yeah, well, there's always the fucked-up pathologically insane.
but there's a difference between a few isolated instances of people or software or software companies being broken and an entire country of people using - and used to using - a broken date format. the former can be ignored. the latter are a minor annoyance (with occasionally serious consequences) all across the internet.
YYYYMMDD has another advantage - europeans will have to change too (from DMY), so yanks aren't quite as likely to get their backs up and say stupid shit like "you can take my fucked up insane date format from my cold dead hands".
not seen since Murdoch's papers fucked Whitlam in '75.
Whitlam's govt was a bit on the nose but still had a reasonable chance of winning without the sustained and vitriolic propaganda campaign against Labour by the mainstream newspapers - especially with the rage that many australians felt over Kerr's dismissal of Whitlam.
I know for a fact that I would literally turn down $500k/year in salary if the job required me to live in NJ (or any of those other godforsaken liberal hellhole states).
thank you for providing a perfect example that gun nuts are fucking stupid in a general sense as well as in the childish fantasy make-believe sense of "i need my gun to protect myself from da gubmint".
making $500K/year in a liberal western democracy isn't exactly an onerous hardship. you're not at risk of being dragged off to the gulags for not saluting the flag or blowing jesus enthusiastically enough (as might be the case in a jesusland state), and you won't be tortured or lynched or burnt or dragged in chains behind a car for miles just for being different.
making $500k/year for a year or three or five is enough to set you up to live however you like, wherever you like afterwards....and with a living standard better than about 98% of everyone else in the world.
but that would be intolerable to you because....why? is it because "liberal hellhole" states have and enforce laws about separation of church and state, minimum wages, employment conditions, food safety standards, and..... you know what, I just can't figure out what the fuck it is that people like you think is so bad about "liberal hellhole states" that doesn't just boil down to brainwashed propaganda that "liberal is a dirty word".
personally, i live in a civilised country and think even your "liberal hellhole" states are regressive, backward, authoritarian police-state hellholes. i'd *hate* to have to live anywhere in america but i could tolerate somewhere on either the east or west coasts (the semi-civilised parts - NY or Boston or Seattle or San Francisco for example) for a year or five if i was making $500K/year. It might even be worth it at $250K/year. In contrast, I probably wouldn't last a month in some redneck jesusland state where freedom means the freedom to look, think, dress and act just like everyone else if you want to remain intact or alive.
I would be much happier even if I could only make a tenth of that while living in relative freedom.
why is it that nutters like you never see the irony of railing against "liberal" values yet wishing for "freedom"?
Not if you believe in "intellectual property" rather than "[...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times [...]"
This is why the "intellectual property" meme is so perniciously evil - it completely transforms the purpose and intent of copyrights and patents.
the math you're forgetting is that if you've got $6 billion in the bank you can patent whatever the fuck you like and sue almost everyone else into bankruptcy.
Big-endian only exists because Latin languages write their numbers wrong -- text is written left-to-right but numbers are written right-to-left.
huh? numbers are written in exactly the same order they would be expressed in words - "fifty-one thousand, three hundred and forty-eight" == 51,348
being trained from a young age to read numbers like that, i have no idea whether it really would have been just as easy to learn to read the digits in reverse order ("8 4 3 1 5") but it doesn't seem so to me. In fact it seems competely unnatural - the kind of thing you might do just to prove you can rather than because it's any better or more efficient.
This mess has also caused the middle-endian date and time formats currently in use.
it's really only americans who do this (MDY). and maybe the japanese because of the "Operation Blacklist" post-WWII occupation led by Gen. MacArthur. Everyone else uses DMY or YMD because the middle-endian american date format is alien - people naturally order things from either smallest to largest (or least significant to most significant) or from largest to smallest (most to least).
ISO tries to fix the date format, but unfortunately does it by standardizing exactly the big-endian way that feels so alien to humans.
