If you've ever had a discussion about evolution or creation with a young earth creationist, you'd realise that that isn't true - at least metaphorically.
I've been programming in C and C like languages e.g. Java, C++, Perl etc for 20 years and I have never found a convincing case for using break (except in a switch), continue or goto in any of those languages. A case can be made for goto in C as a poor man's substitute for proper exceptions but in both Java and C++ you have real exceptions so goto, break-out-of-a-loop and continue are never needed.
I avoid break because it obfuscates the loop post condition. Without break you can always tell at a glance what the post condition is by looking at the loop condition, but with break you have to search through the body of the loop to find that out.
I avoid continue because it obfuscates the structure of the code within the loop.
{
if (condition) continue ;
rest of loop }
is the same as
{
if (!condition)
{
rest of loop
} }
The latter form looks more complex because there are more braces and more indentation, but, in fact, the fault is in the former which disguises the complexity.
With regards to clause C, if I am a non-commercial distributor, and I point at a public server for source code and that server disappears, the end user *cannot* get the source code from MySQL AB if mySQL AB says "tough titties, buy a licensed binary" and the end user doesn't feel like ponying up. MySQL AB is not obligated to give it to them, because that end user did not have a prior relationship with MySQL AB as a customer or even as a downloader of *their* binaries.
But you wouldn't be able to use option C if you didn't have a written offer from MySQL AB making the source code available to everybody for three years.
So if MySQL made an offer to you saying "the source code will be available to anybody on this FTP server until at least 2010, you can pass on that offer to others under clause c and if MySQL shut down the server tomorrow, they would be breaking the terms of the written offer, but not necessarily the GPL, because they are the copyright holder of all of the code.
I once worked for a company that was selling an Open Source product (an e-mail MTA beginning with "S", if you want a clue). Most of the sales and marketing people came from a world of of Powerpoint and Word and were used to sending sales documents out in MS Word. Anyhow, once our salesman sent out a contract to a company that was very much a Linux shop (not unusual for the product we were selling). Of course, they couldn't read the Word document, since Word doesn't run on Linux.
Except that they could read the document with strings(1). In case you are not a Unix person, strings is a utility that reads a binary file and prints out all the sequences of ASCII characters of more than length 4 (the default). They were thus able to read the entire contract and several other contracts to other customers because the sales droid did what everybody does and based the contract on one for a previous customer which itself was based on a previous contract and so on back to the very first contract ever written in MS Word.
Word is great for document archaeology but very poor for trade secrets. Deletion of text results in the text being marked as deleted, but not necessarily removed from the file.
I don't think that's true. The core of activity was merely transferred to where it is now - GCHQ in Cheltenham. Had the government kept the team together they wouldn't have been able to go out and make progress in the civilian world. For instance, had Alan Turing remained at GCHQ, none of his post war work in the field of computing would have happened.
Many of the pioneers of British computing had previously worked at Bletchley.
It's also wrong IMO to suggest that, in the early days of computing the British were 10 years behind the Americans. My tutor at University was very fond of telling me about the Manchester Atlas et al which pioneered such things as virtual memory.
Windows 95 was a pre-emptive multitasking multithreaded operating system. However, the GDI, which was the bit that drew all the graphics, was 95% identical to that of Win 3.1 which was cooperatively multitasking and the code was not reentrant. Microsoft "solved" this by protecting it with a semaphore, yes one semaphore for the whole OS. This meant that a process that grabbed it and then hung would appear to freeze the whole system because nothing else could update the display. If you could find a way to kill the errant process, everything else would leap back into life.
WinXP traces its lineage back to Windows NT which was a completely different operating system to Win95 (written in C rather than assembler, for one thing) which had proper threading from the start. In fact, WinNT had proper support for threading before any of the *nixes including Linux (if my memory serves me correctly, it may not).
Has anyone stopped to think what this retards been doing for the past 3 years?
Yes, they have. According to the article, this guy has been fighting this case for the past three years. Do you think three years is an unreasonably long time for a case like this to last? Consider that, if Google never had any case, their best chance is to spin the case out until this guy ran out of money.
I hope nobody on the security staff of SFO is reading this because otherwise the next time you use this trick there will probably be rubber gloves, a security guard with large hands and cavities involved.
Or perhaps it's not you doing this but somebody you work with that you dislike intensely.
If it makes that big a difference to you, you'd probably consider it not too much inconvenience to go to a record shop and buy a CD which, I understand, is of CD quality and in a lossless format. Furthermore, when you buy a CD it comes with a back up bundled.
Yet, we've ported some of our best applications to the proprietary Windows platform
We?
If "we" is the Linux community, then "we" have a bit of a nerve claiming those projects you have listed are "ours". They all stand independent of any particular platform (maybe not VLC - I don't know much about it).
