It's good to know that, however ironic it may be, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera are all working opposite Google to keep the web away from just a different monoculture.
You asked for an example. I gave you one. Now you're changing the argument.
I disagree - a large part of your argument was that GPL projects were more successful and had more contributors because contributors weren't scared of their contributions being "gobbled up". I don't see much evidence for that any more, although 10-15yrs ago it was a different story.
I just don't think that overall these days developers care as much about what happens to their contributions beyond improving the project/community they are contributing to directly. Its seems as though as FOSS gains more mainstream acceptance the Free Software idealistic thinking (which I'm not criticising BTW) is being slowly crowded out by more pragmatic Open Source thinking.
The bit about whether or not end users get guaranteed access to the code under the GPL wasn't worth arguing about - that is objectively obvious and I completely agreed with that. Maybe I just wasn't clear enough about which part I was disagreeing with.
According to this very article, it's going to be running a modified FreeBSD, and the users of it will not have any right to get, use, tinker, modify or re-distribute the source code of the product they've bought.
How does that matter? How many FreeBSD users/contributors have had their code taken away or been hurt by that? They are the stakeholders involved in this example.
It will either work out at having zero effect at worst, or in the unlikely event Sony does push some useful patches upstream there will even be a slight benefit to them.
The GPL's entire purpose is to ensure software freedom, and as a side-effect that has created a far more successful software ecosystem than the BSD license *BECAUSE* users and contributors value that freedom. More people contribute to GPL projects *because* they can feel confident that they are making a permanent gift to the world, one that won't and can't be gobbled up by some private entity and made proprietary, that all users of software that derives from their contribution will have the same freedom to use, tinker, modify, and re-distribute.
That guarantee is simply absent - deliberately so - from the BSD license, and the entire BSD software ecosystem suffers because of it. There are a few outstanding examples of software (postgresql is a great example, freebsd itself to a lesser extent, and others) which have overcome that handicap through sheer technical merit but for the most part, the GPL projects are better software, are more successful, and have more active contributors.
Really? I have no issues at all with the GPL and use it myself, but I do get a bit annoyed at the 90s era FUD produced by it's fans that never seems to have any actual evidence backing it up.
On the non GPL side of the open source fence you have lots of projects using BSD/Apache/MIT etc style licenses:
Anything Apache (a huge number of projects - including massive numbers of Java ones), OpenStack, Postfix, Postgres (as you mentioned), Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, Nginx, memcache, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, PHP, Chromium/V8, x.org, Wayland, Kerberos, Node.js, JQuery, Bootstrap, D3, Dojo, AngularJS, BackboneJS, EmberJS, Symphony, Zend, CakePHP etc etc
You can't claim any of that code isn't free or is being obviously harmed by exploitative proprietary companies. That code can't be taken away from anyone no matter what any company does with it.
In fact the biggest examples of shenanigans lately have been Oracle with GPL projects eg MySQL and OpenOffice. In fact, OpenOffice's new found freedom from further corporate meddling coincided with a move to the Apache license.
I'd love to hear of some real world examples of code that has been "gobbled up by some private entity and made proprietary" in such a way that prevents "all users of software that derives from their contribution will have the same freedom to use, tinker, modify, and re-distribute".
As for level of community contribution - scroll down the list of popular forked repositories at github and exclusively (L)GPL projects are in a minority. That disincentive you talk about just doesn't seem to exist.
Then use file permissions, access control lists and disk level encryption. The original assertion was encryption should be done in the browser and I'm pointing out it's worthless there. Even disk level encryption and ACLs won't protect you from a trojan. Once your OS is rooted by a trojan you may as well give up thinking any of your data is secure because it isn't. Encryption might help with laptop theft but that's nothing to do with the browser.
Thank you. The default knee jerk response always seems to be "needs encryption!" as if it is magic security dust. But there are usually few use cases where it isn't already redundant (eg disk encryption tackling the offline access case much better) or won't actually help (the browser needs access to the keys, so one site accessing anothers data is the same problem with or without encryption).