YYYY-MM-DD seems perfectly natural to me, not at all alien. I was raised on D-M-Y but figured out for myself that YYYYMMDD is the only format that sorts properly (and then later learnt there was as ISO standard for it).
YYYYMMDD also has the advantage of being unambiguous - you don't have to guess whether whoever wrote the date is american and if so, whether they're using a sane or insane date format or not - for days >12, it's easy to figure out: 8-13-2013 can't be anything but 13th August....but 8-7-2013 could be July 8 (sane) or August 7 (insane).
worse, there's absolutely no way to tell except to look for other dates on the same page (or journal/ledged/book/web site/etc) and check to see if any of them have day numbers > 12.
2) You can't easily PXE boot to UEFI mode as almost no desktop / notebook network cards support it.
I haven't had any difficulty finding desktops and laptops that will PXE boot in UEFI mode (many have both UEFI PXE and BIOS PXE as options in their BIOS settings).
the trouble with UEFI and PXE at the moment is that syslinux and friends (including menu.c32 and ipxe/gpxe) don't support UEFI mode (yet)....so at the moment it's a pain to have working PXE-bootable menus to re-image the machine, run clonezilla, or run an installer ISO.
some things still work - anything that doesn't need to stay in UEFI mode. e.g. freedos floppy images for motherboard or PCI-e card firmware updates. installers and re-imaging tools won't work because they need to be in UEFI mode to change the UEFI boot settings.
this makes it a real pain to script/automate the re-imaging of large numbers of machines (e.g. an entire lab of Windows PCs at the start of semester). it has turned turned what used to be an entirely automated remotely triggered process that can re-image an entire lab in under an hour into a tedious manual process booting each machine individually with a USB stick, and then sitting through the entire re-install process.
the good news is that the ipxe and syslinux devs are working on it, so i expect it will be working properly by the end of the year.
BTW, all this is slightly off-topic as it isn't specifically about Restricted Boot...it's just an issue with UEFI itself at the moment.
Of course, a hardware security system that is too complex to verify seems like a fatal flaw.
as long as it makes it more difficult to run or install linux or *bsd or other alternative operating systems, then it has done its job.
i always thought that Restricted Boot was created to advance the interests of Microsoft and the RIAA....but it wouldn't surprise me if the NSA was behind it too.
this is one of the main reasons i participate on mailing lists and forums, and write readmes, tech notes, and documentation - the act of writing (or speaking, to a lesser extent) to explain something to someone else, or to solve their problem forces me to put my own thoughts and knowledge in order and ends up increases my own understanding.
usually it's just a fairly minor incremental increase, but sometimes it's a major "aha!" moment of insight, completely overturning my old understanding and opening up new knowledge and techniques. Those occasional moments are priceless.
and, as you say, it's also a damn good way of debugging a problem - write it out, send it, and 5 seconds after you hit Send, you'll realise exactly how obvious the solution is.
that's not tricky at all, not even an ethical dilemma - children have rights of their own, completely independent of their parents. they are not the property of their parents, they are not chattels.
if a child's parents are neglecting them (by withholding nutrition or medical treatment) or abusing their rights in other ways, then the state has a duty to step in and uphold the rights of the child.
why would anyone want to replace their credit card with their mobile phone, anyway?
what problem does it solve? what benefit does it give?
there are numerous security and privacy reasons why this is a bad idea but I can't think of even one reason why anyone would want it, or why it might be a good - or even useful - idea.
You asked for an example. I gave you one. Now you're changing the argument.
If you want more examples, then I refer you to every single commercial product ever sold that contains BSD-licensed code. NONE of them give the users the right to obtain, use, modify and re-distribute the source code used in the product.
Having no rights to the source code may not matter at all to most Sony PS4 users...it probably doesn't. But that's not the point, or the question you asked. You asked for an example, you got one.
