergency lights to turn off. (Yes, that's right. Apparently you can't launch with the emergency lights on. I don't see the justification for this, but hey.)
They tried to fix this by turning the plane off.
And on.
And off.
And on.
Sitting on the runway for half an hour while they power-cycled the plane.
Eventually they told us all to get off and wait two hours for another plane. Argh.
I think it's also very clear that these elements are neither necessary nor sufficient. There are plenty of fantastic games that don't include all of these, or even most of these, and plenty of horrible games that do.
Yes, these are all important to think about. But so are many other aspects, such as immersion (which is quite different from storyline), difficulty, a sense of accomplishment, replayability, etc etc etc.
If there's a million of you, and one of you gets destroyed, there are still 999,999 left.
If there's one of you, and one of you gets destroyed, there goes your species.
Same reason I think human beings need to start settling space - if you're on one planet, and it gets destroyed, there goes your species. If you're on a million planets, it's a lot harder.
I imagine robots would be smart enough to follow the same logic.
This assumes, of course, that "the continued survival of our species" is important to them.
A lot of people assume "CPU power is everything!" but that's not really true. Questions that haven't been answered, that are absolutely vital to how good a deal this is:
How much RAM per process? How much connectivity between systems? (Gigabit switch per rack? Better?) How many available disk space, and how fast can it be accessed? And, of course, how *fast* are the CPUs?
I'd want a LOT more info before I even considered using that service, and I just can't find where the info is listed.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't do it retroactively.
The current licenses say, and I quote:
"you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."
Even assuming every open-source project immediately changes that to "version 3 or later", the source that was available *before* the change is still licensed under version 2. The company won't be able to upgrade to later v3-licensed versions, of course - but they will be able to fork it just before the change point.
This is still similar to changing EULA terms with a service pack, but it's not quite as bad . . . not that most people will see it that way, and rightly so. This is a blisteringly stupid move for any group whose goal isn't "let's force all software to be free". (Which is, of course, their goal.)
No surprise here. I think that's my first -1 :)
Yeah, because everyone is fucking pussyfooting around them for fear of offending them.
Anti-male jokes are fine. Anti-white-guy jokes are fine. Anti-geek jokes are fine. But oh please, let's not offend the poor poor women and black people, they're too fragile!
Sure, go ahead, ban jokes about black people. Ban jokes about women. While we're at it, let's ban any jokes about Slashdotters not having girlfriends. Or not showering.
Well, if I recall correctly, it's distance^4 - because RFID doesn't carry its own power supply, it has to receive power (distance^2) and then rebroadcast (distance^2). distance^2*distance^2 = distance^4.
I dunno where distance^6 comes from, that's new to me.
If I had mod points, I'd mod it up - it's *funny*.
The fact that it actually *is* the first post just makes it even better.
Oh, I agree, and I'd actually considered doing that. But the computers were rarely shut down or logged out of - there was no permission system, so we just left 'em logged in 24/7. And that would have involved getting ghost software, and doing a hard drive sweep, and so on and so forth, and I just wasn't interested in spending that much time on it.
:)
But yeah. I kinda wish we'd done that.
I admined a high school computer lab for a while. We had a bunch of Win98 boxes with very flaky hardware - out of 15 machines I usually had to reformat and reinstall one every week or so. We did have a linux box for permanent storage, but largely, the proper solution to file storage was "bring a floppy" or "email it to yourself" or "upload it to geocities".
It's worth pointing out that there were signs all OVER the room, including one on each computer, reading "do not save your work on this computer, save on the Linux server or ask a tech for help".
And so inevitably, one day a computer melted down as usual (Windows just wouldn't boot) and, as was usual at this time, I didn't bother trying to fix it because it just wasn't worth it. Wipe, reinstall, done.
And then a day or two later I ended up with a teacher yelling at me because someone had written a paper on that computer and, natch, saved it on the hard drive, despite all the warnings. She demanded that I retype it from him ("retype"? Turned out he'd written it on paper, then merely typed it in on the computer - he still had the original!) and I refused.
It's worth pointing out that I wasn't just a volunteer. I wasn't even an official volunteer. They had no real admins at this computer lab - I was just a highschooler who had gotten tired of only having two working computers out of 20, and had taken it on myself to make the lab work again.
