Allowing people to use what you produce is simple, protecting your freedom and preserving it for others is the hard task that the GPL trys to solve.
It's easy to preserve your freedom, just stick `copyrighg NNNN ME, I'm allowed to do whatever I like with this code'. Similarly, adding `and so are you' preserves those freedoms for everyone else. What the GPL tries to do is make other people give you, and the rest of the world, the same freedoms you give them.
The GPL restricts people from making proprietary versions.
It also restricts people from making freeer versions. It also, more painfully, prevents people from combining GPLed code with freeer code, or just code which for whatever reason has an idiosyncratic licence.
All these kinds of things are trade-offs. Personally I'd rather produce code that more people can use, and if that means letting some people keep their changes to themselves I don't care. Stallman would rather produce code that fewer people can use than run the risk that somewhere there might be someone who benefits but doesn't contribute.
On what planet? The whole point of it is the infectiousness. It provides a maximum as well as a minimum level of freedom for all works which are based on any part of the current work. Try combining GPLed and freeer code in one project.
As Torvalds says, the GPL is the minimum complexity required.
It may or may not be the minimum required to implement the politics. It is clearly not the minimum required to let people use what you produce.
My problem is that if I write a GFDL'd document, someone else can add content and add an invariant section. They benefit fully from my work but I can't benefit from their work unless I include the section titled "Proprietary Software Rules!!", or "Why I Like To Sniff Knickers".
Of course, the situation is completely symmetrical, you can put a comment in the original saying `people who add invariant sections to other people's document are scum'.
I think this rule is like the infectivity of the GPL. It is an indication of how much more impportant the politics is to Stallman and co than the freedom and the desire to make something useful.
The number of ignorant and stupid posts in this story is ridiculous. All the pronouncements about what the wheelchair-bound need by people who clearly don't know the first thing about physical disability.
And your qualification to pontificate is? I know about why the traditional wheelchair is how it is because my father lost both his legs.
You think people who use powered wheelchairs are lazy?
Think some are, and some are stupid and some are ignorant and some a raving loonies and... In fact I think they are no different from any other randomly selected group of people.
But none of that is in any way relevent to what I wrote, which was simply that adding an extra single point of failure to someone's life is a big price to pay for the undoubted benefits of this device and it would be nice if that SPOF could be made less absolute.
If it's good enough proof of identity to withdraw large sums of cash over the counter at a bank...
The fact that you can for that does not imply that it is good enough, just that banks really couldn't care less. All they have to believe is that they have agreed among themslves, and possibly with some pet politicians, that this is all they will demand. After all they are giving someone your money, not theirs...
Of course, there is also a battery indicator right next to the joystick. If it was telling me I'm extremely low on battery power, I wouldn't want to attempt the stairs anyway.
And those things never lie:-)
As I said, I presume the thing is failsafe, what would worry me if I needed and used one would ending up stuck somewhere with a low/empty battery. Not dangerous, just embarassing and/or inconvinient. Such things are important in what is intended to be an enabling device.
To some extent a traditional wheelchair allows someone to use their arms in place of their legs. This device however in some sense replaces their legs. This means the user is much more technology-dependent.
All I was really saying was that it would be nice if there was some way in which (some of) the good features of this could be available without the total reliance on technology.
But it looks to me that if you had battery probems you would be fucked. Any of us who ever had a laptop battery unexpectedly die will know how the unierse punishes reliance on that kind of technology.
I presume the FDA testing would mean that a failure going up stairs wouldn't result in it crashing to the bottom.
The traditional big-wheeled wheelchair is (relatively) low tech, cheap and, for those who can use it, gives real independence of the `let me on with my own life damn it' variety.
Obviously there are classes of dissability for which a powered chair is neccesary, stick Stephen Hawking in one of these for instance. But I wonder if there is some way to bring some of this technology to a machine which wouldn't just be a oversized couch when deprived of power, and wouldn't reduce people who don't need to be to couch potatoes.
Charitably, you have a machine which is seriously fucked up at the hardware level. Less charitably, you are making it up.
For comparison, PIII 500, old scavenged (ie slow) disks, 11 seconds to copy a 130MB file between disks, 18 seconds within one disk.
I have a policy of not tuning my systems, so this is about as slow as it is possible for FBSD to get, without underlying problems. I have no reason to think any of the other BSDs are significantly slower.
If you really have the problem you claim, I can only think you are either getting huge numbers of recoverable hardware disk errors, or something has eaten all your memory and the system is thrashing wildly.
My guess is that if you want to make money from software, distributing it would be a good start.
Unless you plan to charge your employees for the software they use to do their work,
Have you considered they might charge their customers for use of software? Directly, for example a pay-for-access web site, or indirectly, the cost of the software used to design and manufacture a product is part of what you pay for when you buy the product.
Funny... I get 3 hours out of my Zaurus and it's 802.11b card.
1.5 if I use the backlight.
