I think the point is that, if you have been cut off by your provider, there is little point in switching on your phone or keeping the battery charged. The man may not even have had his telephone on him.
Local or not, when you have no internet connection your productivity and efficiency is reduced to just about 0% for many of us.
For most of the people I know, the reverse is true. If my internet connection was down right now, I'd be hacking code instead of jerking around on Slashdot.
While all that stuff may be true, bear in mind that the Apple app store is the only way to distribute iPhone applications. So some percentage of Java developers will eventually start using a Java app store (it doesn't have to be Sun's and if Sun is successful, there will soon be others), 100% of people who develop for the iPhone use Apple's app store.
Have you actually read paragraph 6 from the GPLv3? The restriction is still very much in place (see point B, and fee restrictions on points C, D and E):
Yes, and it nowhere says my competitor is forced to redistribute the binaries to me.
A competitor would have to have very high prices, incredibly loyal customers and no second-hand market for their product (at least, not that existed within the product's support lifetime or three years, whichever is longest) if they were to succeed in making that difficult. Note also that to sell successfully at such high prices, such a competitor must have made very high-value modifications
While that is unlikely in the games market, this situation is common in the world of professional services where customers might actually pay a commercial rate for the man time required to modify a product to fit their needs.
Both of those ways depend on you getting a copy of the binaries. Once you have that copy, however you obtained it (presumably you have to obtain it legally - the GPL just says "come into possession of"), you have the right to see the source. But if you don't have the binaries, you have no right to the source.
Let's say I write a new game and I sell it. Let's say I also make the source code available under the GPL (for a fee).
My competitor buys the source code and makes a new game based on my code which he starts selling. Because he obtained my source code under the GPL, he has to provide the source code to his game to anybody who buys a copy of the game and asks for the source code, but he can charge a fee for his source code and that fee might be quite a lot of money.
Some of his customers decide to buy his source code.
So, how can I get a copy of my competitor's source code?
I can approach my competitor and ask for his source code, but there's nothing in the GPL that says he has to give it to me.
I could buy a copy of his game, at which point he has now redistributed the code in binary form to me, so he must let me have the source code, but he can charge a fee. GPLv2 said the fee could only cover packaging and distribution costs but that restriction seems to have been lifted in v3. Note that my competitor may choose to refuse to sell me a copy of his game although I may be able to pick up a copy from elsewhere.
I could approach one of his customers who has the source code. His customer may give me the source. He may choose to charge me a fee for the source, or he may refuse to give me anything.
If nobody in possession of a copy of my competitor's game chooses to let me have either a binary or source code copy, I have no way of getting to see my competitor's changes. Obviously, this is an unlikely scenario with software that is on general sale or is quite popular. However, imagine a scenario with highly specialised software where each company may have only a few customers. My competitor might have built up a good and valuable relationship with his customers and they may be unwilling to compromise that relationship by giving away or selling his products.
That is correct, but maybe they don't want to. If your competitor has sold the code to their customers at a huge price, perhaps none of the customers would want to give you the software without themselves charging a huge price.
The point is, you have no automatic right to get your competitor's changes.
The GPL, by contrast, allows your competitor to use your code as the basis for their enhanced product only if they give you their code in return. That means that whenever your competitor uses your code to gain a competitive advantage, you can grab his code in return and match him.
That's actually not true. There's no obligation in the GPL for your competitor to give you any of their source code unless they, or one of their customers, or somebody else downstream, redistributes the code to you. Since they are allowed to charge a fee for the software, you might find yourself having to pay to see their code changes. Or if you can't find anybody prepared to give you or sell you a copy of the software, you may never get the changes.
Such a search engine would, by definition, not be decent. The syntax of Perl regex is very powerful but virtually incomprehensible to most people. The search engine would also be very slow.
As long as you understand that most of the "free" services on the Internet e.g. Google are funded by advertising. No advertising, no search engines, no free web mail, no Sourceforge etc etc etc.
However, when I went to Paris last summer as a tourist, I quickly found that almost everybody spoke English. The trick was to open the conversation in French and such is my expertise in that language that pretty soon they'd switch to English.
I think you only need to demonstrate a willingness to try to speak French to get the French on side.
I don't think you can regard British series as an example of anything on this subject. The pressures are very different , especially on the BBC where advertising revenue is not a factor. Short and sweet tends to be the yardstick. some of the best BBC series had very short runs. Fawlty Towers: 12 episodes, Blackadder: 24 episodes, The Office: 14 episodes including a two part Christmas special. Those are three of the greatest sitcoms ever to grace British TV screens. Perhaps they are so good because the creators were allowed to quit before the dead horse flogging started.