It wasn't the point of my original post, either. I mostly steered clear of subjective evaluations of whether the GPL or the BSD is a better license...the point I was making was that cheering about a company like Sony using BSD-licensed code in a proprietary product is silly fanboy cheer-squad behaviour because there is no practical benefit whatsoever to anyone except Sony. It really makes no difference whether they use BSD-licensed code or their own proprietary code.
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".
how about the Sony Playstation 4?
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.
In fact, they'd likely get criminal charges for copyright infringement and DMCA circumvention if they attempted to do any of those things.
right, because the BSD license is just so hard to understand.
try not to judge others by your own short-comings, not everyone is perplexed by simple things.
I know exactly what the differences are between BSD and GPL licenses are, exactly what they allow and disallow. The aims of both licenses are very different. In short, BSD pretty much cares about nothing except correct attribution (and in the most recent no-advertising-clause variation, even that's just a polite request), while the GPL cares only about creating and perpetuating software freedom.
I also know the results of those two very different aims.
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.
When it comes to corporate/commercial re-use, the GPL attracts contributors and it makes the decision to contribute easy by requiring it. The BSD license attracts free-loaders, and makes the decision to contribute difficult because programmers inside the corporation cant say "the license requires us to", they have to argue the case for contribution on ethics which really isn't a strong-point for corporations.
Actually, it's the BSD license cheer-squad who are odd. you clap and cheer at something that does not benefit you, or anyone else (except Sony. or Apple. etc).
Here's the difference in outcomes with products using software under 1. GPL, 2. BSD, and 3. proprietary licenses:
1. with a GPL code-base, the user has the *right* to get, modify, use, and re-distribute the source code. the product manufactuer MUST release the source code to GPL-derived works under the same terms as the GPL. a win for the user and the world.
2. with a BSD licensed code-base, the user has no right to the source code, at all. the product manufacturer might voluntarily make some of their code public, under any licensing terms of their choosing. no benefit to the user or to the world.
3. with a proprietary code-base, the user has no right to the source code, at all. the product manufacturer might voluntarily make some of their code public, under any licensing terms of their choosing. no benefit to the user or to the world.
The outcomes of the last two cases are identical, so why cheer for something that has no practical benefit? bragging rights - especially when they're third-hand and your just a fanboy or a herd member who gets off on identifying with brand names - aren't worth much, if anything. they don't benefit the user, they don't benefit the public, they don't even benefit the original authors of the software who generously chose to use a BSD-style license.
(and, note, while I think the BSD license is inferior to the GPL for many reasons, I absolutely accept and endorse the authors' rights to choose that license for their software)
So, I don't even see any reason to care that Sony (or Apple or anyone ) chooses to base some of their products on BSD-licensed code. I certainly see no reason to think it's a Good Thing because it's NOT a Good Thing - at best, it's neutral because it just isn't relevant.
BTW, I'm really tired of seeing, as it was in this article, the BSD license described as being "more liberal" than the GPL. The *ONLY* "freedom" you get with the BSD license that you don't get with the GPL is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Claiming that that makes it "more liberal" is akin to saying that we had more freedom before the abolition of slavery because we hadn't had our freedom to own other people (and to treat our property in whatever manner we liked) restricted.
Freedom to oppress, to exploit, to be a parasitic leech are not freedoms worth having, let alone worth crowing about.
When I read that part of the letter, i suspected that it was a hint about knowledge of some existing shady deal that the city council - or some individual(s) on it - wouldn't want exposed.
IMO it was far too specific a suggestion to be anything but an "I know what you've been up to".
He has to - or someone does, anyway. Thinking for yourself is a patented process. If you want to think, pay for a license to the technology.
The patent claims start with "Using a brain or other thought-capable natural organ, artificial device, or semi-synthetic hybrid to think thoughts or thought-like approximations wthout direct instruction on what to think" and go on to include several other claims including "[...] whether the thoughts produced thereby are communicated in some form (including via biological means, electronic means, analog or digital) or not".