That would seem to prove that the Zaurus is pretty awful, bluetooth or 802.
What on earth happened to designing battery powerd devices with battery consumption in mind? I'd be really upset if I got less than a full working day out of one set/charge of batteries in a PDA.
If you can skip the wire, then you don't need to worry about the wire getting tangled, the wire getting lost, the wire getting broken--or wanting to plug in two things at once.
Instead you have to worry about interference, competition between devices, incompatability,...:-).
Yeah, I mean what use is there for free television? Poor people are so last year.
The UK government is trying to move broadcast TV over to digital, freeing up the current UHF bandwidth without eliminating terrestrial transmission.
The US seems to be remarkably backward on such things. I read the other day that they are still arguing about how to do digital radio. Same thing happened over cellphones. Is this just a result of the size of the market or some feature of the US political/economic system?
you can't really do anything important (system-config type stuff) without resorting to a CLI,
I know it will come as a shock to you, but some of us use our computers to do (supposedly) useful things, not just to endlessly reconfigure.
Besides which, while I haven't used Debian, in most of the unix systems I have administered the primary configuration interface is not the command line, but emacs (or vi or your choice). The exception would be Solaris where they made a half-arsed attempt to provide GUI configuration just to make life painful for remote administration.
Is it just me, or is 6 days between first release candidate and final release cutting it a bit fine?
Remember, only the instalation stuff is gogin to need shaking out in that time. Lots of people will have been upgrading to and running the new code from CVS before they actually make ISO images for people to test the instalation, setup and out-of-the-box behaviour.
This is the kind of technology that should be used for portable mp3 players.
If you want an MP3 player you have to replace if you drop it or if the pocket it is in gets banged against a wall or...
Flash mm cards are now cheap enough for me to be able to carry half a dozen 64mb cards with me, each holding about an album. That's enough for me. The extra space doesn't seem worth going to something mechanical.
Avoid Sony, period. The Microsoft of the hardware world. Lots of effort into makeing the stuff look pretty and adding bells and whistles, no effort into quality or support etc. Once you have handed over your money, you are not of interest anymore. Indeed, if it goes wrong, maybe they can get mre money out of you for the replacement.
That attitude may be OK for consumer toys, but I'm not about to trust my backups to hardware with that kind of attitude behind it.
the linked site lists it for $93, whereas ThinkGeek is selling it for $119, a $26 dollar premium.
93 euro is $109. so only $10, perhaps thinkgeek bought their stock at the euro price. I can only presume LAKS haven't been paying attention to the financial news.
The black hole lists do not give the end user any idea of what is blocked. Likewise people may not know that they are black holed.
Black hole list,like any other anti spam measure, either do or don't let theuer see what is blocked depending on the choice of the person who sets up the filter. Black hole lists are no better nor owrse thn header matching or anything else in this way.
Eg, I use black hole lists to tag email which my procmail puts in a probably-spam mailbox.
Combined with some simple rules about subject line length and so on, this basicly eliminates all spam and very rarely catches soemthign it shouldn't.
Effectively 100% of the spam that gets to my main mailbox is the stuff sent to a work email I have to check immediatly, and so can't spam filter.
Slashdot Mirror
Stick in the fixit cdrom.
You do keep a copy of /etc somewhere don't you?
It's easy to preserve your freedom, just stick `copyrighg NNNN ME, I'm allowed to do whatever I like with this code'. Similarly, adding `and so are you' preserves those freedoms for everyone else. What the GPL tries to do is make other people give you, and the rest of the world, the same freedoms you give them.
The GPL restricts people from making proprietary versions.
It also restricts people from making freeer versions. It also, more painfully, prevents people from combining GPLed code with freeer code, or just code which for whatever reason has an idiosyncratic licence.
All these kinds of things are trade-offs. Personally I'd rather produce code that more people can use, and if that means letting some people keep their changes to themselves I don't care. Stallman would rather produce code that fewer people can use than run the risk that somewhere there might be someone who benefits but doesn't contribute.
On what planet? The whole point of it is the infectiousness. It provides a maximum as well as a minimum level of freedom for all works which are based on any part of the current work. Try combining GPLed and freeer code in one project.
As Torvalds says, the GPL is the minimum complexity required.
It may or may not be the minimum required to implement the politics. It is clearly not the minimum required to let people use what you produce.
Of course, the situation is completely symmetrical, you can put a comment in the original saying `people who add invariant sections to other people's document are scum'.
I think this rule is like the infectivity of the GPL. It is an indication of how much more impportant the politics is to Stallman and co than the freedom and the desire to make something useful.
Especially if /. keeps serving up 7MB(!) adverts.
You think people who use powered wheelchairs are lazy?
Think some are, and some are stupid and some are ignorant and some a raving loonies and... In fact I think they are no different from any other randomly selected group of people.
But none of that is in any way relevent to what I wrote, which was simply that adding an extra single point of failure to someone's life is a big price to pay for the undoubted benefits of this device and it would be nice if that SPOF could be made less absolute.