But no, apparently just keeping the lab working, linux box and all, wasn't enough. Now they wanted me to copy all possible data anyone could want off the hard drive, and keep it forever. Including favorites, other apps, documents - everything.
(Which I said "no" to, and also said "no" when they decided to require a two-week paperwork process for fixing any computer, and eventually they kicked me out of the lab and half the computers were broken in a week. Lab never was the same after that.)
But there you have it. Lost data? Don't say "oh, I was warned this wasn't a good place to save things." Don't say "well, shit happens, I'll go retype it from my paper version." Just try to make someone else redo it for you.
Pfft. People.
Personally, my technique tends to be "do search, hit download, allow other things to happen in my life for a few weeks". I'll often have a hundred things downloading at once, gradually, and every once in a while I'll open up my "completed" directory and decide what I'm in the mood to watch. Total time: fifteen seconds per file, with maybe fifteen seconds of annoyance if it turns out to be a fake (which, with the exception of porn, has never happened - and invariably it ends up being other porn of a similar style, and, hey, porn) with a lot of lag between when I decide I might be interested in a movie and when I actually get around to watching it. Which works.
Or rather, I did - I haven't really bothered lately, I get enough just with impulse DVD buys at Fry's. So hey.
Find a representative subset of standard search engine queries. Find a representative subset of humanity. Show subset of humanity the results of subset-of-search-engine queries, with any identifying HTML removed, and ask them to choose which resultset for each query was the best. Gather results.
That's about as objective as you could possibly get.
However, this doesn't account for users being smart at refining searches.
Urine.
I used one for a very long time.
I kept school assignments on it. I kept books on it for bus trips. I kept contact info on it, I kept notes on it. I kept maps on it and bus schedules. I kept basically everything on it, and found it invaluable.
Then I got out of college and got a job and a car. At home, of course, I had a computer. At work I had a computer also. So I just stored stuff on computers, or online. I didn't take the bus anymore, so I didn't read books on it, I read paper books instead. Sure, I couldn't carry thirty around in my pocket, but I didn't need to anymore.
I used the map once in a while, but rarely. Most of the time I just printed out maps at work and used those.
A few times I almost left it in the car until its battery ran down (which took a week or two). Then I'd put it on its charging stand and it would sit there for a month until I wanted it for one random thing, and it would sit in the car again.
Eventually someone broke into my house and, along with the other stuff they stole, they stole it. I considered replacing it . . . but decided against it. I don't really need one anymore.
It was incredibly valuable when I didn't want to carry around a laptop and wanted lots of data at my fingertips. Now? Now I've got a corporate laptop and don't even use that most of the time.
I emailed a bunch of people and ended up meeting precisely one. We hung out a few times and eventually I realized I wasn't really in a good state for a relationship, so we ended the whole "thinking about going out" bit and just became friends. We don't talk much now, but every few months one of us says "hey, how's it going" over AIM and we chat. She's a nice person.
I value friendships pretty highly, and money not very highly, so I'd call it worth it. But not an amazing bargain, and I feel I kinda got lucky near the end.
Right now I'm trying eHarmony, which is amusingly weird and bad in some ways. It's amazing how few people actually respond, which is a problem because you can't just go find more, you have to wait for the system to show them to you.
Honestly, my favorites so far are Spring Street Networks (the backend behind The Onion and Fark's personals, and many others) and Craig's List. Craig's List is especially fun because you can put the craziest random stuff up and actually get responses, plus it's utterly free.
Who needs salary when you're making a massive amount off options and bonuses?
I'm capping my 401(k) *and* my allowed IRA contributions every year. And that's without even dipping into the options.
I didn't say "who needs money". I said "who needs salary".
I do work at Google, and you're dead right. My options and bonuses add quite a nice multiplier onto my salary. Add to that how much I'm saving on (damn good) food and just plain how good it is to work there . . .
Who needs salary? I've got more important things.
Incidentally, those people saying "omg housing = $$$" are, technically, right. If you want to get a house dead-center in Palo Alto, Mountain View, or SF, you're going to be forking over crazy cash. On the other hand if you don't mind a bit of a commute you can easily get something quite a bit cheaper.
I don't actually remember, it's been a very very long time since I read it. The only things I remember is that the ship AI was named PHANTOM, the ship AI's drones were named PHARTS, and that humans and dolphins were two of the races.
