The real problem I find is when the DE's (and software designed to work with them) start being designed ignoring the mature and standard ways of doing things.
A couple cases come to mind: network managers and automounting removable devices.
I wish the people who write GUI utilities would
Consider existing CLI utilities and systems (e.g., ifup/down)
If these are insufficient improve them to support the new needs
build graphical wrappers for them
Unfortunately the mentality seems more often to be "Our interface is what our users are using; the underlying system is just a host for our interface; All that matters is whether our system works by itself reasonably well." This results in many people reinventing the wheel, meanwhile fragmenting the user experience for people who use xterms (i.e., those who have a foot on each side of the CLI-X line). Further it results in diluting one of Linux's greatest benefits, which it inherited from Unix: the flexibility and accessibility of doing as much as possible with standard text streams. The design philosophy also tends to do away with the ability to completely reconfigure almost any aspect of any program via truly human readable config files (not some convoluted XML vomit). While on the topic I'd like cite Slitaz as a great example of a graphical environment that seems to stick to providing good graphical wrappers for standard utilities./end_rant
Firstly, if it only runs javascript applications as you say, then it's hardly any more of a "real distro" than Android is.
Why?
What's the difference between, Javascript as the language and HTML/CSS as the GUI, or using Python as the language and XML to do the GUI? And yet the first is "not a real distro", while the second is. Why?
Well, a few, but that doesn't appear to have been the point. The point, as I see it, is that if in fact the Pre is locked down so that only apps that are written in a particular interpreted language will run on it ("if it only runs javascript applications as you say"), then it is not a full Linux distro (" it's hardly any more of a 'real distro' . .."). It doesn't really matter what the interpreted language is; It isn't a matter of JS v. Python v. Perl v. Java. Rather it is the fact under that scenario a tremendous amount of linux software will not run on it without being completely rewritten in another language (to say nothing of the fact that whatever language you pick will probably not be well-suited for many of the programs).
There are other compiled languages besides C. There are a lot of them in fact...
Yes, but the real question is, "since when is being compiled a requirement?"
Well, it isn't depending on what we are talking about, but to go back to the last point, being able to run binary programs is a requirement of a "full linux" just because so much linux software is written in compiled languages. Moreover the point he was picking was the odd way you described compiled languages. There are some languages that compile to C then get run through a C compiler, but these are a rather small and relatively insignificant class; Most compiled languages cannot be said to "use C". Saying that they are "written in Javascript and not some compiled language using C" makes you sound like you don't actually know what you are talking about. Which brings us to GP's last point which was that you actually appear to be clueless and incompetent to make the evaluation that you did.
Now, I don't actually know whether the Pre is locked down so it will not run apps that aren't in JS, so I'm not commenting on the Pre itself; however, your comment does appear to state that it only runs JS apps, (". . . all the applications are written in Javascript . ..") and this is what the GP picked up on (". . . if it only runs javascript applications as you say . .."). And in this respect he is absolutely right.
The problem you bring up is not just a problem with this scenario, but with a large number of the times we use physical IDs.
Think about it: Aside from drivers' licenses for his own state, how many forms of ID will a typical person be able to verify as authentic on sight? Whether we are talking about a clerk at a store asking for a student ID to give a student discount (how many colleges are there in the world?), a citizen asking to see an investigator's badge (how many people know how to tell whether an investigator's badge is authentic?), or a bouncer asking to see ID at a club (do you really think he knows what all 50 states' drivers' licenses look like?) asking for ID is often relatively insecure way of confirming actual identity. But it is still standard practice and is generally considered basic due diligence. You may think it is a stupid practice, but you can't really fault this guy alone for following it.
And I have to call bs on your only-30%-of-internet-users-understand-English number. This site seems to agree with the number you mention . You will, however, note that the world total adds up to 100%, which means they are only counting people once (i.e., counting people who speak the language as their first language) and are not accounting for the significant number of more-or-less bilingual internet users. Indeed the note at the site makes it clear:
How many people can actually use the global language? David Graddol estimated a total of 750 million L1 (first or native language) plus L2 (second or nth language) speakers of English in his Future of English Report (pdf document) for the British Council. One of our subscribers, Martin Schell, has reviewed Prof. Braj Kachru's new book Asian Englishes which claims that India and China combined have over half a billion "users" of English.
