Cartoon Network? You mean the Pokemon Channel!? I think I might be able to find some reasons to change the channel occasionally!:)
At the risk of offending the hard-core Anime fans, I think they show a lot of bad Anime even on Adult Swim, although they occasionally have a good one (and several that are so-so).
I'm also really annoyed with the Cartoon Network for running Futurama against the Daily Show ("When News Breaks, We Fix It!"), which means I never get to see it (Futurama) unless A) the Daily Show is a rerun, or B) I stay up for the 2AM reshowing.
Netscape 7.1 had a similar (though not as bad) thing: their popup-blocking, by default, didn't work on their site or that of some of their "selected partners". Unlike Norton, though, I think they're unlikely to change this in future versions (fortunately, I finally managed to persuade my brother to switch to firehyena, or whatever it's called).
The X clipboard certainly provides everything an application would need to support copying/pasting of images (or whatever). Whether the applications you use for that actually use the provided features of the X clipboard is another question, but they certainly could!
From the much-linked JWZ page: "One of the really cool, yet rarely used, features of the selection mechanism is that it can negotiate what data formats to use. It's not just about text. When one application asks another for the selection, part of their communication involves the requester asking the owner for the list of types in which they are capable of delivering the selection data; then the requester picks the format they like best, and asks for it that way."
Of course, you can't replace five linux servers with five windows servers. If you tried, you'd have...not enough servers. You'd need at least ten to twenty-five windows servers to replace five linux servers.:)
Now, if you replaced five linux servers with five windows servers and four linux servers, it would look good for MS, which would apparently have more servers at that point, even though the linux servers would be doing 80% of the work.:)
And here it is as a link, so you can see what it is that they're sending. Note that it takes a really long time to download. Be patient.
Seems to me like it could be fun to try generating some random numbers to see if you can find which ones are actually valid tracking numbers in their system. (Note that invalid numbers respond with a zero byte file instantaneously, so you can quickly try again.) Of course, that might interfere with the reliability of the information they claim to provide, so if you think these are nice guys offering a valuable service, you probably don't want to do that!:)
I had problems with the very first question: "What time do you go to sleep at night?" "Choose one." ONE!?!?! How about a range, bubba! Or, where's "when I feel tired?" Where's "depends on whether I had to get up early for a meeting or something that day?" Where's "depends on how much caffeine I consumed that day?":)
No. The D-C suit is about D-C's failure to respond to an audit request, and will fail for various reasons I won't go into here. The Autozone case, though, is about using SCOG's copyrighted code, and most definitely is about Linux. SCOG themselves even had the termerity to ask that one of IBM's amended counterclaims[1] related to copyright be put on hold until the Autozone case is resolved, claiming that the Autozone case will settle all questions of copyrights in Linux.
[1] The same one that IBM is asking for summary judgement on.
I hope you also sent these comments to the installer dev team? This is beta software, after all. Posting complaints on slashdot may help others avoid the problems you encountered, but is unlikely to result in the problems actually getting fixed.
Disregarding MS's copyrights is a bad, bad idea. It makes them look like the victim, and it helps spread lock-in. For example, when the Vietnamese gov't recently announced that they were switching millions of systems from using pirated copies of Windows to using Linux, that was a major blow to MS. And yet, if you believe the standard propoganda, it should have been considered a victory. That's hundreds of millions of dollars in "losses" that they're no longer "suffering". Shouldn't they pay taxes on that?:)
Do you keep wav files on your hard drive because they are loss-less?
No, I use FLAC or shorten for my master audio files, because they are lossless. (Not all compression formats are lossy.) Or I store in cdda on cd (this covers cds I buy as well as flacs/shns I download and burn). I may occasionally make copies in vorbis or other lossy format, but never the master. (And I certainly don't pay a dollar a track for already lossy files!):)
Just like the mp3 format works so well by slimming down the things the human ear can't hear
Actually, the fact that I can hear it (especially in the cymbals) is the main reason I don't use mp3 even when I do use lossy audio formats! (That and the fact that my vendor supports ogg vorbis and flac, but not mp3.)