:P (I just looked on google and couldn't dig it out.)
Good luck finding it, if you want to try.
I don't actually remember, it's been a very long time since I read it. The only things I remember is that the ship AI was named PHANTOM, the ship AI's drones were named PHARTS, and that humans and dolphins were two of the races.
:P (I just looked on google and couldn't dig it out.)
Good luck finding it, if you want to try.
Reminds me of a scifi book I read a while back. One of the side atmosphere bits was that each sentient species (I think there were 5) had one thing they did that really bothered the other races.
One race, for example, lived about ten times as long as anyone else.
One of them never took anything seriously.
The human race? We made clever acronyms. For everything.
Drove the other races completely mad. "It doesn't NEED an acronym! We can just give it a name! Oh my god, is that a RECURSIVE ACRONYM? I can't work under these conditions."
Wait a second.
Article summary: "Nuclear is a bad idea because a lot of nuclear plants are getting old and will need to be replaced. Also, if everyone had solar and wind and personal gas turbines, we wouldn't need nuclear. Oh yeah, and politicians are evil and trying to exploit this for their own benefit."
(1) Those nuclear plants are getting old anyway, and will need to be replaced anyway. That has nothing to do with what they're going to be replaced with.
(2) Not everyone does have those, and I rather doubt everyone's going to suddenly buy those. Great idea for new houses, lousy idea for existing ones.
(3) And there aren't any politicians trying to make a fast buck off green power either? That's practically what a politician's job *is*.
Where's the section that looks at a realistic breakdown of realistic costs and goals? Where's the section that makes any attempt to compare the two besides "hey! look! NUCLEAR POWER ISN'T PERFECT!"
-1, flamebait.
I had this friend who was a pothead.
:)
Not the bad kind - during school she'd keep it down, maybe only get high a few times a month. During break though? Oh man. One break - two weeks long - she flew back home to be with her boyfriend, and, apparently, spent the entire two weeks in her boyfriend's apartment getting high.
Windows and doors closed, of course. About half a step away from a smokebox.
She was clever enough to do laundry before getting on the plane back. What she's forgotten about was her jacket - hanging up against the wall the entire time. And, predictably, the drug dogs went absolutely fucking wild. Seriously, a *human* could smell it.
But she didn't have any pot on her at the time, so what could they do?
We got a good laugh out of that once she got back, though. Can only wonder what kind of internal security lists she's on now.
Now, if everyone in the world were to do the same thing, the airport security would just have to give up . . . if we can only get everyone in the world to do the equivalent online, we're set
I was on a flight where they couldn't get the emergency lights to turn off. (Yes, that's right. Apparently you can't launch with the emergency lights on. I don't see the justification for this, but hey.)
They tried to fix this by turning the plane off.
And on.
And off.
And on.
Sitting on the runway for half an hour while they power-cycled the plane.
Eventually they told us all to get off and wait two hours for another plane. Argh.
I think it's also very clear that these elements are neither necessary nor sufficient. There are plenty of fantastic games that don't include all of these, or even most of these, and plenty of horrible games that do.
Yes, these are all important to think about. But so are many other aspects, such as immersion (which is quite different from storyline), difficulty, a sense of accomplishment, replayability, etc etc etc.
If there's a million of you, and one of you gets destroyed, there are still 999,999 left.
If there's one of you, and one of you gets destroyed, there goes your species.
Same reason I think human beings need to start settling space - if you're on one planet, and it gets destroyed, there goes your species. If you're on a million planets, it's a lot harder.
I imagine robots would be smart enough to follow the same logic.
This assumes, of course, that "the continued survival of our species" is important to them.
but I don't see *any* problems with this idea.
A lot of people assume "CPU power is everything!" but that's not really true. Questions that haven't been answered, that are absolutely vital to how good a deal this is:
How much RAM per process?
How much connectivity between systems? (Gigabit switch per rack? Better?)
How many available disk space, and how fast can it be accessed?
And, of course, how *fast* are the CPUs?
I'd want a LOT more info before I even considered using that service, and I just can't find where the info is listed.
Keep in mind that "illegal" and "unused" are only vaguely related.
I imagine banning free software would be about as effective as prohibition was.