Indeed, many people are bilingual or multilingual, but here we assign only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach).
In otherwords just because only 30% of internet users come from countries where English is the main language does not mean the only 30% of internet users understnd it, especially when you consider that Internet users will tend to be of a higher socio-economic status (thus more likely to understand multuple languages), that English is the most widely learned second language, and that a large majority of material on the internet is in Enlgish.
And if I send you $1 million Monopoly dollars, I've essentially given you $1 million dollars.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Here is a good example:
And if I give you a million dollar house I have essentially given you a million dollars.
That is, when I give you a million dollar house I, in essence, effectively, albeit round-aboutly, transfer a million dollars to you. Not so of monopoly money.
No. Security through obscurity refers to intentionally implementing a system that whose design is hidden and convoluted (hard to reverse engineer or guess) in order to provide security. It doesn't mean simply not realizing an vector exists.
Storing my financial numbers on a public computer under something like/var/cache/www/.98cf4b2101d would be security through obscurity: I know that anyone with access to the computer could read it, but I'm counting on them (a) not finding it and (b) not having a clue what it is and not opening it if they do.
Of course security through obscurity isn't wrong in itself if properly used especially in conjunction with other more rigorous forms of security.
Sorry I somehow confused the relative positions of the posts.
. . . it goes beyond simply a citation of one book from another, as in your example. That embedded information usually includes very specific info about function names and function signatures, variable names and their data types, and may even include constants, e.g. raw data or numbers that are defined in the library itself.
I just don't see how that sort of information is subject to copywrite.
To return to the book example: My book also includes very specific information about other people's works: Specific name of the work, author, publisher, publication data and city, page number, edition, maybe even a section or chapter name and some short (fair use) quotations. Part of the point of a citation is to be as specific as possible so the reader can (at least in theory) get an exact copy of what the author was reading (same pagination, editorial mistakes, etc.)
That seems to me to be every bit as specific as including variable types and function names in a binary.
I don't necessarily agree that that info by itself constitutes copyright infringement,
Duly noted, but if I could press on (looking back to your earlier post). ..
At that point the FSF could prove the "intent", in a hypothetical court case, of the app's developer to use their lib in violation of the lib's license.
But the issue is precisely that the GPL explicitly only applies to distributing, not to using the work:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, . ..
There can be no intent to use the code against it's license, unless 'use' is taken to mean 'copy/distribute/modify', which isn't what's happening (as has been pointed out the developer is not doing any of these things). It seems to me that if the FSF interpretation is to be upheld they must first hold that the primary violation (the actual copying/modifying in violation of the GPL) is taking place at runtime and is committed by the user, then they can (perhaps) argue that the developer that linked his non-GPL compatible code against a GPLed lib is liable for contributory infringement (by, so to speak, setting the user up), which IIRC is the tack that has been taken against torrent trackers.
Perhaps showing my ignorance but,
What if we took a somewhat parallel case from books. If I write a book that can only really be understood if the reader has first read certain other books or articles (by other people), I don't need to comply with the licenses for those other works at all to distribute my book, even though I explicitly cite them by name. I'm not distributing them--I'm just citing them. It's up to the reader to worry about getting a legal copy of them to read in order to understand what I've written.
I know it isn't a perfect example but it does seem like there is a strong parallel insofar as in neither case is there an actual copying of anything copywritten, although there is explicit reference made to it.
As this comment points out, if there is a violation going on (i.e., if the runtime combination in memory constitutes a derived work) then it seems like the user is the one violating the license (he actually made the copy of the work).
Coming up with something new opens you to submarine patents.
I vote for TeX. It's old enough (frozen in 82) not to be susceptible to patents and expressive enough for just about anything.
if social security actually did go bankrupt we would be pretty screwed as a country. It isn't going to, no matter what irrational BS you have heard.
Social security is an unfunded obligation of the government, which means that the program is essentially a ponzi scheme.