Not if this is still the 1950s. What are you, a time traveller? The "big three" of the '50s and '60s were Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, yes. But we've come a long way since then (baby). The sixties introduced the first major "literary" movement in the F&SF genre(s), the "New Wave", and gave us Bradbury, Vonnegut and others, whose literary credentials are, I think, unchallenged. While the older, "pulp" style is still around and going strong, the descendents of the New Wave and other, later movements are widespread -- so much so that Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn't look out of place when cited as a genre writer.
Basically, literary SF is an almost separate genre from pulp SF, with a separate (though somewhat overlapping) set of fans. If your friends are still citing Clarke (my Ghod!) as one of the "greats", perhaps you need to look for some more literate friends, instead of blaming the genre you obviously know so little of. I haven't cited Clarke as a "great" in decades. He's been surpassed by those who came later to such a degree that I'm not even sure he'd make the cut as "average" today.
Even the "pulp" side of the genre has higher literary standards than it once did. I'll match Orson Scott Card against most of the authors on the NYT bestseller list any day of the week.
"But, very occasionally, a book holds its own in both arenas."
If we limit ourselves to works published before 1970, I might agree with you. As it is, I have to say that you simply have no idea what you're talking about.
He already is a defendant in at least three cases: the SCOG shareholder suit, the Red Hat suit and the IBM countersuit. The last of which actually has GPL violation on the list of complaints. Once the Novell suit is dismissed, and SCOG files some less stupid charges against Novell, we'll probably see a countersuit there too.
(We'll ignore the German suits against SCOG, since those are A) against scogroup.de, and B) SCOG already lost, so technically they're not defendants any more. They're losers.:)
Accepting the GPL is completely voluntary. You can refuse to accept the GPL, and then you're merely bound by copyright law. You can still use the program however you want, you just can't distribute copies or derivative works. Not something a lot of people care about. (This is why, e.g., Corel was wrong and stupid to try to make popups to force people to accept the GPL, just as if it were an EULA.)
This has nothing to do with understanding the GPL, this has to do with understanding the law. In general, if you're asking, "can't I get around the law by doing X", the answer is probably going to be no if it's obvious that your intent is to do what the law forbids.
Thus, if you hire a hitman, you may not have pulled the trigger yourself, but the law will still consider you to be guilty of murder.
In your example, it will be obvious that your intent is to provide a derivative work on the end-user's machine. Thus, you will be judged as if you had put that derivative work there yourself. Saying, "I didn't personally copy the code" won't get you off, any more than saying, "I didn't pull the trigger" would get you out of those murder charges.
This is why legal matters are still decided by judges and juries, rather than machines. A literal-minded machine might find your argument compelling. A person wouldn't (unless that person was a programmer, who spends too much time working with literal-minded machines, which is why this suggestion keeps coming up again and again).
"any company [...] will view GPL'd code as sort of a 'Nut Cracker' that will crack open their code base and give it to the world"
Either you're a troll or you're just really, really bad at expressing yourself or you're insane/deluded/misinformed. I'll assume the second option, as that's the most polite one to assume.:)
First of all, you can freely mix GPL'd code with your company's code without any fears as long as you don't distribute the results outside of the company. Since something like 90% of all programmers work for companies that don't distribute any code outside the company, this seems like a pretty important point for a lot of people.
Second, merely using GPL'd programs will not "infect" your code. Oracle, for example, uses GPL'd compilers and operating systems, but they haven't had to "crack open their code base," nor does anyone think they should have to.
Do you know any other languages besides C/C++? I have over 15 years of C, and over 5 of C++, and I strongly disagree with you. They are not different languages. But then, I also have at least a passing acquaintance with Lisp/Scheme, Forth, Python, Tcl, Eiffel, Smalltalk, Haskell, Fortran, Pascal, Ada, PL/1, Prolog and SNOBOL. Compared to most of these, C and C++ (and Objective-C) are identical!
(Java and Perl, which I didn't list above, I would count as being in the same family as C/C++, although I suppose they are, technically, different languages.)
