besides possible GPL violation what i find disturbing is that apparently no credit was given to the mplayer developers.
one of the main motivations of working on something for free is being appreciated and acknowledged for the work you do.
How odd to read someone writing negatively about violation of the GPL when the one thing that the FSF said made the original BSD license non-free was the advertising clause! If you want credit that badly, use a license that insists upon it. The GPL doesn't ask for it, and asks for a lot of other stuff, so it apparently doesn't matter to folks who release their code under the GPL.
But the whole idea behind a presentation is to TALK! Use words to describe the topic. And if you need a graph that is to detail to show up clearly on the projector, then print it out and hand it out.
Thank you. That is dead right.
Nope, that's dead wrong. Tufte is an academic researcher and author. As such he comes from a school of thought that values formal papers and verbatim recitations of them, with active Q&A. In other words, pre-planned well-written presentations - the antithesis of PowerPoint. If you believe in that perspective, then bullet-point agenda-style visuals with off-the-cuff or even pre-planned spoken commentary are "bad".
No one ever said that hand drawn transparencies made you dumb. In fact, such stuff once was the mark of profesionalism in presentations and this is why we have software to do the same thing.
Yes they did - that's exactly Tufte's point. It's not the software, it's the style. Yes, MS-PowerPoint wizards et al. make it easier to create bad presentations, but this style of communication is as old as the hills. Tufte himself says that the PowerPoint style is derived from IBM "foils" and military briefings.
A yacc grammar? That makes it official, ifconfig is now a contender for the ls Memorial Too Damn Many Options award. Other known entrants include ld, most X applications, and the ever-popular gcc.
It's very instructive to go look at the "ACM Classic of the Month" collection. It's exactly eight entries long, was only live for short period, and the papers are rife with typos, etc. You can't argue with the choices, though:
Codd: "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks"
Dijkstra: "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"
Dijkstra: "Appendix of The Structure of the "THE"-Multiprogramming System"
Hoare: "Monitors: An Operating System Structuring Concept"
Metcalfe & Boggs: "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks"
Parnas: "On the Criteria to be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules"
Thompson: "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
Wirth: "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement"
Of course, the ACM Digital Library contains the "[f]ull text of every article ever published by ACM", but only for paying subscribers ($198/year). An organization that considers itself to be "a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students worldwide" should be trying to get information into circulation, not trying to squeeze publications fees out of the practioners of the field.
What he's saying is that OSS products will never be orphaned as long as they have users. A proprietary product is viable only as long as the product's marketing team decides it is.
Hogwash. SourceForge is littered with orphaned projects, including plenty that have users, or at least did at the time that the primary developer lost interest. And that's just the Open Source stuff that has arisen since SourceForge went online. Turn to Deja/Google and troll through the many things that were announced on comp.sources.unix and supported for a while, then went quitely idle.
Just because you have the source doesn't mean you're any better off when the development team (if there actually was more than one of them!) moves on. Many (most?) of the Open Source users are not capable of continuing development of a "product" that gets abandoned on them.
The only time an ambulance driver goes full-speed through an intersection with the siren screaming and cars breaking left and right is in the movies. In real life, they slow down and approach the intersection with all the care appropriate to one who's about to violate the traffic pattern. Because, after all, it doesn't help the dying guy in the back if the ambulance gets in an accident on the way to the ER.
If I want partially-inaccurate information, off-topic rants, and "it worked for me this one time in band camp" anecdotes, I'll search Google or read netnews. Software documentation has to be just as good as the software itself - something we often don't get in Open Source becuase of the "code first and foremost" perspective.
It should be hard to mess up documentation, just as hard as it is to mess up code.
No, no, no, the ITAA was the source of the famous "7 million unfilled IT jobs" myth. They didn't want to send the jobs to Bangalore, they wanted to expand the H1B visa pool so those poor starving children in India could come here and eat instead of having to wait for my mother to send them our leftovers!
There's proof and then there's proof. What Ozzie did was post his own research on a weblog. He didn't file a patent-invalidation suit, and he didn't testify as a witness in one. So for all intents and purposes, nothing happened. You and I know different, but if it didn't happen in court with standing it doesn't matter.