The problem with a ponzi scheme is that it requires an certain ratio between those paying in and those collecting be maintained. It needs an income that literally grows exponentially. Now the babyboomers are retiring and they weren't known for having large families (I.e., they don't have lots of working children and grandchildren paying in to support their benefits). And as we learned last year, just because something is big doesn't mean it can't fail.
We will find a way to make it work.
The unfunded obligation as of 2008, was $13.6 trillion, larger than the entire Federal debt after the bailouts and stimuli ($11.7 T). To put that in perspective, the unfunded social security obligation per person is roughly $44,000. Note that this includes citizens who are already retired, and thus not actually paying in. Yeah we could figure it out for a while--we can treat the Federal government like a limitless resource that can bail anything out--but remember that everything the government has it takes, in one way or another, from it citizens (usually by coercion). I for one do not want to be coerced into balancing the budget of a failed ponzi scheme.
Way to beat that strawman!
Couldn't you have at least waited until a linux fanboi didn't understand the summary and made a dumb comment?
All that aside, the way these projects' being open source will make this better is by making a patch come out sooner. The community knows there is a problem. Someone will get on finding it right away, and in a day or two we will see patches getting pushed out that fix it. There's no sitting around helplessly hoping we don't get DoSed until someone at MegaSoft Corp. decides this is worth fixing and rolls a patch.
Acatully, I suspect it goes the other way. Charging a nominal fee is likely to make kids feel like they now have greater rights over the thing and give a sense of entitlement (i.e., "it's mine, I can do with it what I want, because I payed for it") while still being practically free. Whereas if you just flat out give it to them, you could more easily foster a sense of indebtedness and gratitude ("You did nothing to deserve this, take care of it"). I think AC's observation about volunteers is to the point: Volunteers often would rather make it clear that their work is an unambiguous act of charity, than have it fall in the grey area of kinda-charity, kinda-business.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple cases come to mind: network managers and automounting removable devices.
I wish the people who write GUI utilities would
Unfortunately the mentality seems more often to be "Our interface is what our users are using; the underlying system is just a host for our interface; All that matters is whether our system works by itself reasonably well." /end_rant
This results in many people reinventing the wheel, meanwhile fragmenting the user experience for people who use xterms (i.e., those who have a foot on each side of the CLI-X line). Further it results in diluting one of Linux's greatest benefits, which it inherited from Unix: the flexibility and accessibility of doing as much as possible with standard text streams. The design philosophy also tends to do away with the ability to completely reconfigure almost any aspect of any program via truly human readable config files (not some convoluted XML vomit).
While on the topic I'd like cite Slitaz as a great example of a graphical environment that seems to stick to providing good graphical wrappers for standard utilities.
I believe the word you are looking for is 'penchant'.
Completely OT but an honest question, what is the grey area in the gay marriage debate you make reference to?
Since they are using it to view their server logs, I rather doubt that is a tenable interpretation of the results.
I confused the GGP and P. Mea culpa.
Firstly, if it only runs javascript applications as you say, then it's hardly any more of a "real distro" than Android is.
Why?
What's the difference between, Javascript as the language and HTML/CSS as the GUI, or using Python as the language and XML to do the GUI? And yet the first is "not a real distro", while the second is. Why?
Well, a few, but that doesn't appear to have been the point. The point, as I see it, is that if in fact the Pre is locked down so that only apps that are written in a particular interpreted language will run on it ("if it only runs javascript applications as you say"), then it is not a full Linux distro (" it's hardly any more of a 'real distro' . . .").
It doesn't really matter what the interpreted language is; It isn't a matter of JS v. Python v. Perl v. Java. Rather it is the fact under that scenario a tremendous amount of linux software will not run on it without being completely rewritten in another language (to say nothing of the fact that whatever language you pick will probably not be well-suited for many of the programs).
There are other compiled languages besides C. There are a lot of them in fact...
Yes, but the real question is, "since when is being compiled a requirement?"
Well, it isn't depending on what we are talking about, but to go back to the last point, being able to run binary programs is a requirement of a "full linux" just because so much linux software is written in compiled languages. .") and this is what the GP picked up on (". . . if it only runs javascript applications as you say . . ."). And in this respect he is absolutely right.