Yes, I've used boost and STL and such, and yes, it's a completely different style of programming from C. That still doesn't make it a new language. It's simply been enhanced to allow some new "paradigms". (And they're programming paradigms, not "C++ paradigms".) But I saw the same sorts of things happen back in the stone age, when macros were introduced to assembly language. Didn't mean I wasn't programming in assembler.
I wonder if they got buried in a deluge of complaints about the "have you quit beating your wife" nature of some of the questions? Anyway, I took a look around the "out-law" site (what a cheesy name!), and I am definitely not impressed. Their uncritical reporting of McBride crony Laura Didio's claims about Linux's costs was pathetic. There doesn't seem to be anything here I can't find on more reputable newsites. My suspicion is that this whole thing was an attempt to drum up some publicity and more hits, and frankly, I'm now sorry I gave them any. I won't be going back.
a friend with a young son said to me that it wasn't the nipple that bothered him aqs a father, so much as the act of Timberlake ripping off Jackson's top.
Yeah, I've heard that argument, and it's bullshit. If he'd ripped off her top to reveal a bikini or an undershirt, nobody would be bitching! Hell, if he'd pulled out a bullwhip and pretended to be beating her, there would have been much less controversy! (That last would have offended me but I generally find myself in a minority when it comes to the relative offensiveness of violence vs. sex and/or nudity.) On the other hand, if Janet had calmly and peacefully pulled off her own top to reveal her own nipple, the general public reaction would have been almost identical.
The fact is that we had a firestorm of controversy because a nipple was exposed on live television. Oh the horror, oh the humanity. The supposed violence of the act (and frankly, it didn't look that violent to me) is a distraction being clutched at by those who want to be offended by the nipple but have barely enough intellectual integrity left to realize their position isn't very sound or defensible.
My kids were weaned only a couple of years ago. I don't see any reason why the sight of a nipple on television should be dangerous or harmful to them. They've seen plenty of nipples in their lives, and will probably (hopefully) see plenty more before those lives are done.
Aha, that explains why the AMD chips always outperform the Intel chips that they're supposedly equivalent to. I always thought they were just being conservative in their labelling in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. But if the numbers are based on their own chips, well, AMD has been making faster chips at equivalent clock speeds since the days of the 486/33.
Why would you want to use CVS in server mode if you're not using multiple boxes? AFAIK, CVS runs just fine in standalone mode on Win. And for "at-home" projects, that should be sufficient. There's other alternatives too, like external hosting: sourceforge and whatnot.
If cost isn't the issue, then what is? For MS-only shops, the issue is the MS-only policy itself, and that's just a policy. It's purely voluntary, I don't see how a voluntary policy counts as a significant barrier. A barrier, yes, but significant?
As for using MS-branded tools only, that's irrelevant, as the ability to run subversion servers on windows doesn't do anything to that barrier. Perhaps you didn't read the article?
It's nice that you can run a subversion server on MSWin server systems, I suppose, if that's the sort of thing that floats your boat. But how on earth is the option to spend hundreds of extra dollars on proprietary operating system software and the more-expensive hardware it requires "significantly lower[ing] the barrier to entry?"
There may be a minor barrier, in Win-only shops (although I would say that it's the Win-only policy that is the barrier, not the other way around). Like I say, Win support is a perfectly nice thing. But "significant"?
Darl: "There are currently no lawsuits against SCO..."
Forget Cyberknight (or whatever they're called), what about Red Hat! Did Darl just happen to forget that they're being sued by Red Hat? In addition to being countersued by IBM, and having already lost two cases in Germany (although to be fair, those were against SCOG Gmbh, not SCOG Inc., and, being over, could be considered "not an outstanding lawsuit).
The Cyberknight thing isn't actually a lawsuit AFAIK. It's a complaint filed with a government body, not with a court. (How many slashdotters have (e)mailed the FTC?) But pretending the Red Hat lawsuit doesn't exist...aren't there laws about lying to investors? Is mind-boggling stupidity a legal defense in such cases?