Patent law is a weird beast. I've had patent attorneys (IANAL but I occasionally need one) tell me that I shouldn't attempt to keep abreast of current patents. Attempting to do so but nonetheless infringing on somebody's patent (willfully or accidentally) can be brought against you in an infringement suit as negligence. And negligence, if proved, causes extra damages if the case goes against you.
Web developers face the possibility of having to significantly rewrite their pages or strip them of commonly used technologies like Macromedia's Flash.
And that's bad... why? Woo hoo! No more "skip intro" buttons to click!
As much as I actually like the idea, it's too-heavily based on the unfortunate concept of a repository. I don't mind *having* a repository, but look at what it's going to contain! You can't even successfully compare two "info:" URIs without checking the repository to determine if they're case-sensitive. Important information that would be useful offline shouldn't live in the repository.
URLs specify methods for accessing resources, not identifiers for them. The "info:" draft explicitly states that the things it's intended to name might not be "resources" - that they might not be accessable online and that you shouldn't even try. The idea is a way to *talk about* objects, not to *retrieve* them.
Jesus and Satan have a discussion as to who is the better computer programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest, with God as the judge.
They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show what he has come up with.
Satan is visibly upset and cries, "I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out."
"Very well, then," says God, "let us see if Jesus fared any better."
Jesus enters a command and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.
Satan is astonished. He stutters, "B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus' program is intact! How did he do it?"
Don Hopkins wonderful Pie Menus idea got it's start as an add-on for Sun's aborted NeWS window manager. One of the NeW things about NeWS was that you wrote UI parts in Postscript!
P.S. That's not Don in the movie, although he is the one doing the voice-over during the demo.
Just type a US phone number into Google and up comes the name and street address, just like in that local copy of the White Pages. So they might as well be global.
Once fnord you begin to fnord actively fnord notice visual fnord clues they fnord show up everywhere fnord. It's fnord sort of like fnord what happens when fnord you buy fnord a new car. All of fnord a sudden you fnord notice that fnord lots of people are fnord driving the same fnord car, more than fnord you ever noticed fnord before.
Yes, online gambling is legal in the UK. But the tax structure there is truly intense, leading to some oddities. Some of the largest online sports-books have there servers and banking operations in the Caribbean (Antigua, in particular). This allows them to settle the bets offshore and just repatriate (and pay tax on) the net profits, rather than on the gross revenue.
I've got several SprintPCS phones on a family plan (yes, even geeks sometimes procreate), and the two most-recently manufactured (a Nokia 3585i and a Samsung A460) both have options to disable the GPS locator for everything except 911 usage. That's good enough for me - if I call 911, I want the cops to find me!
Of course, the more paranoid among you might claim that disabling the "location-based services" on these phones doesn't actually do anything. So just wrap your cell phone in 1/8" lead sheeting and you'll be fine.
Johnny Fever may have been hip to the Phone Cops, but "The President's Analyst" was hip to the whole cell-phone gig, way back in 1967. Don't forget that TPC ("The Phone Company") wanted to implant telephone chips in our brains! And you've got to love the army of Pat Harringtons near the end of the movie, all with cables jacked into their shoes!
This is exactly the reason why the single largest fount of open source code was the University of Califoria at Berkeley. UCB and the UC Regents created a license that was intended to allow programmers and the businesses (both for- and not-for-profit) they work for to do whatever they wanted with the code. Stallman had a different idea - that all software should belong to everyone, and that's what the GPL and the LGPL are intended to express. Those two different approaches produced two different licenses. And that's why everyone goes into ctl-alt-meta-cokebottle SetMode AmateurLawyer when discussing the GPL, and nobody except the FSF has a cow when discussing the BSD license.
If you're a socio-political philosopher-coder, by all means put everything you write under GPL (and listen to what Stallman says about his LGPL being a bad idea after all). If you don't care about the social/economic/etc. aspects, use the BSD license and just be happy.