"Nowadays any sheep meat that isn't classified as lamb due to its age is usually called mutton. [...] Offhand, I can't think of any words from French or Romance languages."
Then, you will be surprised that mutton in French is... mouton.
My high school french teacher said that the Anglo Saxon 'sheep' derived from the old germanic word for sheep and that 'mutton' derived from the french word for sheep.
So after the Norman Conquest, mutton evolved into a word for the meat (as that was how the French speaking nobility saw it) and sheep stayed as word for the woolly animal in a field (as that was how the Anglo Saxon peasants saw it).
Whether or not it happened that way is another thing altogether though...
Are you sure you're not conflating two different things here? It sounds like you're saying some languages are better for short, more expressive code, but that's not the same as static vs. dynamic typing.
The only increase in code from static typing is explicit conversion, but I do not see how this extra code can increase bugs, on the contrary, it's what often decreases bugs in applications written with static typing because the developer has to explicitly declare and perform the possible conversions. In contrast, with a dynamically typed language you're relying on the interpreter to guess, which is much more error prone.
If you perform a conversion in a statically typed language and it's wrong, you know the second you try and execute, but in a dynamically typed language you may not know there's a problem until you hit some edge case input, which is more likely to get out into production due to the subtle nature of it.
Strictly speaking I think you're also "conflating two different things" here.
Static vs dynamic typing is somewhat orthogonal to the less well defined strong vs weak typing axis. Static means type checking is done at compile time and dynamic means it happens at runtime. Requiring explicit conversions is generally a strong typing thing and both static and dynamic languages can be like that.
eg Python is dynamically typed in that type checking happens at runtime, but it is still strongly typed in that you need to explicitly convert between types.
Unlike other dynamic languages (eg PHP and Javascript) that are weakly typed and let you do stuff like adding strings and integers by implicitly converting between types.
Russian has become more like the USA, and the USA becomes more like Russia.
New World Order, anyone?
OK, here you go....
All the locals hide their tears of regret Open fire 'cos I love you to death Sky high with a heartache of stone You'll never see me 'cos I'm always alone
How to love without a trace of dissent I'll buy the torture 'cos you pay for the rent Tied high with a broken command You're all alone to the promised land
I'm in love with this malicious intent You've been taken but you don't know it yet What you will know must never live to be found 'Cos it's the subject of the eyes of the clown
The Detectibility scale is screwed up in my opinion. Every single item is either average or easy except Difficult designation of 'Using components with known vulnerabilities' (A9)... How hard can it be to check current versions of libraries your system is using?
I think they are referring to how easy it is for someone else to figure that out.
I decided I'd prefer an SSD and yet when I looked at the big suppliers of office machines - Dell, HP, etc. none of them even offered SSD's as an option.
I was looking at small business desktops too recently. Lenovo (in Aus/NZ at least) had SSD options for all their desktops. Even on the cheapest models - which were also a lot cheaper than anything Dell offered. All the base warranties were 3yrs on site too.
I'd have to be extremely hard pressed to go back to Dell (or HP) now.
So what is the web framework du jour? I'm not going to try them all.
If popularity is very important to you then you'll probably want to stick with Django or Rails.
Personally I'm partial to Pyramid (the merger of Pylons and BFG). It seems more 'engineered' than the very opinionated frameworks like Rails and Django or the steady stream of new 'simple' frameworks. It is completely agnostic when it comes to templating libraries or data persistence layers.
That does mean that you need to make more choices and architectural decisions yourself, and there is a longer learning curve figuring out the best options etc. But that pays off later when your apps get more complex and you won't have to fight the against the framework.
I suggest it as it's likely that someone who prefers SQLAlchemy over the simpler ORMs in Rails or Django though is likely to be someone who appreciates more powerful non opinionated frameworks.
What exactly is better about Django? Django's template library and ORM are objectively terrible and Django is even slower than Rails. It's unfortunate because Jinja 2 and SqlAlchemy are significantly better than anything available in Ruby.
Why is it unfortunate? Are you stuck with Django?
There are plenty of other frameworks that let you use jinja2 and SQLA together if that's what you want.
