There's a version included with the book that is fine for non-commercial use. While the license isn't GPL, it certainly isn't 'commercial-only' as you say.
Nautilus looks pretty slick and even claims to be writing to my DVD drive. It _very_ quickly finishes, though, and then ejects my still blank DVD+RW disk. [sigh]
This is somewhat off-topic and for that I apologise. I am interested in hearing what people use in Linux for DVD+ or -RW burning, that is for burning of data DVDs rather than video DVDs. I have yet to find any decent software in Linux but I am likely just not looking hard enough. I can happily burn CD-R and CD-RW in my DVD+-RW drive using k3b or even from the command line but I've never been able to get DVD media to work properly.
I have used several Mac laptops, both iBooks and powerbooks. I haven't been particularly impressed with the battery life with them. Granted I tend to _use_ the laptops (often spending much of my time compiling) but in my experience, the battery life was no better than with similar Dell ix86 laptops with decent batteries.
That said, it is quite possible (and outside my experience) that these Apple laptops have greater battery life when the system is mostly idle, i.e. doing word processing and the like.
I agree with what you are saying. What I'm about to say is not a contradiction, I am simply explaining why I use Mandrake.
By most counts, I'm a power Linux user. I first installed Linux on a system back in 1994. I've contributed a kernel patch. I have installed at least five distributions, two of which are Gentoo and Linux From Scratch.
In the end, both for my home computer and my work computer (where I develop Linux and Windows software), I settled for Mandrake. I got tired of having to deal with config files and having to install drivers when I plug in new hardware. Mandrake handles this all pretty seemlessly for me, moreso in fact than Windows does. These days (though this was less true in the past), the software packaged with Mandrake is fairly recent and quite stable. That said, I did install KDevelop 3.0.1 from source rather than from Mandrake's packages.
I still run Debian for my email/web server at home. In fact, I really like Debian. Its dependency resolution still has everything else beaten. But it doesn't offer such features as the Mandrake Control Center and other such happy Mandrake tools. As a result, I'm quite happy with my Mandrake installations, at least for desktop and workstation systems.
A friend of mine pointed out that he switched operating systems (to OS X, in his case) because he wants something that just works. He doesn't want to spend time reformatting, reinstalling, and dealing with configuration files, at least no more than is absolutely necessary. I find Mandrake offers me this now and that is why I use it.
They have long claimed that Windows was not immune from their claims. In fact, they continued to state this even after Microsoft invested money in them.
Re:Enough with C++/C/Java books! We need wider top
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The difference being that with open-source software, people can legally publish patches (and of course, those patches can be examined by others). This is not an option with Microsoft source code for the majority of people with access to it.
What evidence do you have that this bug was not found until the code was leaked? It is entirely possible that some people did indeed know about this bug and had used it to exploit Windows systems for quite some time. Of course, I have no evidence of this either but as I'm not a black-hat (or indeed a hacker at all), I wouldn't expect to hear about it.
The actual LCD screen itself, the bit that has the defective pixels, only costs approximately $15 to manufacture. If we assume for a moment that half of these are defective, this means it would only cost an additional $15, on average, to make perfect LCDs with no bad pixels.
Of course, this is simplifying things somewhat. There probably aren't enough perfect screens to keep up with demand for LCDs, for example.
I tend to abuse laptops, often spending much of my time at very high CPU loads. I used a 15" TiBook and, despite the thing being brand new, only got a little under 2 hours of battery life out of it (a couple of minutes short).
Perhaps the 17" TiBooks have higher quality batteries in them. I assume they'd need one with considerably more juice than the 15" in order to get close to 4 hours of life.
I'm curious... do your lawyers think you'd be able to sue Microsoft? If so, do they think they'd be able to get claims of more than $1 (or the cost price of the software, I forget which)? On the other hand, you may well not use any Microsoft software.
This is a good point. I had been assuming that Microsoft would be writing the tool to compile and link the.NET source code into a stand-alone application. Obviously, any other company doing so would need Microsoft's permission.
I don't see much problem (maybe I'm missing the point) using newer class libraries as part of a stand-alone, statically linked application on an older Microsoft Windows operating system, however.
In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the hard drive is used _extensively_, basically as swap space. Removing the hard drive means that some games just won't be feasible, games that require more memory space than is available. That said, with 256 megs or 512 _gigs_ (okay, probably megs, but the other news story quoted gigs) of RAM, this may be less of an issue. Most current PC games don't require more than 256 megs and don't touch swap space all that much.