Regina is a Rexx implementation for a variety of platforms, Linux included. It is very good: faithful to Cowlishaw's language definition yet supporting of all the major extensions, ARexx included. Alas, *nix systems lack the AmigaOS hooks for universal scripting, but Regina does a nice job and can be used in place of all those ugly shell scripts:-)
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besides possible GPL violation what i find disturbing is that apparently no credit was given to the mplayer developers. one of the main motivations of working on something for free is being appreciated and acknowledged for the work you do.
How odd to read someone writing negatively about violation of the GPL when the one thing that the FSF said made the original BSD license non-free was the advertising clause! If you want credit that badly, use a license that insists upon it. The GPL doesn't ask for it, and asks for a lot of other stuff, so it apparently doesn't matter to folks who release their code under the GPL.
But the whole idea behind a presentation is to TALK! Use words to describe the topic. And if you need a graph that is to detail to show up clearly on the projector, then print it out and hand it out.
Thank you. That is dead right.
Nope, that's dead wrong. Tufte is an academic researcher and author. As such he comes from a school of thought that values formal papers and verbatim recitations of them, with active Q&A. In other words, pre-planned well-written presentations - the antithesis of PowerPoint. If you believe in that perspective, then bullet-point agenda-style visuals with off-the-cuff or even pre-planned spoken commentary are "bad".
No one ever said that hand drawn transparencies made you dumb. In fact, such stuff once was the mark of profesionalism in presentations and this is why we have software to do the same thing.
Yes they did - that's exactly Tufte's point. It's not the software, it's the style. Yes, MS-PowerPoint wizards et al. make it easier to create bad presentations, but this style of communication is as old as the hills. Tufte himself says that the PowerPoint style is derived from IBM "foils" and military briefings.
A yacc grammar? That makes it official, ifconfig is now a contender for the ls Memorial Too Damn Many Options award. Other known entrants include ld, most X applications, and the ever-popular gcc.
- Codd: "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks"
- Dijkstra: "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"
- Dijkstra: "Appendix of The Structure of the "THE"-Multiprogramming System"
- Hoare: "Monitors: An Operating System Structuring Concept"
- Metcalfe & Boggs: "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks"
- Parnas: "On the Criteria to be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules"
- Thompson: "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
- Wirth: "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement"
Of course, the ACM Digital Library contains the "[f]ull text of every article ever published by ACM", but only for paying subscribers ($198/year). An organization that considers itself to be "a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students worldwide" should be trying to get information into circulation, not trying to squeeze publications fees out of the practioners of the field.What he's saying is that OSS products will never be orphaned as long as they have users. A proprietary product is viable only as long as the product's marketing team decides it is.
Hogwash. SourceForge is littered with orphaned projects, including plenty that have users, or at least did at the time that the primary developer lost interest. And that's just the Open Source stuff that has arisen since SourceForge went online. Turn to Deja/Google and troll through the many things that were announced on comp.sources.unix and supported for a while, then went quitely idle.
Just because you have the source doesn't mean you're any better off when the development team (if there actually was more than one of them!) moves on. Many (most?) of the Open Source users are not capable of continuing development of a "product" that gets abandoned on them.
The only time an ambulance driver goes full-speed through an intersection with the siren screaming and cars breaking left and right is in the movies. In real life, they slow down and approach the intersection with all the care appropriate to one who's about to violate the traffic pattern. Because, after all, it doesn't help the dying guy in the back if the ambulance gets in an accident on the way to the ER.
If I want partially-inaccurate information, off-topic rants, and "it worked for me this one time in band camp" anecdotes, I'll search Google or read netnews. Software documentation has to be just as good as the software itself - something we often don't get in Open Source becuase of the "code first and foremost" perspective.
It should be hard to mess up documentation, just as hard as it is to mess up code.
No, no, no, the ITAA was the source of the famous "7 million unfilled IT jobs" myth. They didn't want to send the jobs to Bangalore, they wanted to expand the H1B visa pool so those poor starving children in India could come here and eat instead of having to wait for my mother to send them our leftovers!
There's proof and then there's proof. What Ozzie did was post his own research on a weblog. He didn't file a patent-invalidation suit, and he didn't testify as a witness in one. So for all intents and purposes, nothing happened. You and I know different, but if it didn't happen in court with standing it doesn't matter.