France was instrumental in securing USA as am independent country. I think that action is far more interesting and yet, Americans hate the French while you should be kissing their ass and thank them for USA.
I think the USA more than repaid that debt with its contribution to liberating France from Hitler's rule in WW2, which, frankly, wouldn't have happened without the USA.
Creationism is falsifiable. The Genesis creation story makes some very specific claims about the way everything was created which should have predictable effects on the fossil record.
For instance, all of the animals were made on the same day according to Genesis. This means that we should see fossil cows at every level of the geological column. Do we? No. Creationism is not only falsifiable, it is falsified.
I'm not sure if you are trying to refute GP's assertion that it's no fun and everybody takes it too seriously, because, if what you say is true, GP is correct.
The BBC also did a documentary for the 40th anniversary in which they simulated the scene using a computer model based on camera footage from the assassination and they came to the same conclusion. The magic bullet wasn't magic at all.
Without copyright, the GPL wouldn't even need to exist. The GPL was created as a retaliation against copyright. "Copyleft", get it... it's the opposite of copyright. If all copyright laws were abolished tomorrow there would be no more need for the GPL.
I think you have fundamentally missed the point of Free software. The idea is not just to make it possible for people to copy software for free (as in beer) but to make it possible for them to use it in any way they want and to modify it for their needs. In fact I would say that the freedom to redistribute the software unchanged is the least important and could be done away with except that it's pretty much impossible without also doing away with the freedom to redistribute modified software.
Without the GPL somebody could take your software that you want to be free and redistribute it in binary form only with some sort of copy protection, thus preventing their customers the freedom to reuse and modify it.
I don't think that's the case in Britain at all actually. I think you cannot be libelled by the truth even here. There have been several high profile cases where politicians have brought libel cases against newspapers here in which the politicians have lost their cases through the newspapers showing that their "libelous" accusations were essentially true.
the laptops only have one button adn I'm sure as hell not carting around a mouse to make up for it.
Modern Apple laptops emulate right click with a two fingered tap on the track pad. They also have scroll wheel functionality if you do a two fingered drag across the track pad. For me, this works better than real buttons.
Oh, and current Apple mice effectively have four buttons and a two dimensional scroll wheel. I find them extremely nasty because the ergonomics are terrible for left handers and the scroll wheel jams easily.
I think the GP post was referring to the process of activation after installation, not the Windows Genuine Advantage program.
In any case, OEM licences are restricted to a single specific computer (using some complicated algorithm to determine whether it's always the same computer), but OEM licences cost a fraction of the amount of a full retail version of Windows. You get what you pay for.
Organizing information to display in tabs is a method. At one time, it was novel and non-obvious. There was no reason to reject a patent for it ("I should have thought of that!" isn't one) in 1981.
The idea of using tabs to help display information predates this patent by at least several decades. For instance, for as long as I can remember (at least 35 years) my mother has had an address book with staggered cut-outs from the edge of the pages. Each cut-out exposed a small area of one of the susequent pages which was labelled with a letter of the alphabet. If you put your finger on that letter and then turned over all the pages before it, you got to the addresses that started with that letter.
Where do you think the metaphor for tabs used in GUIs comes from? Tabs were not novel in 1981 or even 1987 when this patent was filed.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been programming in C and C like languages e.g. Java, C++, Perl etc for 20 years and I have never found a convincing case for using break (except in a switch), continue or goto in any of those languages. A case can be made for goto in C as a poor man's substitute for proper exceptions but in both Java and C++ you have real exceptions so goto, break-out-of-a-loop and continue are never needed.
I avoid break because it obfuscates the loop post condition. Without break you can always tell at a glance what the post condition is by looking at the loop condition, but with break you have to search through the body of the loop to find that out.
I avoid continue because it obfuscates the structure of the code within the loop.
{
if (condition) continue ;
rest of loop
}
is the same as
{
if (!condition)
{
rest of loop
}
}
The latter form looks more complex because there are more braces and more indentation, but, in fact, the fault is in the former which disguises the complexity.
So if MySQL made an offer to you saying "the source code will be available to anybody on this FTP server until at least 2010, you can pass on that offer to others under clause c and if MySQL shut down the server tomorrow, they would be breaking the terms of the written offer, but not necessarily the GPL, because they are the copyright holder of all of the code.
I'd go for
MYsql_bwahaha
I once worked for a company that was selling an Open Source product (an e-mail MTA beginning with "S", if you want a clue). Most of the sales and marketing people came from a world of of Powerpoint and Word and were used to sending sales documents out in MS Word. Anyhow, once our salesman sent out a contract to a company that was very much a Linux shop (not unusual for the product we were selling). Of course, they couldn't read the Word document, since Word doesn't run on Linux.