Scientists have spoken out about gay marriage from the scientific standpoint? And what exactly scientifically provable principle are they supporting in relation to gay marriage? I'm finding it difficult to understand why you're trying to align these two controversies with one another.
There is broad consensus in the scientific community that there is no connection between severe weather like droughts or hurricanes and gay marriage.
Most meat consumed is from farm animals, who basically exist to be someone's dinner. In that regard, nothing is going to go extinct because of a hamburger. Certainly not cattle.
That assumes that existing habitats aren't being converted into cattle farms to satisfy a growing demand for hamburgers globally.
Turn the problem on its head. Instead of supplying them with an actual virtual sandbox to play in (lots of work) - give them the ability to spin up a bunch of different virtual network/server configurations on their own machines.
Vagrant configs can specify multiple servers and networks etc.
They can easily be blown away and rebuilt, they can start sharing their own custom environments.
BTW: checkout salty vagrant. Salt is a Python based configuration management tool like Chef and Puppet but much simpler and lighter weight. And because you're teaching them Python and most Linux distros already have Python builtin, you don't need to install much else to bootstrap it.
Intellectual property can be copied (possibly in a way that violates one or more laws), but it cannot be stolen.
I'm not so sure. I can't help wondering if it is possible that trademark or patent registrations could somehow be hijacked like dns domain registrations have been.
Or if (a probably very naive) someone could get unintentionally cheated out of the copyrights on their work. I'd imagine some dodgy record companies have already done/tried that.
Those kind of things would fit my non legalistic pulled out of my ass definition of intellectual property being stolen. Especially if the victim doesn't have the funds to fight it all the way through the courts.
People with skills and trades will almost always find work even in shitty economies. If you know how to make something, build something, or fix something that everyone uses, then someone is probably going to pay you to do that.
Not necessarily. The construction industry (at least in my country) has traditionally suffered from a nasty boom-bust cycle. A few years of flat out work struggling to find/attract/train talent, then a few years of struggling to find work and having to lay off that same talent. Who then move overseas and then the cycle starts again.
Geez slashdot is getting stupider and stupider every year.
The parent post is modded flamebait while the grandparent post is +5 insightful.
This was about the effects the ice loss has on the planets spin. The ice loss and changes in spin are measurable.
Yet because that ice loss was attributed to climate change some knee jerk slashdotter gets offended, claims the whole study is ludicrous and gets modded +5 for it.
Slashdotters will only see the word Ubuntu or Canonical, and then jump to their own conclusions anyway or rant about something unrelated like Unity or how Ubuntu should give up now because Mint is easily the most popular distro on the planet etc etc.
For example: what percentage of replies below didn't even skim the summary and assumed that Ubuntu will be ditching dpkg and apt for this new tool?
Microsoft is fustrated that still, no one gives a shit about windows 8, and no one wants windows rt, and they were all DOA.
As much as I despise apple products, no cult-of-crapple iPad users would ever think twice about anything else, and if they did, it would more likely be android.
MS rose to riches in the 90s on selling massive numbers of Office suites when they (and desktop PCs) really were a big productivity improvement.
They put huge efforts into (mostly) successfully keeping standalone document/spreadsheet files relevant during the increasingly networked and web oriented 2000s. Smaller geekier companies (like ours) moved to things like wikis other webapps etc, but that didn't put much of a dent in the Office suite market.
Now in the 2010s a bunch of smaller factors like mobility, device independence / cloud storage, "coolness", apps, always on networking, an increasingly powerful web, collaboration, the growth of other platforms etc have combined to really start eroding the actual value/point of a file based Office suite outside the world of the legacy enterprise desktop.
I think MS has hung onto Office technology being the only real basis of any of their collaboration/content based solutions for far too long. Their fear of huting the massive Office profits has left them vulnerable/blind to being left behind. They realise this now and are getting a bit desperate.
Slashdot Mirror
Opera? Opera is now a Chrome skin.
I disagree - a large part of your argument was that GPL projects were more successful and had more contributors because contributors weren't scared of their contributions being "gobbled up". I don't see much evidence for that any more, although 10-15yrs ago it was a different story.