Slashdot Mirror
Cartoon Network? You mean the Pokemon Channel!? I think I might be able to find some reasons to change the channel occasionally! :)
At the risk of offending the hard-core Anime fans, I think they show a lot of bad Anime even on Adult Swim, although they occasionally have a good one (and several that are so-so).
I'm also really annoyed with the Cartoon Network for running Futurama against the Daily Show ("When News Breaks, We Fix It!"), which means I never get to see it (Futurama) unless A) the Daily Show is a rerun, or B) I stay up for the 2AM reshowing.
Netscape 7.1 had a similar (though not as bad) thing: their popup-blocking, by default, didn't work on their site or that of some of their "selected partners". Unlike Norton, though, I think they're unlikely to change this in future versions (fortunately, I finally managed to persuade my brother to switch to firehyena, or whatever it's called).
The X clipboard certainly provides everything an application would need to support copying/pasting of images (or whatever). Whether the applications you use for that actually use the provided features of the X clipboard is another question, but they certainly could!
From the much-linked JWZ page: "One of the really cool, yet rarely used, features of the selection mechanism is that it can negotiate what data formats to use. It's not just about text. When one application asks another for the selection, part of their communication involves the requester asking the owner for the list of types in which they are capable of delivering the selection data; then the requester picks the format they like best, and asks for it that way."
Of course, you can't replace five linux servers with five windows servers. If you tried, you'd have...not enough servers. You'd need at least ten to twenty-five windows servers to replace five linux servers. :)
:)
Now, if you replaced five linux servers with five windows servers and four linux servers, it would look good for MS, which would apparently have more servers at that point, even though the linux servers would be doing 80% of the work.
Both the curses library and emacs refer to rectangular subsections of a text screen as "windows".
And here it is as a link, so you can see what it is that they're sending. Note that it takes a really long time to download. Be patient.
:)
Seems to me like it could be fun to try generating some random numbers to see if you can find which ones are actually valid tracking numbers in their system. (Note that invalid numbers respond with a zero byte file instantaneously, so you can quickly try again.) Of course, that might interfere with the reliability of the information they claim to provide, so if you think these are nice guys offering a valuable service, you probably don't want to do that!
I had problems with the very first question: "What time do you go to sleep at night?" "Choose one." ONE!?!?! How about a range, bubba! Or, where's "when I feel tired?" Where's "depends on whether I had to get up early for a meeting or something that day?" Where's "depends on how much caffeine I consumed that day?" :)
No. The D-C suit is about D-C's failure to respond to an audit request, and will fail for various reasons I won't go into here. The Autozone case, though, is about using SCOG's copyrighted code, and most definitely is about Linux. SCOG themselves even had the termerity to ask that one of IBM's amended counterclaims[1] related to copyright be put on hold until the Autozone case is resolved, claiming that the Autozone case will settle all questions of copyrights in Linux.
[1] The same one that IBM is asking for summary judgement on.
I hope you also sent these comments to the installer dev team? This is beta software, after all. Posting complaints on slashdot may help others avoid the problems you encountered, but is unlikely to result in the problems actually getting fixed.
Disregarding MS's copyrights is a bad, bad idea. It makes them look like the victim, and it helps spread lock-in. For example, when the Vietnamese gov't recently announced that they were switching millions of systems from using pirated copies of Windows to using Linux, that was a major blow to MS. And yet, if you believe the standard propoganda, it should have been considered a victory. That's hundreds of millions of dollars in "losses" that they're no longer "suffering". Shouldn't they pay taxes on that? :)
Do you keep wav files on your hard drive because they are loss-less?
:)
No, I use FLAC or shorten for my master audio files, because they are lossless. (Not all compression formats are lossy.) Or I store in cdda on cd (this covers cds I buy as well as flacs/shns I download and burn). I may occasionally make copies in vorbis or other lossy format, but never the master. (And I certainly don't pay a dollar a track for already lossy files!)
Just like the mp3 format works so well by slimming down the things the human ear can't hear
Actually, the fact that I can hear it (especially in the cymbals) is the main reason I don't use mp3 even when I do use lossy audio formats! (That and the fact that my vendor supports ogg vorbis and flac, but not mp3.)
"My point's not all that elitist."