Except that they could read the document with strings(1). In case you are not a Unix person, strings is a utility that reads a binary file and prints out all the sequences of ASCII characters of more than length 4 (the default). They were thus able to read the entire contract and several other contracts to other customers because the sales droid did what everybody does and based the contract on one for a previous customer which itself was based on a previous contract and so on back to the very first contract ever written in MS Word.
Word is great for document archaeology but very poor for trade secrets. Deletion of text results in the text being marked as deleted, but not necessarily removed from the file.
I don't think that's true. The core of activity was merely transferred to where it is now - GCHQ in Cheltenham. Had the government kept the team together they wouldn't have been able to go out and make progress in the civilian world. For instance, had Alan Turing remained at GCHQ, none of his post war work in the field of computing would have happened.
Many of the pioneers of British computing had previously worked at Bletchley.
It's also wrong IMO to suggest that, in the early days of computing the British were 10 years behind the Americans. My tutor at University was very fond of telling me about the Manchester Atlas et al which pioneered such things as virtual memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Computer
Not true actually.
Windows 95 was a pre-emptive multitasking multithreaded operating system. However, the GDI, which was the bit that drew all the graphics, was 95% identical to that of Win 3.1 which was cooperatively multitasking and the code was not reentrant. Microsoft "solved" this by protecting it with a semaphore, yes one semaphore for the whole OS. This meant that a process that grabbed it and then hung would appear to freeze the whole system because nothing else could update the display. If you could find a way to kill the errant process, everything else would leap back into life.
WinXP traces its lineage back to Windows NT which was a completely different operating system to Win95 (written in C rather than assembler, for one thing) which had proper threading from the start. In fact, WinNT had proper support for threading before any of the *nixes including Linux (if my memory serves me correctly, it may not).
Because the DVDs of the first four Futurama series sold really really well. Futurama is a commercial success.
I hope nobody on the security staff of SFO is reading this because otherwise the next time you use this trick there will probably be rubber gloves, a security guard with large hands and cavities involved.
Or perhaps it's not you doing this but somebody you work with that you dislike intensely.
If it makes that big a difference to you, you'd probably consider it not too much inconvenience to go to a record shop and buy a CD which, I understand, is of CD quality and in a lossless format. Furthermore, when you buy a CD it comes with a back up bundled.
HFS+ is open source.
We?
If "we" is the Linux community, then "we" have a bit of a nerve claiming those projects you have listed are "ours". They all stand independent of any particular platform (maybe not VLC - I don't know much about it).
I think the USA more than repaid that debt with its contribution to liberating France from Hitler's rule in WW2, which, frankly, wouldn't have happened without the USA.
Creationism is falsifiable. The Genesis creation story makes some very specific claims about the way everything was created which should have predictable effects on the fossil record.
For instance, all of the animals were made on the same day according to Genesis. This means that we should see fossil cows at every level of the geological column. Do we? No. Creationism is not only falsifiable, it is falsified.
I'm not sure if you are trying to refute GP's assertion that it's no fun and everybody takes it too seriously, because, if what you say is true, GP is correct.
The BBC also did a documentary for the 40th anniversary in which they simulated the scene using a computer model based on camera footage from the assassination and they came to the same conclusion. The magic bullet wasn't magic at all.
Windows NT was originally released for x86, Alpha (and MIPS I think).
I think you have fundamentally missed the point of Free software. The idea is not just to make it possible for people to copy software for free (as in beer) but to make it possible for them to use it in any way they want and to modify it for their needs. In fact I would say that the freedom to redistribute the software unchanged is the least important and could be done away with except that it's pretty much impossible without also doing away with the freedom to redistribute modified software.
Without the GPL somebody could take your software that you want to be free and redistribute it in binary form only with some sort of copy protection, thus preventing their customers the freedom to reuse and modify it.
I don't think that's the case in Britain at all actually. I think you cannot be libelled by the truth even here. There have been several high profile cases where politicians have brought libel cases against newspapers here in which the politicians have lost their cases through the newspapers showing that their "libelous" accusations were essentially true.
Modern Apple laptops emulate right click with a two fingered tap on the track pad. They also have scroll wheel functionality if you do a two fingered drag across the track pad. For me, this works better than real buttons.
Oh, and current Apple mice effectively have four buttons and a two dimensional scroll wheel. I find them extremely nasty because the ergonomics are terrible for left handers and the scroll wheel jams easily.
I think the GP post was referring to the process of activation after installation, not the Windows Genuine Advantage program.
In any case, OEM licences are restricted to a single specific computer (using some complicated algorithm to determine whether it's always the same computer), but OEM licences cost a fraction of the amount of a full retail version of Windows. You get what you pay for.
Where do you think the metaphor for tabs used in GUIs comes from? Tabs were not novel in 1981 or even 1987 when this patent was filed.