I just don't think that overall these days developers care as much about what happens to their contributions beyond improving the project/community they are contributing to directly. Its seems as though as FOSS gains more mainstream acceptance the Free Software idealistic thinking (which I'm not criticising BTW) is being slowly crowded out by more pragmatic Open Source thinking.
The bit about whether or not end users get guaranteed access to the code under the GPL wasn't worth arguing about - that is objectively obvious and I completely agreed with that. Maybe I just wasn't clear enough about which part I was disagreeing with.
How does that matter? How many FreeBSD users/contributors have had their code taken away or been hurt by that? They are the stakeholders involved in this example.
It will either work out at having zero effect at worst, or in the unlikely event Sony does push some useful patches upstream there will even be a slight benefit to them.
Then there is the port of the KDE / Almquist shell integration - Kashmir
[groan]
Really? I have no issues at all with the GPL and use it myself, but I do get a bit annoyed at the 90s era FUD produced by it's fans that never seems to have any actual evidence backing it up.
On the non GPL side of the open source fence you have lots of projects using BSD/Apache/MIT etc style licenses:
Anything Apache (a huge number of projects - including massive numbers of Java ones), OpenStack, Postfix, Postgres (as you mentioned), Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, Nginx, memcache, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, PHP, Chromium/V8, x.org, Wayland, Kerberos, Node.js, JQuery, Bootstrap, D3, Dojo, AngularJS, BackboneJS, EmberJS, Symphony, Zend, CakePHP etc etc
You can't claim any of that code isn't free or is being obviously harmed by exploitative proprietary companies. That code can't be taken away from anyone no matter what any company does with it.
In fact the biggest examples of shenanigans lately have been Oracle with GPL projects eg MySQL and OpenOffice. In fact, OpenOffice's new found freedom from further corporate meddling coincided with a move to the Apache license.
I'd love to hear of some real world examples of code that has been "gobbled up by some private entity and made proprietary" in such a way that prevents "all users of software that derives from their contribution will have the same freedom to use, tinker, modify, and re-distribute".
As for level of community contribution - scroll down the list of popular forked repositories at github and exclusively (L)GPL projects are in a minority. That disincentive you talk about just doesn't seem to exist.
Thank you. The default knee jerk response always seems to be "needs encryption!" as if it is magic security dust. But there are usually few use cases where it isn't already redundant (eg disk encryption tackling the offline access case much better) or won't actually help (the browser needs access to the keys, so one site accessing anothers data is the same problem with or without encryption).
My high school french teacher said that the Anglo Saxon 'sheep' derived from the old germanic word for sheep and that 'mutton' derived from the french word for sheep.
So after the Norman Conquest, mutton evolved into a word for the meat (as that was how the French speaking nobility saw it) and sheep stayed as word for the woolly animal in a field (as that was how the Anglo Saxon peasants saw it).
Whether or not it happened that way is another thing altogether though...
Strictly speaking I think you're also "conflating two different things" here.
Static vs dynamic typing is somewhat orthogonal to the less well defined strong vs weak typing axis. Static means type checking is done at compile time and dynamic means it happens at runtime. Requiring explicit conversions is generally a strong typing thing and both static and dynamic languages can be like that.
eg Python is dynamically typed in that type checking happens at runtime, but it is still strongly typed in that you need to explicitly convert between types.
Unlike other dynamic languages (eg PHP and Javascript) that are weakly typed and let you do stuff like adding strings and integers by implicitly converting between types.
OK, here you go....
I think they are referring to how easy it is for someone else to figure that out.
I was looking at small business desktops too recently. Lenovo (in Aus/NZ at least) had SSD options for all their desktops. Even on the cheapest models - which were also a lot cheaper than anything Dell offered. All the base warranties were 3yrs on site too.
I'd have to be extremely hard pressed to go back to Dell (or HP) now.
If popularity is very important to you then you'll probably want to stick with Django or Rails.