This is clearly such a novel and unlikely invention that patent protection is justified.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, well, there's always the fucked-up pathologically insane.
but there's a difference between a few isolated instances of people or software or software companies being broken and an entire country of people using - and used to using - a broken date format. the former can be ignored. the latter are a minor annoyance (with occasionally serious consequences) all across the internet.
YYYYMMDD has another advantage - europeans will have to change too (from DMY), so yanks aren't quite as likely to get their backs up and say stupid shit like "you can take my fucked up insane date format from my cold dead hands".
don't forget - it would cost your parents about $5K just to bury or cremate you.
please tell me where i can buy one of these free market things you keep talking about. they sound pretty good.
not seen since Murdoch's papers fucked Whitlam in '75.
Whitlam's govt was a bit on the nose but still had a reasonable chance of winning without the sustained and vitriolic propaganda campaign against Labour by the mainstream newspapers - especially with the rage that many australians felt over Kerr's dismissal of Whitlam.
thank you for providing a perfect example that gun nuts are fucking stupid in a general sense as well as in the childish fantasy make-believe sense of "i need my gun to protect myself from da gubmint".
making $500K/year in a liberal western democracy isn't exactly an onerous hardship. you're not at risk of being dragged off to the gulags for not saluting the flag or blowing jesus enthusiastically enough (as might be the case in a jesusland state), and you won't be tortured or lynched or burnt or dragged in chains behind a car for miles just for being different.
making $500k/year for a year or three or five is enough to set you up to live however you like, wherever you like afterwards....and with a living standard better than about 98% of everyone else in the world.
but that would be intolerable to you because....why? is it because "liberal hellhole" states have and enforce laws about separation of church and state, minimum wages, employment conditions, food safety standards, and ..... you know what, I just can't figure out what the fuck it is that people like you think is so bad about "liberal hellhole states" that doesn't just boil down to brainwashed propaganda that "liberal is a dirty word".
personally, i live in a civilised country and think even your "liberal hellhole" states are regressive, backward, authoritarian police-state hellholes. i'd *hate* to have to live anywhere in america but i could tolerate somewhere on either the east or west coasts (the semi-civilised parts - NY or Boston or Seattle or San Francisco for example) for a year or five if i was making $500K/year. It might even be worth it at $250K/year. In contrast, I probably wouldn't last a month in some redneck jesusland state where freedom means the freedom to look, think, dress and act just like everyone else if you want to remain intact or alive.
why is it that nutters like you never see the irony of railing against "liberal" values yet wishing for "freedom"?
Not if you believe in "intellectual property" rather than "[...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times [...]"
This is why the "intellectual property" meme is so perniciously evil - it completely transforms the purpose and intent of copyrights and patents.
the math you're forgetting is that if you've got $6 billion in the bank you can patent whatever the fuck you like and sue almost everyone else into bankruptcy.
huh? numbers are written in exactly the same order they would be expressed in words - "fifty-one thousand, three hundred and forty-eight" == 51,348
being trained from a young age to read numbers like that, i have no idea whether it really would have been just as easy to learn to read the digits in reverse order ("8 4 3 1 5") but it doesn't seem so to me. In fact it seems competely unnatural - the kind of thing you might do just to prove you can rather than because it's any better or more efficient.
it's really only americans who do this (MDY). and maybe the japanese because of the "Operation Blacklist" post-WWII occupation led by Gen. MacArthur. Everyone else uses DMY or YMD because the middle-endian american date format is alien - people naturally order things from either smallest to largest (or least significant to most significant) or from largest to smallest (most to least).
YYYY-MM-DD seems perfectly natural to me, not at all alien. I was raised on D-M-Y but figured out for myself that YYYYMMDD is the only format that sorts properly (and then later learnt there was as ISO standard for it).