Patent law is a weird beast. I've had patent attorneys (IANAL but I occasionally need one) tell me that I shouldn't attempt to keep abreast of current patents. Attempting to do so but nonetheless infringing on somebody's patent (willfully or accidentally) can be brought against you in an infringement suit as negligence. And negligence, if proved, causes extra damages if the case goes against you.
Web developers face the possibility of having to significantly rewrite their pages or strip them of commonly used technologies like Macromedia's Flash.
... why? Woo hoo! No more "skip intro" buttons to click!
And that's bad
As much as I actually like the idea, it's too-heavily based on the unfortunate concept of a repository. I don't mind *having* a repository, but look at what it's going to contain! You can't even successfully compare two "info:" URIs without checking the repository to determine if they're case-sensitive. Important information that would be useful offline shouldn't live in the repository.
URLs specify methods for accessing resources, not identifiers for them. The "info:" draft explicitly states that the things it's intended to name might not be "resources" - that they might not be accessable online and that you shouldn't even try. The idea is a way to *talk about* objects, not to *retrieve* them.
Read the fine internet-draft. One of the authors is from OCLC. Wanna guess that he knows how the Dewey numbers can and can't be used?
This is a common error. Model Ts were available in lots of colors.
Don Hopkins wonderful Pie Menus idea got it's start as an add-on for Sun's aborted NeWS window manager. One of the NeW things about NeWS was that you wrote UI parts in Postscript! P.S. That's not Don in the movie, although he is the one doing the voice-over during the demo.
Just type a US phone number into Google and up comes the name and street address, just like in that local copy of the White Pages. So they might as well be global.
Once fnord you begin to fnord actively fnord notice visual fnord clues they fnord show up everywhere fnord. It's fnord sort of like fnord what happens when fnord you buy fnord a new car. All of fnord a sudden you fnord notice that fnord lots of people are fnord driving the same fnord car, more than fnord you ever noticed fnord before.
Yes, online gambling is legal in the UK. But the tax structure there is truly intense, leading to some oddities. Some of the largest online sports-books have there servers and banking operations in the Caribbean (Antigua, in particular). This allows them to settle the bets offshore and just repatriate (and pay tax on) the net profits, rather than on the gross revenue.
I've got several SprintPCS phones on a family plan (yes, even geeks sometimes procreate), and the two most-recently manufactured (a Nokia 3585i and a Samsung A460) both have options to disable the GPS locator for everything except 911 usage. That's good enough for me - if I call 911, I want the cops to find me!
Of course, the more paranoid among you might claim that disabling the "location-based services" on these phones doesn't actually do anything. So just wrap your cell phone in 1/8" lead sheeting and you'll be fine.
Johnny Fever may have been hip to the Phone Cops, but "The President's Analyst" was hip to the whole cell-phone gig, way back in 1967. Don't forget that TPC ("The Phone Company") wanted to implant telephone chips in our brains! And you've got to love the army of Pat Harringtons near the end of the movie, all with cables jacked into their shoes!
This is exactly the reason why the single largest fount of open source code was the University of Califoria at Berkeley. UCB and the UC Regents created a license that was intended to allow programmers and the businesses (both for- and not-for-profit) they work for to do whatever they wanted with the code. Stallman had a different idea - that all software should belong to everyone, and that's what the GPL and the LGPL are intended to express. Those two different approaches produced two different licenses. And that's why everyone goes into ctl-alt-meta-cokebottle SetMode AmateurLawyer when discussing the GPL, and nobody except the FSF has a cow when discussing the BSD license.
If you're a socio-political philosopher-coder, by all means put everything you write under GPL (and listen to what Stallman says about his LGPL being a bad idea after all). If you don't care about the social/economic/etc. aspects, use the BSD license and just be happy.
Regina is a Rexx implementation for a variety of platforms, Linux included. It is very good: faithful to Cowlishaw's language definition yet supporting of all the major extensions, ARexx included. Alas, *nix systems lack the AmigaOS hooks for universal scripting, but Regina does a nice job and can be used in place of all those ugly shell scripts :-)