A.NET program does not _require_ an interpreter. To make a.NET program stand-alone, you could either include the interpreter and all parts of the class libraries, etc., or you could 'simply' compile the pcode into machine code, link it, and ship that.
The advantage would be smaller executables and, with the exception of potential run-time dynamic recompilation benefits from the interpreted version, faster execution. The disadvantage would be tying the resulting application to a specific CPU.
Have you ever statically linked against a large library? Are you aware that most linkers will throw out the parts of the library that you don't use? If you have a small 200K application, it is pretty unlikely that you'd be using the whole.NET library. More likely, you'd be shipping a compressed install package that is a few megs in size (say, 2 - 8 megs), not 30 megs. Now, you are at the size that a dial-up user would consider. Many people in the U.S. and Canada, and most people in Europe, are still on dial-up.
This is based on my experiences with other libraries, mind you..NET is slightly different.
I have used a variety of Linux distributions including Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, and Linux from Scratch. I've submitted patches to the Linux kernel. I'm quite satisfied with Debian as a server operating system for now, at least, but I keep on switching for my desktop dist. You seem to have had a similar experience to me so I'm interested in your FreeBSD experiences.
I loved Gentoo. It was great. I got pretty much cutting-edge software installed and optimised for my system. The only thing I hated was the configuration. Now, that's fine, Gentoo isn't really aiming at making configuration simple. Compare this to Mandrake which automatically detects my hardware, offers a nice graphical configuration during install for X11, gives me a nice graphical control panel for most of what I'm likely to change. So, is FreeBSD more like Gentoo or is it more like Mandrake? Am I going to have to write X11 configs by hand, or using X11's 'graphical config' program, or will FreeBSD detect my graphics card, monitor, and mouse during installation? Obviously, these things aren't required for a _server_ operating system and in any case, you can modify the config files by hand or using a tool like webmin. But I don't want to, I want an operating system which dumbs this down a bit.
Apart from that, do you happen to know if FreeBSD runs VMWare and/or valgrind?
Actually, I inquired for a paper I was writing for CMPUT401, obviously part of the Computing Science program at the UofA. The problem was that it was a take-home final exam that asked us to write a paper, basically a design document, on a product which I had already contracted out to develop. I had to call the legal office on campus and ask if I would still own the copyright on the design document that I wrote for the class. The answer was absolutely clear. The professor would own the 'question' she asked us to answer, I would own the answer, that is to say the paper that I wrote. They advised me further to put a little copyright notice on the paper when I submitted it, just to make it quite clear.
I would be quite interested to hear about your co-worker, get some more details about the problem. Many times, computer assignments at the UofA involve you extending code that is given to you. In that case, obviously, you are deriving from someone else's work and I could see copyright issues in that case. I'd also be interested to know if it was the Department of Computing Science that had the problem or the legal department of the UofA.
If in fact your professor has submitted your paper to turnitin.com and, like the University of Alberta, your university maintains that undergrads entirely own the copyright on works they produce, you have good grounds for at least a civil case of copyright infringement against your professor, _perhaps_ even a criminal case. At the very least, you should report this case of academic dishonesty on the part of the professor to your university.
It may be true that most schools around your parts own papers that students write but here in Canada, this is generally (though not always) not true. Certainly, this is not true at the University of Alberta (which unfortunately also often uses turnitin.com). At the UofA, undergrads entirely own the copyright of the work they produce while a student, even work they submit to a professor for a class. I specifically had to inquire about this while I was an undergrad.
At the University of Alberta which also forces students to use turnitin.com, the drafted policy adopted by the university makes it quite clear that undergrads (haven't looked into this for grad students) entirely own the copyright on papers they submit to their professors. So while there is nothing stopping the UofA from changing their policy, this is how it currently sits. By forcing the students to use turnitin.com, they are essentially going against the policy they have established and are in fact requiring that students assign copyright to a commercial entity (turnitin.com).
Yes, a teacher certainly could do this. However, if that teacher submitted the paper to turnitin.com, the student could then sue the teacher for copyright infringement.
You are kidding, right? "In what sense is turnitin.com making money off this fellow's work?" In _every_ sense. turnitin.com is a commercial site. They exist to make money. In point of fact, they ONLY make money by functioning as a plagiarism detector (at least at the moment... in the future they can legally make money by selling this fellow's paper to another fellow).
Slashdot Mirror
There's a version included with the book that is fine for non-commercial use. While the license isn't GPL, it certainly isn't 'commercial-only' as you say.