This hysteria and panic is caused by, well, nothing.
No, it's not caused by nothing, it's caused by the media. Bad news is good for newspaper sales (people like to see road accidents, as long as it is not them having the accident), therefore it is in the interests of the media to report bad news.
If something appears in a newspaper, it is, almost by definition, rare. We need to really worry about knife crime when newspapers stop reporting individual cases and start reporting only statistics.
Think of the iPhone as an African swallow. Is it uncompetitive that Apple don't let you use it to transport coconuts?
There's no point in thinking of the iPhone as another PC because it isn't. It's a telephone with some frilly bits added on. Sure, on the inside there is a computer, but that is an implementation detail. It's Apple's telephone. They get to add or leave out whatever functionality they like. If you don't like what is missing, buy a different telephone, or a computer.
That's all very well, but in a production environment when dereferencing a NULL pointer you'd probably rather have the program crash than carry on merrily with bad data. With a zero null value, you can easily arrange for this to happen by protecting the bottom page of memory from reads and writes. That way, even an assembly language program can't dereference a null pointer.
Let's be clear. The limited capability here is the fact that you have to use a kludge like VNC or Apple Remote Desktop to access your computer remotely. Apple (and Microsoft) have ditched this "important feature" in favour of improving the UI experience for the user when they are sitting in front of the computer. And guess what, only a few people ever complain about the lack of this "important feature", the reason being that most of us do not lock our computers in server rooms and access them with X terminals.
It's clear that Apple (and Microsoft) have made the right decision because more than 99% of personal computers run one or other of those operating systems. Your "important feature" seems to be totally irrelevant to 99 and a bit percent of all computer users.
Actually, the default condition for most languages is that the end of line is just another white space and that's the way I like it. I like my source code text to fit into 80 columns. Long thin columns of text are easier for the human eye to scan than short wide ones. This is the same reason why newspapers do not print single lines across the whole page, but divide it into narrow columns.
My personal opinion is that any language where white space (i.e. characters you can't see) does anything more significant than separate the tokens is the spawn of Satan.
The airframe is superficially similar but is probably made of advanced composites. It's also aerodynamically more efficient.
The engines are now high bypass turbofans with increased efficiency and reliability and reduced noise.
The avionics are unrecognisable compared with 40 years ago. Flight controls are electronic. The cockpit is a few CRTs instead of hundreds of mechanical dials. Navigation systems include GPS. The plane can now be flown by two people instead of three. Actually, technically, the aeroplane can be flown by the onboard computers. It doesn't need humans at all.
In the cabin, the seats are.... well, the seats are the same - possibly worse, but even in cattle class, every seat has its own entertainment centre with on demand video and computer games.
So modern airliners are all identical metal tubes with wings stuck on and engines stuck to the wings in turn, but when you think about it, that description fits the Douglas DC3 from the 1930's. Appearances are only skin deep.
He wasn't a devout Christian. He was a Christian at first but no more or less so than anybody else of his time. Yes, he studied Divinity at Cambridge with the aim of becoming a country parson, but that was really only to provide him with a respectable position so that he could carry on collecting beetles
The "many eyes" factor is bullshit, it doesn't work in real life. It doesn't seem to stop bugs from getting into Open Source software. In fact, in at least one spectacular case, the OSS model actually introduced a nasty security bug.
This idea that with OSS if you find a bug you can patch it is also bullshit for the most part. It assumes that the user is both a competent programmer in the implementation language and knowledgeable enough to patch the application without making the same kind of screw ups that Debian did with OpenSSL. As far as most people are concerned, if they find a bug in OSS, they will just report it to the development organisation in much the same way as they would for proprietary software. At that point, they are in pretty much the same boat. Almost.
I think the real advantage of OSS is actually nothing to do with the quality of the final product being better. The real advantage is that the whole development process is usually out in the open. The bug tracker is almost always on a publicly accessible web site so you can see what people are saying about your bug and what progress is being made. You can see the source code (obviously) but you can also take a look at the source code control system. You can subscribe to developer mailing lists to get a feel about how things are going and how professional the developers are. You can examine the change control process (even the company in the article managed to do this but it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that they can't easily examine change control in a proprietary company without the co-operation of that company.) The whole development process is open to scrutiny from the customers. This is almost never the case with proprietary software.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is that, if you have been cut off by your provider, there is little point in switching on your phone or keeping the battery charged. The man may not even have had his telephone on him.