YYYYMMDD also has the advantage of being unambiguous - you don't have to guess whether whoever wrote the date is american and if so, whether they're using a sane or insane date format or not - for days >12, it's easy to figure out: 8-13-2013 can't be anything but 13th August....but 8-7-2013 could be July 8 (sane) or August 7 (insane).
worse, there's absolutely no way to tell except to look for other dates on the same page (or journal/ledged/book/web site/etc) and check to see if any of them have day numbers > 12.
I haven't had any difficulty finding desktops and laptops that will PXE boot in UEFI mode (many have both UEFI PXE and BIOS PXE as options in their BIOS settings).
the trouble with UEFI and PXE at the moment is that syslinux and friends (including menu.c32 and ipxe/gpxe) don't support UEFI mode (yet)....so at the moment it's a pain to have working PXE-bootable menus to re-image the machine, run clonezilla, or run an installer ISO.
some things still work - anything that doesn't need to stay in UEFI mode. e.g. freedos floppy images for motherboard or PCI-e card firmware updates. installers and re-imaging tools won't work because they need to be in UEFI mode to change the UEFI boot settings.
this makes it a real pain to script/automate the re-imaging of large numbers of machines (e.g. an entire lab of Windows PCs at the start of semester). it has turned turned what used to be an entirely automated remotely triggered process that can re-image an entire lab in under an hour into a tedious manual process booting each machine individually with a USB stick, and then sitting through the entire re-install process.
the good news is that the ipxe and syslinux devs are working on it, so i expect it will be working properly by the end of the year.
BTW, all this is slightly off-topic as it isn't specifically about Restricted Boot...it's just an issue with UEFI itself at the moment.
as long as it makes it more difficult to run or install linux or *bsd or other alternative operating systems, then it has done its job.
i always thought that Restricted Boot was created to advance the interests of Microsoft and the RIAA....but it wouldn't surprise me if the NSA was behind it too.
...which is great, because the one thing that all developers lack is ego. everything else, they're absolutely brilliant at.
this is one of the main reasons i participate on mailing lists and forums, and write readmes, tech notes, and documentation - the act of writing (or speaking, to a lesser extent) to explain something to someone else, or to solve their problem forces me to put my own thoughts and knowledge in order and ends up increases my own understanding.
usually it's just a fairly minor incremental increase, but sometimes it's a major "aha!" moment of insight, completely overturning my old understanding and opening up new knowledge and techniques. Those occasional moments are priceless.
and, as you say, it's also a damn good way of debugging a problem - write it out, send it, and 5 seconds after you hit Send, you'll realise exactly how obvious the solution is.
that's not tricky at all, not even an ethical dilemma - children have rights of their own, completely independent of their parents. they are not the property of their parents, they are not chattels.
if a child's parents are neglecting them (by withholding nutrition or medical treatment) or abusing their rights in other ways, then the state has a duty to step in and uphold the rights of the child.
s/pension/penchant/
why would anyone want to replace their credit card with their mobile phone, anyway?
what problem does it solve? what benefit does it give?
there are numerous security and privacy reasons why this is a bad idea but I can't think of even one reason why anyone would want it, or why it might be a good - or even useful - idea.
"We have to destroy the web in order to save it".
actually, they're the ones that make re-make after re-make of the same old shit, over and over again.
If companies like this want to give up making the same shit, or even just wall themselves off from the web, then good fucking riddance.
You asked for an example. I gave you one. Now you're changing the argument.
If you want more examples, then I refer you to every single commercial product ever sold that contains BSD-licensed code. NONE of them give the users the right to obtain, use, modify and re-distribute the source code used in the product.
Having no rights to the source code may not matter at all to most Sony PS4 users...it probably doesn't. But that's not the point, or the question you asked. You asked for an example, you got one.
It wasn't the point of my original post, either. I mostly steered clear of subjective evaluations of whether the GPL or the BSD is a better license...the point I was making was that cheering about a company like Sony using BSD-licensed code in a proprietary product is silly fanboy cheer-squad behaviour because there is no practical benefit whatsoever to anyone except Sony. It really makes no difference whether they use BSD-licensed code or their own proprietary code.
how about the Sony Playstation 4?
