While I don't entirely disagree with you, if there's a feature that a proprietary, pay-for program has that I need that the open source, free equivalent doesn't have, then ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll be cheaper for me to just buy the proprietary version than to try to comission someone to write it for me.
I'd reflect that there are a number of TV shows and films showing high-powered, highly-paid lawyers or doctors, or that show law or medicine as a dynamic, interesting, even adventurous and sexy job.
Engineering? Well, I guess there's the odd engineer in war films (though never the hero, often dies setting a bomb or fixing something), and of course there's Scottie and Geordie.
Nope, I can't imagine why so many people are going into medicine and law, and so few into engineering. Complete mystery.
Then they drop the suit (since they'd lose it anyway). At this point that employee starts having performance problems, gets lousy assignments, and generally suffers until they quit - but of course nothing is attributed to the blog and nothing is done that would give the employee grounds to sue.
I don't know about the US, but over here in the UK if that happened then you may well have a case for constructive dismissal.
So has Windows - the 64 bit build of Win XP was released a couple of years ago.
The problem isn't the OS, it's the hardware support. In my case, USB wi-fi dongles; none of the ones I have kicking about the place have driver support from the manufacturer (thanks for that Netgear!) and I don't fancy trailing cat5 cabling through my house again.
And yes, Linux is great, and yes it was my primary desktop OS for a couple of years, but it simply doesn't support all the software I want to run (and yes, that includes games, and no I don't fancy hoping that WINE will run something I've just shelled out cold, hard cash for)
And if they didn't, people would be screaming about incompatibilities - as in fact they are, with Vista and driver support, as they did with XP and driver support...
For me, alter table add (column_name type [constraints]); is quick and easy, but then I'm used to tools like sqlplus. In a graphical tool, it could be as easy as right click on table -> add column -> enter name and optionally type (or accept some default, say varchar2(4000) or even CLOB for Oracle). Hell, you could even design it so that it looks just like a spreadsheet, with "spare" columns after the last one, and you just start typing in one and the tool does the result automagically.
It would make for some truly horrible database schemas, of course, and you'd be losing (or at least hiding) a lot of the good stuff that a proper RDBMS brings, but you could certainly do it.
I would have to wonder why though, given that you'd have simply created something that tried to be both spreadsheet and database, but would probably fail to do either properly.
I mean, people thought the electronics would survive in a 2861 C (5182 F) metal vat?
That was my first thought, especially given the widely-publicised Athlon fires of a few years back.
Components that need active cooling to avoid damage in normal operating surviving in a vat of molten steel? (For that matter, solder joints surviving!) And yet people modded you up something other than "Funny" for it. Sometimes I truly despair of this site's readership.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a "CEO's dinner" at a regional tech trade show. (I'm not a CEO, I just happened to work for the meetings major sponsor.) The majority of attendees were the type of people who wear very expensive watches and attend regional tech conferences and use words like "synergy" a lot.
In other words, a bunch of people who perhaps were technical once, a long time ago, but most likely weren't and definitely aren't now.
Sounds like the FBI guy was pitching his presentation at the audience; chances are, he was selected specifically to match the audience too. In other words, a good presenter, rather than a good security expert necessarily.
In FPS games most of the kills are made with sniper or alike weapons.
You've clearly not played the UT series much. I have, and going down to a sniper weapon is relatively rare, except on certain maps (such as Torlan, but even then you know exactly where the guy with the lightning gun is going to be stood 90% of the time)
he couldn't get any wackier and do anything more outlandish than subpoena the President
Assuming his testimony would be relevant to the case, what's wrong with serving the president with a subpoena? Is he excused his legal and moral obligations because he's busy?
(Note that I have no idea of the details of the case you're referring to, but generally I don't find that a ridiculous idea - no-one should be above the law. Of course, if the president had nothing to do with the case and it was just some sort of publicity stunt then yeah, the guy's a loon)
If you "owned" a piece of software, you could resell it. Not just once, you could start your own CD printing factory and sell million of copies.
That's what ownership means.