There may be no GPL'ed Windows version but there is a non-commercial edition of Qt 3.x for Windows included on the CD accompanying the book.
Nautilus looks pretty slick and even claims to be writing to my DVD drive. It _very_ quickly finishes, though, and then ejects my still blank DVD+RW disk. [sigh]
This is somewhat off-topic and for that I apologise. I am interested in hearing what people use in Linux for DVD+ or -RW burning, that is for burning of data DVDs rather than video DVDs. I have yet to find any decent software in Linux but I am likely just not looking hard enough. I can happily burn CD-R and CD-RW in my DVD+-RW drive using k3b or even from the command line but I've never been able to get DVD media to work properly.
I have used several Mac laptops, both iBooks and powerbooks. I haven't been particularly impressed with the battery life with them. Granted I tend to _use_ the laptops (often spending much of my time compiling) but in my experience, the battery life was no better than with similar Dell ix86 laptops with decent batteries.
That said, it is quite possible (and outside my experience) that these Apple laptops have greater battery life when the system is mostly idle, i.e. doing word processing and the like.
I agree with what you are saying. What I'm about to say is not a contradiction, I am simply explaining why I use Mandrake.
By most counts, I'm a power Linux user. I first installed Linux on a system back in 1994. I've contributed a kernel patch. I have installed at least five distributions, two of which are Gentoo and Linux From Scratch.
In the end, both for my home computer and my work computer (where I develop Linux and Windows software), I settled for Mandrake. I got tired of having to deal with config files and having to install drivers when I plug in new hardware. Mandrake handles this all pretty seemlessly for me, moreso in fact than Windows does. These days (though this was less true in the past), the software packaged with Mandrake is fairly recent and quite stable. That said, I did install KDevelop 3.0.1 from source rather than from Mandrake's packages.
I still run Debian for my email/web server at home. In fact, I really like Debian. Its dependency resolution still has everything else beaten. But it doesn't offer such features as the Mandrake Control Center and other such happy Mandrake tools. As a result, I'm quite happy with my Mandrake installations, at least for desktop and workstation systems.
A friend of mine pointed out that he switched operating systems (to OS X, in his case) because he wants something that just works. He doesn't want to spend time reformatting, reinstalling, and dealing with configuration files, at least no more than is absolutely necessary. I find Mandrake offers me this now and that is why I use it.
They have long claimed that Windows was not immune from their claims. In fact, they continued to state this even after Microsoft invested money in them.
Stop complaining and write a review yourself.
Wasn't that V-E day or is that an Americanism? (I'm a Brit living in Canada before you pounce on me)
The difference being that with open-source software, people can legally publish patches (and of course, those patches can be examined by others). This is not an option with Microsoft source code for the majority of people with access to it.
What evidence do you have that this bug was not found until the code was leaked? It is entirely possible that some people did indeed know about this bug and had used it to exploit Windows systems for quite some time. Of course, I have no evidence of this either but as I'm not a black-hat (or indeed a hacker at all), I wouldn't expect to hear about it.
The actual LCD screen itself, the bit that has the defective pixels, only costs approximately $15 to manufacture. If we assume for a moment that half of these are defective, this means it would only cost an additional $15, on average, to make perfect LCDs with no bad pixels.
Of course, this is simplifying things somewhat. There probably aren't enough perfect screens to keep up with demand for LCDs, for example.
I tend to abuse laptops, often spending much of my time at very high CPU loads. I used a 15" TiBook and, despite the thing being brand new, only got a little under 2 hours of battery life out of it (a couple of minutes short).
Perhaps the 17" TiBooks have higher quality batteries in them. I assume they'd need one with considerably more juice than the 15" in order to get close to 4 hours of life.
I'm curious... do your lawyers think you'd be able to sue Microsoft? If so, do they think they'd be able to get claims of more than $1 (or the cost price of the software, I forget which)? On the other hand, you may well not use any Microsoft software.
This is a good point. I had been assuming that Microsoft would be writing the tool to compile and link the .NET source code into a stand-alone application. Obviously, any other company doing so would need Microsoft's permission.
I don't see much problem (maybe I'm missing the point) using newer class libraries as part of a stand-alone, statically linked application on an older Microsoft Windows operating system, however.
In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the hard drive is used _extensively_, basically as swap space. Removing the hard drive means that some games just won't be feasible, games that require more memory space than is available. That said, with 256 megs or 512 _gigs_ (okay, probably megs, but the other news story quoted gigs) of RAM, this may be less of an issue. Most current PC games don't require more than 256 megs and don't touch swap space all that much.