Not if this is still the 1950s. What are you, a time traveller? The "big three" of the '50s and '60s were Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, yes. But we've come a long way since then (baby). The sixties introduced the first major "literary" movement in the F&SF genre(s), the "New Wave", and gave us Bradbury, Vonnegut and others, whose literary credentials are, I think, unchallenged. While the older, "pulp" style is still around and going strong, the descendents of the New Wave and other, later movements are widespread -- so much so that Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn't look out of place when cited as a genre writer.
Basically, literary SF is an almost separate genre from pulp SF, with a separate (though somewhat overlapping) set of fans. If your friends are still citing Clarke (my Ghod!) as one of the "greats", perhaps you need to look for some more literate friends, instead of blaming the genre you obviously know so little of. I haven't cited Clarke as a "great" in decades. He's been surpassed by those who came later to such a degree that I'm not even sure he'd make the cut as "average" today.
Even the "pulp" side of the genre has higher literary standards than it once did. I'll match Orson Scott Card against most of the authors on the NYT bestseller list any day of the week.
"But, very occasionally, a book holds its own in both arenas."
If we limit ourselves to works published before 1970, I might agree with you. As it is, I have to say that you simply have no idea what you're talking about.
He already is a defendant in at least three cases: the SCOG shareholder suit, the Red Hat suit and the IBM countersuit. The last of which actually has GPL violation on the list of complaints. Once the Novell suit is dismissed, and SCOG files some less stupid charges against Novell, we'll probably see a countersuit there too.
:)
(We'll ignore the German suits against SCOG, since those are A) against scogroup.de, and B) SCOG already lost, so technically they're not defendants any more. They're losers.
Accepting the GPL is completely voluntary. You can refuse to accept the GPL, and then you're merely bound by copyright law. You can still use the program however you want, you just can't distribute copies or derivative works. Not something a lot of people care about. (This is why, e.g., Corel was wrong and stupid to try to make popups to force people to accept the GPL, just as if it were an EULA.)
This has nothing to do with understanding the GPL, this has to do with understanding the law. In general, if you're asking, "can't I get around the law by doing X", the answer is probably going to be no if it's obvious that your intent is to do what the law forbids.
Thus, if you hire a hitman, you may not have pulled the trigger yourself, but the law will still consider you to be guilty of murder.
In your example, it will be obvious that your intent is to provide a derivative work on the end-user's machine. Thus, you will be judged as if you had put that derivative work there yourself. Saying, "I didn't personally copy the code" won't get you off, any more than saying, "I didn't pull the trigger" would get you out of those murder charges.
This is why legal matters are still decided by judges and juries, rather than machines. A literal-minded machine might find your argument compelling. A person wouldn't (unless that person was a programmer, who spends too much time working with literal-minded machines, which is why this suggestion keeps coming up again and again).
"any company [...] will view GPL'd code as sort of a 'Nut Cracker' that will crack open their code base and give it to the world"
:)
:)
Either you're a troll or you're just really, really bad at expressing yourself or you're insane/deluded/misinformed. I'll assume the second option, as that's the most polite one to assume.
First of all, you can freely mix GPL'd code with your company's code without any fears as long as you don't distribute the results outside of the company. Since something like 90% of all programmers work for companies that don't distribute any code outside the company, this seems like a pretty important point for a lot of people.
Second, merely using GPL'd programs will not "infect" your code. Oracle, for example, uses GPL'd compilers and operating systems, but they haven't had to "crack open their code base," nor does anyone think they should have to.
"The GPL isn't an 'EULA' by the way"
At least you got that part right!
Do you know any other languages besides C/C++? I have over 15 years of C, and over 5 of C++, and I strongly disagree with you. They are not different languages. But then, I also have at least a passing acquaintance with Lisp/Scheme, Forth, Python, Tcl, Eiffel, Smalltalk, Haskell, Fortran, Pascal, Ada, PL/1, Prolog and SNOBOL. Compared to most of these, C and C++ (and Objective-C) are identical!
(Java and Perl, which I didn't list above, I would count as being in the same family as C/C++, although I suppose they are, technically, different languages.)