No, that's what being the copyright holder means. Owning a box, manual and CD/DVD means that I can sell that on to anyone I choose and no-one can stop me.
Or would you equally argue that the shops that carry software don't own it? Somehow I don't think you would get very far using that as a defence if you tried walking out with it without paying.
It would really suck if multiple countries found that the contributions back were worth billions of dollars and taxed each contributer or copyright holder accordingly.
How would they tax the contributor? I don't get taxed because I work, I get taxed on my earnings. I could do exactly the same job for free and not be taxed a penny. Even if the contributions themselves were found to have taxable value, the contributor is not the one gaining that value, they are producing it.
The difference here is that there is a perception in business that Open Source projects are operated by dirty hippies that don't have it "together" enough to do anything about it (nor the money, even if they did have it "together").
I definitely think that's part of it. It's the old school playground taunt of "Oh yeah? You and who's army?"
If it's MS, IBM, Apple, Oracle, etc, then it's obviously their army of highly-paid lawyers.
If it's some hobbiest open source project, then what army indeed?
The only businesses that will be scared off from using Open Source because of this are dishonest businesses that shouldn't be allowed to use Open Source anyway
I'm not entirely sure that I agree there, to be honest. Some businesses may be scared away simply because they don't feel that they understand the legal ramifications fully enough to trust that they will even know what their obligations are. Not every firm has access to a legal department (mine, for instance).
Well, I've never had FF crash any of my machines either, but then I've not seen the CPU hogging bug and I don't tend to have more than one window open at once.
Sometimes "works for me!" is a valid response, as long as you're not the one that's meant to be fixing it...
Even having a minority government didn't stop this horseshit from passing.
Why would it? Yes, prison time for making a shaky cam recording of a film in a cinema is dumb. But what rights are you losing? How likely is it that the government is going to be voted out because it passed the law? How likely is it that enough members of the government who are senior enough perform the act that's being legislated against that they can get it quashed before it's passed?
Yes, stupid laws and stupid punishments serve to make a mockery of the law, but what reason would any government have to not pass this one, other than that?
I think a GPL case that went to court would probably look like a run of the mill copyright complaint except theres no real plaintiff so who cares?
The plaintiff is the copyright holder, just as in any other copyright violation case.
Contracts without signatures are really worthless
Actually I believe that verbal contracts (at least here in the UK) are just as binding as written ones, it's just a lot harder to prove that they exist.
It should automatically save the session, and then give you an option of reopening it the next time you launch.
No thank you - that will make it two clicks for me to start FF rather than 1, as even when it has crashed I sometimes choose not to restore the previous session.
There's no conceptual reason why the browser couldn't detect that it's not active, has been running for a few days, and hasn't been active for a few minutes (or hours) and automatically restart itself periodically.
Funnily enough, I was talking about exactly this last week with one of our sysadmins at work, about a particular problematic server. We agreed that doing that sort of thing is the absolute last resort; it is an admission of defeat, that you don't know what the cause of the problem is or how to fix it, so you're just going to restart the damn thing every so often to stop it from happening when someone's actually trying to use it.
With something like this, it's even worse - odds are every so often the damn thing would restart just as you were about to use it.
You do realise that he's talking about restarting FF not rebooting Windows, don't you?
I've got a real clunker of a laptop, 256 MB RAM PIII, that runs FF with Flash and all that
Congratulations. I regularly see FF hit in excess of 200MB of RAM usage after a few days of normal usage. This instance has been running maybe 20 minutes (after locking up earlier) and is using 65MB already.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't entirely disagree with you, if there's a feature that a proprietary, pay-for program has that I need that the open source, free equivalent doesn't have, then ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll be cheaper for me to just buy the proprietary version than to try to comission someone to write it for me.
I'd reflect that there are a number of TV shows and films showing high-powered, highly-paid lawyers or doctors, or that show law or medicine as a dynamic, interesting, even adventurous and sexy job.
Engineering? Well, I guess there's the odd engineer in war films (though never the hero, often dies setting a bomb or fixing something), and of course there's Scottie and Geordie.