Personally I'm partial to Pyramid (the merger of Pylons and BFG). It seems more 'engineered' than the very opinionated frameworks like Rails and Django or the steady stream of new 'simple' frameworks. It is completely agnostic when it comes to templating libraries or data persistence layers.
That does mean that you need to make more choices and architectural decisions yourself, and there is a longer learning curve figuring out the best options etc. But that pays off later when your apps get more complex and you won't have to fight the against the framework.
I suggest it as it's likely that someone who prefers SQLAlchemy over the simpler ORMs in Rails or Django though is likely to be someone who appreciates more powerful non opinionated frameworks.
Wow that is really slow! It took 15yrs for your post to show up :)
Why is it unfortunate? Are you stuck with Django?
There are plenty of other frameworks that let you use jinja2 and SQLA together if that's what you want.
Ponies? Now I'm confused - is this about Rails or Django?
There is broad consensus in the scientific community that there is no connection between severe weather like droughts or hurricanes and gay marriage.
Funny you mention that - wasn't a recent MS Cloud outage due to a certificate screwup not handling leap years?
Or was that what you were alluding to?
That assumes that existing habitats aren't being converted into cattle farms to satisfy a growing demand for hamburgers globally.
I was going to suggest that too.
Turn the problem on its head. Instead of supplying them with an actual virtual sandbox to play in (lots of work) - give them the ability to spin up a bunch of different virtual network/server configurations on their own machines.
Vagrant configs can specify multiple servers and networks etc.
They can easily be blown away and rebuilt, they can start sharing their own custom environments.
BTW: checkout salty vagrant. Salt is a Python based configuration management tool like Chef and Puppet but much simpler and lighter weight. And because you're teaching them Python and most Linux distros already have Python builtin, you don't need to install much else to bootstrap it.
I'm not so sure. I can't help wondering if it is possible that trademark or patent registrations could somehow be hijacked like dns domain registrations have been.
Or if (a probably very naive) someone could get unintentionally cheated out of the copyrights on their work. I'd imagine some dodgy record companies have already done/tried that.
Those kind of things would fit my non legalistic pulled out of my ass definition of intellectual property being stolen. Especially if the victim doesn't have the funds to fight it all the way through the courts.
You really missed out! Sometimes all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments would simultaneously leap one foot to the left!
Not necessarily. The construction industry (at least in my country) has traditionally suffered from a nasty boom-bust cycle. A few years of flat out work struggling to find/attract/train talent, then a few years of struggling to find work and having to lay off that same talent. Who then move overseas and then the cycle starts again.
Geez slashdot is getting stupider and stupider every year.
The parent post is modded flamebait while the grandparent post is +5 insightful.
This was about the effects the ice loss has on the planets spin. The ice loss and changes in spin are measurable.
Yet because that ice loss was attributed to climate change some knee jerk slashdotter gets offended, claims the whole study is ludicrous and gets modded +5 for it.
Doesn't really matter what the headline is.
Slashdotters will only see the word Ubuntu or Canonical, and then jump to their own conclusions anyway or rant about something unrelated like Unity or how Ubuntu should give up now because Mint is easily the most popular distro on the planet etc etc.
For example: what percentage of replies below didn't even skim the summary and assumed that Ubuntu will be ditching dpkg and apt for this new tool?
MS rose to riches in the 90s on selling massive numbers of Office suites when they (and desktop PCs) really were a big productivity improvement.
They put huge efforts into (mostly) successfully keeping standalone document/spreadsheet files relevant during the increasingly networked and web oriented 2000s. Smaller geekier companies (like ours) moved to things like wikis other webapps etc, but that didn't put much of a dent in the Office suite market.
Now in the 2010s a bunch of smaller factors like mobility, device independence / cloud storage, "coolness", apps, always on networking, an increasingly powerful web, collaboration, the growth of other platforms etc have combined to really start eroding the actual value/point of a file based Office suite outside the world of the legacy enterprise desktop.
I think MS has hung onto Office technology being the only real basis of any of their collaboration/content based solutions for far too long. Their fear of huting the massive Office profits has left them vulnerable/blind to being left behind. They realise this now and are getting a bit desperate.