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.
In fact, they'd likely get criminal charges for copyright infringement and DMCA circumvention if they attempted to do any of those things.
let H_M be the set of idiots who think that freedom in particular and/or ethics in general are a subset of mathematics.
right, because the BSD license is just so hard to understand.
try not to judge others by your own short-comings, not everyone is perplexed by simple things.
I know exactly what the differences are between BSD and GPL licenses are, exactly what they allow and disallow. The aims of both licenses are very different. In short, BSD pretty much cares about nothing except correct attribution (and in the most recent no-advertising-clause variation, even that's just a polite request), while the GPL cares only about creating and perpetuating software freedom.
I also know the results of those two very different aims.
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.
When it comes to corporate/commercial re-use, the GPL attracts contributors and it makes the decision to contribute easy by requiring it. The BSD license attracts free-loaders, and makes the decision to contribute difficult because programmers inside the corporation cant say "the license requires us to", they have to argue the case for contribution on ethics which really isn't a strong-point for corporations.
you seem to have a reading comprehension problem - perhaps you should see a doctor about that.
Actually, it's the BSD license cheer-squad who are odd. you clap and cheer at something that does not benefit you, or anyone else (except Sony. or Apple. etc).
Here's the difference in outcomes with products using software under 1. GPL, 2. BSD, and 3. proprietary licenses:
1. with a GPL code-base, the user has the *right* to get, modify, use, and re-distribute the source code. the product manufactuer MUST release the source code to GPL-derived works under the same terms as the GPL. a win for the user and the world.
2. with a BSD licensed code-base, the user has no right to the source code, at all. the product manufacturer might voluntarily make some of their code public, under any licensing terms of their choosing. no benefit to the user or to the world.
3. with a proprietary code-base, the user has no right to the source code, at all. the product manufacturer might voluntarily make some of their code public, under any licensing terms of their choosing. no benefit to the user or to the world.
The outcomes of the last two cases are identical, so why cheer for something that has no practical benefit? bragging rights - especially when they're third-hand and your just a fanboy or a herd member who gets off on identifying with brand names - aren't worth much, if anything. they don't benefit the user, they don't benefit the public, they don't even benefit the original authors of the software who generously chose to use a BSD-style license.
(and, note, while I think the BSD license is inferior to the GPL for many reasons, I absolutely accept and endorse the authors' rights to choose that license for their software)
So, I don't even see any reason to care that Sony (or Apple or anyone ) chooses to base some of their products on BSD-licensed code. I certainly see no reason to think it's a Good Thing because it's NOT a Good Thing - at best, it's neutral because it just isn't relevant.
BTW, I'm really tired of seeing, as it was in this article, the BSD license described as being "more liberal" than the GPL. The *ONLY* "freedom" you get with the BSD license that you don't get with the GPL is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Claiming that that makes it "more liberal" is akin to saying that we had more freedom before the abolition of slavery because we hadn't had our freedom to own other people (and to treat our property in whatever manner we liked) restricted.
Freedom to oppress, to exploit, to be a parasitic leech are not freedoms worth having, let alone worth crowing about.
When I read that part of the letter, i suspected that it was a hint about knowledge of some existing shady deal that the city council - or some individual(s) on it - wouldn't want exposed.
IMO it was far too specific a suggestion to be anything but an "I know what you've been up to".
He has to - or someone does, anyway. Thinking for yourself is a patented process. If you want to think, pay for a license to the technology.
The patent claims start with "Using a brain or other thought-capable natural organ, artificial device, or semi-synthetic hybrid to think thoughts or thought-like approximations wthout direct instruction on what to think" and go on to include several other claims including "[...] whether the thoughts produced thereby are communicated in some form (including via biological means, electronic means, analog or digital) or not".
This is clearly such a novel and unlikely invention that patent protection is justified.