Moreover the point he was picking was the odd way you described compiled languages. There are some languages that compile to C then get run through a C compiler, but these are a rather small and relatively insignificant class; Most compiled languages cannot be said to "use C". Saying that they are "written in Javascript and not some compiled language using C" makes you sound like you don't actually know what you are talking about.
Which brings us to GP's last point which was that you actually appear to be clueless and incompetent to make the evaluation that you did.
Now, I don't actually know whether the Pre is locked down so it will not run apps that aren't in JS, so I'm not commenting on the Pre itself; however, your comment does appear to state that it only runs JS apps, (". . . all the applications are written in Javascript . .
The problem you bring up is not just a problem with this scenario, but with a large number of the times we use physical IDs.
Think about it: Aside from drivers' licenses for his own state, how many forms of ID will a typical person be able to verify as authentic on sight?
Whether we are talking about a clerk at a store asking for a student ID to give a student discount (how many colleges are there in the world?), a citizen asking to see an investigator's badge (how many people know how to tell whether an investigator's badge is authentic?), or a bouncer asking to see ID at a club (do you really think he knows what all 50 states' drivers' licenses look like?) asking for ID is often relatively insecure way of confirming actual identity. But it is still standard practice and is generally considered basic due diligence. You may think it is a stupid practice, but you can't really fault this guy alone for following it.
Requiring readers to follow multiple links to figure out wtf the summary is about is annoying.
Indeed the note at the site makes it clear:
How many people can actually use the global language? David Graddol estimated a total of 750 million L1 (first or native language) plus L2 (second or nth language) speakers of English in his Future of English Report (pdf document) for the British Council. One of our subscribers, Martin Schell, has reviewed Prof. Braj Kachru's new book Asian Englishes which claims that India and China combined have over half a billion "users" of English.
Indeed, many people are bilingual or multilingual, but here we assign only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach).
In otherwords just because only 30% of internet users come from countries where English is the main language does not mean the only 30% of internet users understnd it, especially when you consider that Internet users will tend to be of a higher socio-economic status (thus more likely to understand multuple languages), that English is the most widely learned second language, and that a large majority of material on the internet is in Enlgish.
And if I send you $1 million Monopoly dollars, I've essentially given you $1 million dollars.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Here is a good example:
And if I give you a million dollar house I have essentially given you a million dollars.
That is, when I give you a million dollar house I, in essence, effectively, albeit round-aboutly, transfer a million dollars to you. Not so of monopoly money.
No. Security through obscurity refers to intentionally implementing a system that whose design is hidden and convoluted (hard to reverse engineer or guess) in order to provide security. It doesn't mean simply not realizing an vector exists. /var/cache/www/.98cf4b2101d would be security through obscurity: I know that anyone with access to the computer could read it, but I'm counting on them (a) not finding it and (b) not having a clue what it is and not opening it if they do.
Storing my financial numbers on a public computer under something like
Of course security through obscurity isn't wrong in itself if properly used especially in conjunction with other more rigorous forms of security.
That post was the one my post was replying to.
Sorry I somehow confused the relative positions of the posts.
. . . it goes beyond simply a citation of one book from another, as in your example. That embedded information usually includes very specific info about function names and function signatures, variable names and their data types, and may even include constants, e.g. raw data or numbers that are defined in the library itself.
I just don't see how that sort of information is subject to copywrite.
To return to the book example: My book also includes very specific information about other people's works: Specific name of the work, author, publisher, publication data and city, page number, edition, maybe even a section or chapter name and some short (fair use) quotations. Part of the point of a citation is to be as specific as possible so the reader can (at least in theory) get an exact copy of what the author was reading (same pagination, editorial mistakes, etc.) That seems to me to be every bit as specific as including variable types and function names in a binary.
I don't necessarily agree that that info by itself constitutes copyright infringement,
Duly noted, but if I could press on (looking back to your earlier post). . .
At that point the FSF could prove the "intent", in a hypothetical court case, of the app's developer to use their lib in violation of the lib's license.