Yes, I've used boost and STL and such, and yes, it's a completely different style of programming from C. That still doesn't make it a new language. It's simply been enhanced to allow some new "paradigms". (And they're programming paradigms, not "C++ paradigms".) But I saw the same sorts of things happen back in the stone age, when macros were introduced to assembly language. Didn't mean I wasn't programming in assembler.
I wonder if they got buried in a deluge of complaints about the "have you quit beating your wife" nature of some of the questions? Anyway, I took a look around the "out-law" site (what a cheesy name!), and I am definitely not impressed. Their uncritical reporting of McBride crony Laura Didio's claims about Linux's costs was pathetic. There doesn't seem to be anything here I can't find on more reputable newsites. My suspicion is that this whole thing was an attempt to drum up some publicity and more hits, and frankly, I'm now sorry I gave them any. I won't be going back.
Novell is waiving. IBM is waving Novell's waiving. :)
a friend with a young son said to me that it wasn't the nipple that bothered him aqs a father, so much as the act of Timberlake ripping off Jackson's top.
Yeah, I've heard that argument, and it's bullshit. If he'd ripped off her top to reveal a bikini or an undershirt, nobody would be bitching! Hell, if he'd pulled out a bullwhip and pretended to be beating her, there would have been much less controversy! (That last would have offended me but I generally find myself in a minority when it comes to the relative offensiveness of violence vs. sex and/or nudity.) On the other hand, if Janet had calmly and peacefully pulled off her own top to reveal her own nipple, the general public reaction would have been almost identical.
The fact is that we had a firestorm of controversy because a nipple was exposed on live television. Oh the horror, oh the humanity. The supposed violence of the act (and frankly, it didn't look that violent to me) is a distraction being clutched at by those who want to be offended by the nipple but have barely enough intellectual integrity left to realize their position isn't very sound or defensible.
My kids were weaned only a couple of years ago. I don't see any reason why the sight of a nipple on television should be dangerous or harmful to them. They've seen plenty of nipples in their lives, and will probably (hopefully) see plenty more before those lives are done.
Aha, that explains why the AMD chips always outperform the Intel chips that they're supposedly equivalent to. I always thought they were just being conservative in their labelling in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. But if the numbers are based on their own chips, well, AMD has been making faster chips at equivalent clock speeds since the days of the 486/33.
Why would you want to use CVS in server mode if you're not using multiple boxes? AFAIK, CVS runs just fine in standalone mode on Win. And for "at-home" projects, that should be sufficient. There's other alternatives too, like external hosting: sourceforge and whatnot.
If cost isn't the issue, then what is? For MS-only shops, the issue is the MS-only policy itself, and that's just a policy. It's purely voluntary, I don't see how a voluntary policy counts as a significant barrier. A barrier, yes, but significant?
As for using MS-branded tools only, that's irrelevant, as the ability to run subversion servers on windows doesn't do anything to that barrier. Perhaps you didn't read the article?
It's nice that you can run a subversion server on MSWin server systems, I suppose, if that's the sort of thing that floats your boat. But how on earth is the option to spend hundreds of extra dollars on proprietary operating system software and the more-expensive hardware it requires "significantly lower[ing] the barrier to entry?"
There may be a minor barrier, in Win-only shops (although I would say that it's the Win-only policy that is the barrier, not the other way around). Like I say, Win support is a perfectly nice thing. But "significant"?
Darl: "There are currently no lawsuits against SCO..."
Forget Cyberknight (or whatever they're called), what about Red Hat! Did Darl just happen to forget that they're being sued by Red Hat? In addition to being countersued by IBM, and having already lost two cases in Germany (although to be fair, those were against SCOG Gmbh, not SCOG Inc., and, being over, could be considered "not an outstanding lawsuit).
The Cyberknight thing isn't actually a lawsuit AFAIK. It's a complaint filed with a government body, not with a court. (How many slashdotters have (e)mailed the FTC?) But pretending the Red Hat lawsuit doesn't exist...aren't there laws about lying to investors? Is mind-boggling stupidity a legal defense in such cases?