Nope, I can't imagine why so many people are going into medicine and law, and so few into engineering. Complete mystery.
Then they drop the suit (since they'd lose it anyway). At this point that employee starts having performance problems, gets lousy assignments, and generally suffers until they quit - but of course nothing is attributed to the blog and nothing is done that would give the employee grounds to sue.
I don't know about the US, but over here in the UK if that happened then you may well have a case for constructive dismissal.
So has Windows - the 64 bit build of Win XP was released a couple of years ago.
The problem isn't the OS, it's the hardware support. In my case, USB wi-fi dongles; none of the ones I have kicking about the place have driver support from the manufacturer (thanks for that Netgear!) and I don't fancy trailing cat5 cabling through my house again.
And yes, Linux is great, and yes it was my primary desktop OS for a couple of years, but it simply doesn't support all the software I want to run (and yes, that includes games, and no I don't fancy hoping that WINE will run something I've just shelled out cold, hard cash for)
And if they didn't, people would be screaming about incompatibilities - as in fact they are, with Vista and driver support, as they did with XP and driver support...
the user cannot add columns quickly
See now, that all depends on the UI, doesn't it?
For me, alter table add (column_name type [constraints]); is quick and easy, but then I'm used to tools like sqlplus. In a graphical tool, it could be as easy as right click on table -> add column -> enter name and optionally type (or accept some default, say varchar2(4000) or even CLOB for Oracle). Hell, you could even design it so that it looks just like a spreadsheet, with "spare" columns after the last one, and you just start typing in one and the tool does the result automagically.
It would make for some truly horrible database schemas, of course, and you'd be losing (or at least hiding) a lot of the good stuff that a proper RDBMS brings, but you could certainly do it.
I would have to wonder why though, given that you'd have simply created something that tried to be both spreadsheet and database, but would probably fail to do either properly.
I mean, people thought the electronics would survive in a 2861 C (5182 F) metal vat?
That was my first thought, especially given the widely-publicised Athlon fires of a few years back.
Components that need active cooling to avoid damage in normal operating surviving in a vat of molten steel? (For that matter, solder joints surviving!) And yet people modded you up something other than "Funny" for it. Sometimes I truly despair of this site's readership.
recent experience has taught us that we will be going it alone
On behalf of the rest of the UK, fuck you too.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a "CEO's dinner" at a regional tech trade show. (I'm not a CEO, I just happened to work for the meetings major sponsor.) The majority of attendees were the type of people who wear very expensive watches and attend regional tech conferences and use words like "synergy" a lot.
In other words, a bunch of people who perhaps were technical once, a long time ago, but most likely weren't and definitely aren't now.
Sounds like the FBI guy was pitching his presentation at the audience; chances are, he was selected specifically to match the audience too. In other words, a good presenter, rather than a good security expert necessarily.
In FPS games most of the kills are made with sniper or alike weapons.
You've clearly not played the UT series much. I have, and going down to a sniper weapon is relatively rare, except on certain maps (such as Torlan, but even then you know exactly where the guy with the lightning gun is going to be stood 90% of the time)
Vista Ultimate OEM costs today about what I paid for XP Pro OEM 3 or 4 years ago.
I'd say that's pretty good going given inflation would suggest it should be 10-12% more expensive.
he couldn't get any wackier and do anything more outlandish than subpoena the President
Assuming his testimony would be relevant to the case, what's wrong with serving the president with a subpoena? Is he excused his legal and moral obligations because he's busy?
(Note that I have no idea of the details of the case you're referring to, but generally I don't find that a ridiculous idea - no-one should be above the law. Of course, if the president had nothing to do with the case and it was just some sort of publicity stunt then yeah, the guy's a loon)
Actually, I think I will blame you too, if it's all the same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer#The_United_States
It was olny when he punched someone on the nose that he became socially accepted
You misspelt "feared".
Great!
Now all I'll need is a US credit card.
If you "owned" a piece of software, you could resell it. Not just once, you could start your own CD printing factory and sell million of copies.