But the issue is precisely that the GPL explicitly only applies to distributing, not to using the work:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, . . .
There can be no intent to use the code against it's license, unless 'use' is taken to mean 'copy/distribute/modify', which isn't what's happening (as has been pointed out the developer is not doing any of these things).
It seems to me that if the FSF interpretation is to be upheld they must first hold that the primary violation (the actual copying/modifying in violation of the GPL) is taking place at runtime and is committed by the user, then they can (perhaps) argue that the developer that linked his non-GPL compatible code against a GPLed lib is liable for contributory infringement (by, so to speak, setting the user up), which IIRC is the tack that has been taken against torrent trackers.
Perhaps showing my ignorance but,
What if we took a somewhat parallel case from books. If I write a book that can only really be understood if the reader has first read certain other books or articles (by other people), I don't need to comply with the licenses for those other works at all to distribute my book, even though I explicitly cite them by name. I'm not distributing them--I'm just citing them. It's up to the reader to worry about getting a legal copy of them to read in order to understand what I've written.
I know it isn't a perfect example but it does seem like there is a strong parallel insofar as in neither case is there an actual copying of anything copywritten, although there is explicit reference made to it.
As this comment points out, if there is a violation going on (i.e., if the runtime combination in memory constitutes a derived work) then it seems like the user is the one violating the license (he actually made the copy of the work).
Coming up with something new opens you to submarine patents.
I vote for TeX. It's old enough (frozen in 82) not to be susceptible to patents and expressive enough for just about anything.
I would think they could offer a free license if they wanted, but I don't know what sort of prejudice they can show in doing it.
IANAL
if social security actually did go bankrupt we would be pretty screwed as a country. It isn't going to, no matter what irrational BS you have heard.
Social security is an unfunded obligation of the government, which means that the program is essentially a ponzi scheme.
The problem with a ponzi scheme is that it requires an certain ratio between those paying in and those collecting be maintained. It needs an income that literally grows exponentially. Now the babyboomers are retiring and they weren't known for having large families (I.e., they don't have lots of working children and grandchildren paying in to support their benefits). And as we learned last year, just because something is big doesn't mean it can't fail.
We will find a way to make it work.
The unfunded obligation as of 2008, was $13.6 trillion, larger than the entire Federal debt after the bailouts and stimuli ($11.7 T). To put that in perspective, the unfunded social security obligation per person is roughly $44,000. Note that this includes citizens who are already retired, and thus not actually paying in. Yeah we could figure it out for a while--we can treat the Federal government like a limitless resource that can bail anything out--but remember that everything the government has it takes, in one way or another, from it citizens (usually by coercion). I for one do not want to be coerced into balancing the budget of a failed ponzi scheme.
What's more Apple owns it.
For one, isn't ODF, which IIRC is covered by multiple published standards, exactly such a system as MS is now getting a patent for?
Way to beat that strawman!
Couldn't you have at least waited until a linux fanboi didn't understand the summary and made a dumb comment?
All that aside, the way these projects' being open source will make this better is by making a patch come out sooner. The community knows there is a problem. Someone will get on finding it right away, and in a day or two we will see patches getting pushed out that fix it. There's no sitting around helplessly hoping we don't get DoSed until someone at MegaSoft Corp. decides this is worth fixing and rolls a patch.
Acatully, I suspect it goes the other way. Charging a nominal fee is likely to make kids feel like they now have greater rights over the thing and give a sense of entitlement (i.e., "it's mine, I can do with it what I want, because I payed for it") while still being practically free.
Whereas if you just flat out give it to them, you could more easily foster a sense of indebtedness and gratitude ("You did nothing to deserve this, take care of it").
I think AC's observation about volunteers is to the point: Volunteers often would rather make it clear that their work is an unambiguous act of charity, than have it fall in the grey area of kinda-charity, kinda-business.
That would have been the perfect last scene to this little sketch.
Not much of an achievement but I for one tip my hat to you.
And my sig may be apropos.
nope.
Wow, I just posted a link to a T-shirt ad as a citation.
wow, that was a really informative video.
Psych.
Do you talk to yourself often?