The fact that you can for that does not imply that it is good enough, just that banks really couldn't care less. All they have to believe is that they have agreed among themslves, and possibly with some pet politicians, that this is all they will demand. After all they are giving someone your money, not theirs...
And those things never lie:-)
As I said, I presume the thing is failsafe, what would worry me if I needed and used one would ending up stuck somewhere with a low/empty battery. Not dangerous, just embarassing and/or inconvinient. Such things are important in what is intended to be an enabling device.
To some extent a traditional wheelchair allows someone to use their arms in place of their legs. This device however in some sense replaces their legs. This means the user is much more technology-dependent.
All I was really saying was that it would be nice if there was some way in which (some of) the good features of this could be available without the total reliance on technology.
There is no way to do that in real life, so why would you expect there to be one online?
Then the passport itself (or at least the machine-readable section at the back) can be PGP signed by the government.
Oh, right, the government. They never make mistakes/ get defrauded/ play stupid games.
I presume the FDA testing would mean that a failure going up stairs wouldn't result in it crashing to the bottom.
The traditional big-wheeled wheelchair is (relatively) low tech, cheap and, for those who can use it, gives real independence of the `let me on with my own life damn it' variety.
Obviously there are classes of dissability for which a powered chair is neccesary, stick Stephen Hawking in one of these for instance. But I wonder if there is some way to bring some of this technology to a machine which wouldn't just be a oversized couch when deprived of power, and wouldn't reduce people who don't need to be to couch potatoes.
Sure you don't.
[20 minutes + on a PIII 800 to copy a 17MB file]
Charitably, you have a machine which is seriously fucked up at the hardware level. Less charitably, you are making it up.
For comparison, PIII 500, old scavenged (ie slow) disks, 11 seconds to copy a 130MB file between disks, 18 seconds within one disk.
I have a policy of not tuning my systems, so this is about as slow as it is possible for FBSD to get, without underlying problems. I have no reason to think any of the other BSDs are significantly slower.
If you really have the problem you claim, I can only think you are either getting huge numbers of recoverable hardware disk errors, or something has eaten all your memory and the system is thrashing wildly.
If their web site worked on something other than IE they might have more chance of selling me one.
Unless you plan to charge your employees for the software they use to do their work,
Have you considered they might charge their customers for use of software? Directly, for example a pay-for-access web site, or indirectly, the cost of the software used to design and manufacture a product is part of what you pay for when you buy the product.
Single purpose tools, you know it makes sense.
1.5 if I use the backlight.
That would seem to prove that the Zaurus is pretty awful, bluetooth or 802.
What on earth happened to designing battery powerd devices with battery consumption in mind? I'd be really upset if I got less than a full working day out of one set/charge of batteries in a PDA.
Instead you have to worry about interference, competition between devices, incompatability, ... :-).
The UK government is trying to move broadcast TV over to digital, freeing up the current UHF bandwidth without eliminating terrestrial transmission.
The US seems to be remarkably backward on such things. I read the other day that they are still arguing about how to do digital radio. Same thing happened over cellphones. Is this just a result of the size of the market or some feature of the US political/economic system?
I know it will come as a shock to you, but some of us use our computers to do (supposedly) useful things, not just to endlessly reconfigure.
Besides which, while I haven't used Debian, in most of the unix systems I have administered the primary configuration interface is not the command line, but emacs (or vi or your choice). The exception would be Solaris where they made a half-arsed attempt to provide GUI configuration just to make life painful for remote administration.
Remember, only the instalation stuff is gogin to need shaking out in that time. Lots of people will have been upgrading to and running the new code from CVS before they actually make ISO images for people to test the instalation, setup and out-of-the-box behaviour.
If you want an MP3 player you have to replace if you drop it or if the pocket it is in gets banged against a wall or...
Flash mm cards are now cheap enough for me to be able to carry half a dozen 64mb cards with me, each holding about an album. That's enough for me. The extra space doesn't seem worth going to something mechanical.
That attitude may be OK for consumer toys, but I'm not about to trust my backups to hardware with that kind of attitude behind it.
93 euro is $109. so only $10, perhaps thinkgeek bought their stock at the euro price. I can only presume LAKS haven't been paying attention to the financial news.
BTW, why doesn't /. let me include euro signs?
Black hole list ,like any other anti spam measure, either do or don't let theuer see what is blocked depending on the choice of the person who sets up the filter. Black hole lists are no better nor owrse thn header matching or anything else in this way.
Eg, I use black hole lists to tag email which my procmail puts in a probably-spam mailbox.
Combined with some simple rules about subject line length and so on, this basicly eliminates all spam and very rarely catches soemthign it shouldn't.
Effectively 100% of the spam that gets to my main mailbox is the stuff sent to a work email I have to check immediatly, and so can't spam filter.
So, how many times in the last 10 years have you needed to have /bin/cat look up passwords in a different way:-)