That's what ownership means.
No, that's what being the copyright holder means. Owning a box, manual and CD/DVD means that I can sell that on to anyone I choose and no-one can stop me.
Or would you equally argue that the shops that carry software don't own it? Somehow I don't think you would get very far using that as a defence if you tried walking out with it without paying.
It would really suck if multiple countries found that the contributions back were worth billions of dollars and taxed each contributer or copyright holder accordingly.
How would they tax the contributor? I don't get taxed because I work, I get taxed on my earnings. I could do exactly the same job for free and not be taxed a penny. Even if the contributions themselves were found to have taxable value, the contributor is not the one gaining that value, they are producing it.
The difference here is that there is a perception in business that Open Source projects are operated by dirty hippies that don't have it "together" enough to do anything about it (nor the money, even if they did have it "together").
I definitely think that's part of it. It's the old school playground taunt of "Oh yeah? You and who's army?"
If it's MS, IBM, Apple, Oracle, etc, then it's obviously their army of highly-paid lawyers.
If it's some hobbiest open source project, then what army indeed?
The only businesses that will be scared off from using Open Source because of this are dishonest businesses that shouldn't be allowed to use Open Source anyway
I'm not entirely sure that I agree there, to be honest. Some businesses may be scared away simply because they don't feel that they understand the legal ramifications fully enough to trust that they will even know what their obligations are. Not every firm has access to a legal department (mine, for instance).
The difference appears to be that while FF2 periodically downloads a list from google, FF3 uploads every URL you visit.
The feature itself may not be new, but the implementation certainly seems to be.
Well, I've never had FF crash any of my machines either, but then I've not seen the CPU hogging bug and I don't tend to have more than one window open at once.
Sometimes "works for me!" is a valid response, as long as you're not the one that's meant to be fixing it...
Even having a minority government didn't stop this horseshit from passing.
Why would it? Yes, prison time for making a shaky cam recording of a film in a cinema is dumb. But what rights are you losing? How likely is it that the government is going to be voted out because it passed the law? How likely is it that enough members of the government who are senior enough perform the act that's being legislated against that they can get it quashed before it's passed?
Yes, stupid laws and stupid punishments serve to make a mockery of the law, but what reason would any government have to not pass this one, other than that?
I think a GPL case that went to court would probably look like a run of the mill copyright complaint
except theres no real plaintiff so who cares?
The plaintiff is the copyright holder, just as in any other copyright violation case.
Contracts without signatures are really worthless
Actually I believe that verbal contracts (at least here in the UK) are just as binding as written ones, it's just a lot harder to prove that they exist.
That really depends on exactly what you mean by "surfing around", but you have to have JavaScript enabled to use google.com/ig.
Of course, once you've set it up in a more fully-featured browser, that minimal browser you're after might be enough to just read the page.
It should automatically save the session, and then give you an option of reopening it the next time you launch.
No thank you - that will make it two clicks for me to start FF rather than 1, as even when it has crashed I sometimes choose not to restore the previous session.
There's no conceptual reason why the browser couldn't detect that it's not active, has been running for a few days, and hasn't been active for a few minutes (or hours) and automatically restart itself periodically.
Funnily enough, I was talking about exactly this last week with one of our sysadmins at work, about a particular problematic server. We agreed that doing that sort of thing is the absolute last resort; it is an admission of defeat, that you don't know what the cause of the problem is or how to fix it, so you're just going to restart the damn thing every so often to stop it from happening when someone's actually trying to use it.
With something like this, it's even worse - odds are every so often the damn thing would restart just as you were about to use it.
Daily reboots are a Windows problem, not FF
You do realise that he's talking about restarting FF not rebooting Windows, don't you?
I've got a real clunker of a laptop, 256 MB RAM PIII, that runs FF with Flash and all that
Congratulations. I regularly see FF hit in excess of 200MB of RAM usage after a few days of normal usage. This instance has been running maybe 20 minutes (after locking up earlier) and is using 65MB already.