For most of the people I know, the reverse is true. If my internet connection was down right now, I'd be hacking code instead of jerking around on Slashdot.
While all that stuff may be true, bear in mind that the Apple app store is the only way to distribute iPhone applications. So some percentage of Java developers will eventually start using a Java app store (it doesn't have to be Sun's and if Sun is successful, there will soon be others), 100% of people who develop for the iPhone use Apple's app store.
Have you actually read paragraph 6 from the GPLv3? The restriction is still very much in place (see point B, and fee restrictions on points C, D and E):
Yes, and it nowhere says my competitor is forced to redistribute the binaries to me.
A competitor would have to have very high prices, incredibly loyal customers and no second-hand market for their product (at least, not that existed within the product's support lifetime or three years, whichever is longest) if they were to succeed in making that difficult. Note also that to sell successfully at such high prices, such a competitor must have made very high-value modifications
While that is unlikely in the games market, this situation is common in the world of professional services where customers might actually pay a commercial rate for the man time required to modify a product to fit their needs.
Both of those ways depend on you getting a copy of the binaries. Once you have that copy, however you obtained it (presumably you have to obtain it legally - the GPL just says "come into possession of"), you have the right to see the source. But if you don't have the binaries, you have no right to the source.
You have missed the point.
Let's say I write a new game and I sell it. Let's say I also make the source code available under the GPL (for a fee).
My competitor buys the source code and makes a new game based on my code which he starts selling. Because he obtained my source code under the GPL, he has to provide the source code to his game to anybody who buys a copy of the game and asks for the source code, but he can charge a fee for his source code and that fee might be quite a lot of money.
Some of his customers decide to buy his source code.
So, how can I get a copy of my competitor's source code?
I can approach my competitor and ask for his source code, but there's nothing in the GPL that says he has to give it to me.
I could buy a copy of his game, at which point he has now redistributed the code in binary form to me, so he must let me have the source code, but he can charge a fee. GPLv2 said the fee could only cover packaging and distribution costs but that restriction seems to have been lifted in v3. Note that my competitor may choose to refuse to sell me a copy of his game although I may be able to pick up a copy from elsewhere.
I could approach one of his customers who has the source code. His customer may give me the source. He may choose to charge me a fee for the source, or he may refuse to give me anything.
If nobody in possession of a copy of my competitor's game chooses to let me have either a binary or source code copy, I have no way of getting to see my competitor's changes. Obviously, this is an unlikely scenario with software that is on general sale or is quite popular. However, imagine a scenario with highly specialised software where each company may have only a few customers. My competitor might have built up a good and valuable relationship with his customers and they may be unwilling to compromise that relationship by giving away or selling his products.
That is correct, but maybe they don't want to. If your competitor has sold the code to their customers at a huge price, perhaps none of the customers would want to give you the software without themselves charging a huge price.
The point is, you have no automatic right to get your competitor's changes.
The GPL, by contrast, allows your competitor to use your code as the basis for their enhanced product only if they give you their code in return. That means that whenever your competitor uses your code to gain a competitive advantage, you can grab his code in return and match him.
That's actually not true. There's no obligation in the GPL for your competitor to give you any of their source code unless they, or one of their customers, or somebody else downstream, redistributes the code to you. Since they are allowed to charge a fee for the software, you might find yourself having to pay to see their code changes. Or if you can't find anybody prepared to give you or sell you a copy of the software, you may never get the changes.
Such a search engine would, by definition, not be decent. The syntax of Perl regex is very powerful but virtually incomprehensible to most people. The search engine would also be very slow.
As long as you understand that most of the "free" services on the Internet e.g. Google are funded by advertising. No advertising, no search engines, no free web mail, no Sourceforge etc etc etc.
Perhaps you should RTF BBC A linked to by the Slashdot story. Pay particular attention to the publication date at the top.
That doesn't surprise me.
However, when I went to Paris last summer as a tourist, I quickly found that almost everybody spoke English. The trick was to open the conversation in French and such is my expertise in that language that pretty soon they'd switch to English.
I think you only need to demonstrate a willingness to try to speak French to get the French on side.
Considering your completely off topic post is now at +3, it's hard to deny that your premise seems to be correct and you are in fact doing well.
Technically that would be punctuation, not grammar.
I don't think you can regard British series as an example of anything on this subject. The pressures are very different , especially on the BBC where advertising revenue is not a factor. Short and sweet tends to be the yardstick. some of the best BBC series had very short runs. Fawlty Towers: 12 episodes, Blackadder: 24 episodes, The Office: 14 episodes including a two part Christmas special. Those are three of the greatest sitcoms ever to grace British TV screens. Perhaps they are so good because the creators were allowed to quit before the dead horse flogging started.