A .NET program does not _require_ an interpreter. To make a .NET program stand-alone, you could either include the interpreter and all parts of the class libraries, etc., or you could 'simply' compile the pcode into machine code, link it, and ship that.
The advantage would be smaller executables and, with the exception of potential run-time dynamic recompilation benefits from the interpreted version, faster execution. The disadvantage would be tying the resulting application to a specific CPU.
Have you ever statically linked against a large library? Are you aware that most linkers will throw out the parts of the library that you don't use? If you have a small 200K application, it is pretty unlikely that you'd be using the whole .NET library. More likely, you'd be shipping a compressed install package that is a few megs in size (say, 2 - 8 megs), not 30 megs. Now, you are at the size that a dial-up user would consider. Many people in the U.S. and Canada, and most people in Europe, are still on dial-up.
.NET is slightly different.
This is based on my experiences with other libraries, mind you.
I have used a variety of Linux distributions including Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, and Linux from Scratch. I've submitted patches to the Linux kernel. I'm quite satisfied with Debian as a server operating system for now, at least, but I keep on switching for my desktop dist. You seem to have had a similar experience to me so I'm interested in your FreeBSD experiences.
I loved Gentoo. It was great. I got pretty much cutting-edge software installed and optimised for my system. The only thing I hated was the configuration. Now, that's fine, Gentoo isn't really aiming at making configuration simple. Compare this to Mandrake which automatically detects my hardware, offers a nice graphical configuration during install for X11, gives me a nice graphical control panel for most of what I'm likely to change. So, is FreeBSD more like Gentoo or is it more like Mandrake? Am I going to have to write X11 configs by hand, or using X11's 'graphical config' program, or will FreeBSD detect my graphics card, monitor, and mouse during installation? Obviously, these things aren't required for a _server_ operating system and in any case, you can modify the config files by hand or using a tool like webmin. But I don't want to, I want an operating system which dumbs this down a bit.
Apart from that, do you happen to know if FreeBSD runs VMWare and/or valgrind?
Actually, I inquired for a paper I was writing for CMPUT401, obviously part of the Computing Science program at the UofA. The problem was that it was a take-home final exam that asked us to write a paper, basically a design document, on a product which I had already contracted out to develop. I had to call the legal office on campus and ask if I would still own the copyright on the design document that I wrote for the class. The answer was absolutely clear. The professor would own the 'question' she asked us to answer, I would own the answer, that is to say the paper that I wrote. They advised me further to put a little copyright notice on the paper when I submitted it, just to make it quite clear.
I would be quite interested to hear about your co-worker, get some more details about the problem. Many times, computer assignments at the UofA involve you extending code that is given to you. In that case, obviously, you are deriving from someone else's work and I could see copyright issues in that case. I'd also be interested to know if it was the Department of Computing Science that had the problem or the legal department of the UofA.
Thanks for your followup, quite interesting.
If in fact your professor has submitted your paper to turnitin.com and, like the University of Alberta, your university maintains that undergrads entirely own the copyright on works they produce, you have good grounds for at least a civil case of copyright infringement against your professor, _perhaps_ even a criminal case. At the very least, you should report this case of academic dishonesty on the part of the professor to your university.
It may be true that most schools around your parts own papers that students write but here in Canada, this is generally (though not always) not true. Certainly, this is not true at the University of Alberta (which unfortunately also often uses turnitin.com). At the UofA, undergrads entirely own the copyright of the work they produce while a student, even work they submit to a professor for a class. I specifically had to inquire about this while I was an undergrad.
At the University of Alberta which also forces students to use turnitin.com, the drafted policy adopted by the university makes it quite clear that undergrads (haven't looked into this for grad students) entirely own the copyright on papers they submit to their professors. So while there is nothing stopping the UofA from changing their policy, this is how it currently sits. By forcing the students to use turnitin.com, they are essentially going against the policy they have established and are in fact requiring that students assign copyright to a commercial entity (turnitin.com).
I strongly suspect McGill has a similar problem.
Yes, a teacher certainly could do this. However, if that teacher submitted the paper to turnitin.com, the student could then sue the teacher for copyright infringement.
You are kidding, right? "In what sense is turnitin.com making money off this fellow's work?" In _every_ sense. turnitin.com is a commercial site. They exist to make money. In point of fact, they ONLY make money by functioning as a plagiarism detector (at least at the moment... in the future they can legally make money by selling this fellow's paper to another fellow).