No, it's not caused by nothing, it's caused by the media. Bad news is good for newspaper sales (people like to see road accidents, as long as it is not them having the accident), therefore it is in the interests of the media to report bad news.
If something appears in a newspaper, it is, almost by definition, rare. We need to really worry about knife crime when newspapers stop reporting individual cases and start reporting only statistics.
Think of the iPhone as an African swallow. Is it uncompetitive that Apple don't let you use it to transport coconuts?
There's no point in thinking of the iPhone as another PC because it isn't. It's a telephone with some frilly bits added on. Sure, on the inside there is a computer, but that is an implementation detail. It's Apple's telephone. They get to add or leave out whatever functionality they like. If you don't like what is missing, buy a different telephone, or a computer.
+ 2 minutes on my train into Bristol this morning would have meant me missing my connection.
That's all very well, but in a production environment when dereferencing a NULL pointer you'd probably rather have the program crash than carry on merrily with bad data. With a zero null value, you can easily arrange for this to happen by protecting the bottom page of memory from reads and writes. That way, even an assembly language program can't dereference a null pointer.
Let's be clear. The limited capability here is the fact that you have to use a kludge like VNC or Apple Remote Desktop to access your computer remotely. Apple (and Microsoft) have ditched this "important feature" in favour of improving the UI experience for the user when they are sitting in front of the computer. And guess what, only a few people ever complain about the lack of this "important feature", the reason being that most of us do not lock our computers in server rooms and access them with X terminals.
It's clear that Apple (and Microsoft) have made the right decision because more than 99% of personal computers run one or other of those operating systems. Your "important feature" seems to be totally irrelevant to 99 and a bit percent of all computer users.
Actually, the default condition for most languages is that the end of line is just another white space and that's the way I like it. I like my source code text to fit into 80 columns. Long thin columns of text are easier for the human eye to scan than short wide ones. This is the same reason why newspapers do not print single lines across the whole page, but divide it into narrow columns.
My personal opinion is that any language where white space (i.e. characters you can't see) does anything more significant than separate the tokens is the spawn of Satan.
Yes, including Python.
No it isn't, not remotely.
The airframe is superficially similar but is probably made of advanced composites. It's also aerodynamically more efficient.
The engines are now high bypass turbofans with increased efficiency and reliability and reduced noise.
The avionics are unrecognisable compared with 40 years ago. Flight controls are electronic. The cockpit is a few CRTs instead of hundreds of mechanical dials. Navigation systems include GPS. The plane can now be flown by two people instead of three. Actually, technically, the aeroplane can be flown by the onboard computers. It doesn't need humans at all.
In the cabin, the seats are.... well, the seats are the same - possibly worse, but even in cattle class, every seat has its own entertainment centre with on demand video and computer games.
So modern airliners are all identical metal tubes with wings stuck on and engines stuck to the wings in turn, but when you think about it, that description fits the Douglas DC3 from the 1930's. Appearances are only skin deep.
He wasn't a devout Christian. He was a Christian at first but no more or less so than anybody else of his time. Yes, he studied Divinity at Cambridge with the aim of becoming a country parson, but that was really only to provide him with a respectable position so that he could carry on collecting beetles
The second is the official SI unit of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI
The "many eyes" factor is bullshit, it doesn't work in real life. It doesn't seem to stop bugs from getting into Open Source software. In fact, in at least one spectacular case, the OSS model actually introduced a nasty security bug.
This idea that with OSS if you find a bug you can patch it is also bullshit for the most part. It assumes that the user is both a competent programmer in the implementation language and knowledgeable enough to patch the application without making the same kind of screw ups that Debian did with OpenSSL. As far as most people are concerned, if they find a bug in OSS, they will just report it to the development organisation in much the same way as they would for proprietary software. At that point, they are in pretty much the same boat. Almost.
I think the real advantage of OSS is actually nothing to do with the quality of the final product being better. The real advantage is that the whole development process is usually out in the open. The bug tracker is almost always on a publicly accessible web site so you can see what people are saying about your bug and what progress is being made. You can see the source code (obviously) but you can also take a look at the source code control system. You can subscribe to developer mailing lists to get a feel about how things are going and how professional the developers are. You can examine the change control process (even the company in the article managed to do this but it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that they can't easily examine change control in a proprietary company without the co-operation of that company.) The whole development process is open to scrutiny from the customers. This is almost never the case with proprietary software.