For folks who are only RUNNING software and not modifying the source code, most of those open source licenses are complete nonissues. They apply to programmers modifying the code, not to end users.
Remember that in the late 70's/early 80's, you could make $60K/year for doing data entry. Typing skills and knowledge of a key program like Lotus 123 made you a god. Now of course you could pick any random 12 year old off the street and have him perform that job to perfection.
Maybe on the left or right coasts. In the midwest that was a fairly decent wage for an experienced programmer even in the 90's, and data entry folks made more like 30k. In the 70's and 80's it was less.
In a small metro area... in 2002... with a specialized airline skillset? You tell me.:-)
It took me 32 months to find something other than contract work, I had to move 1200 miles to do it, and I actually had some C/UNIX skills to fall back on. I know others with more experience and arguably greater skills who took even longer to find something permanent.
Circumstances can greatly change the receptivity of a given local job market (especially a saturated market) to new hires regardless of their skills or experience, so that isn't always a good indicator.
I don't think those of use doing skilled IT labour have to worry about.
Unless the company or (in some cases) entire industry that you work for goes into the tanker. Then all bets are off.
When I worked as a senior programmer/analyst for a major airline and 9/11 hit, almost half of the IT department was axed during one day, and it was normally done by project or team -- whole branches of the org chart were removed seemingly w/o much regard for the individuals/tasks/skills present in the branch.
If it was pure development or something not seen as operationally critical, it was gone.
I know a number of 25+ year developers who were highly skilled and (in some cases) were *the* subject matter experts in their areas who lost their jobs during those layoffs.
It doesn't always happen that way, but I know from firsthand experience that it can.:-(
We've been using cloth bags for groceries for roughly three years now. Not only are they environmentally friendly, but I find them a LOT easier to carry. And you can put mroe stuff in them than in those little plastic bags (many grocery stores in Atlanta don't even offer paper as an option, only plastic).
Mostly true, I think especially in the IBM world. Freespace files are fast preallocated fixed records with no real organization, but you only see those on fast online transaction systems (TIP/HVTIP). I think payrool tends to be more batch-oriented.
I work for a living writing a mix of mainframe (Fortran), UNIX (C++, Perl), and Java code, and I prefer the Fortran side of life. There are times when I wonder just WTF the designers of UNIX and/or C-like languages were thinking. Most of the time they seem to have gotten things "right", but there are certain synctactical elements or general concepts that make me wonder at times where their heads were...
Hard to way. I've worked on systems which themselves weren't that complex, but which were so interconnected with other systems that replacement was very difficult.
This is a payroll system, though, and 10's of thousands of LOC isn't really that large as applications go. I've written utilities larger than that.:-)
COBOL isn't that hard (heck, it was one of the core languages back when I got my CompSci degree, and assembler was considered the "weed out" language), but there are some things which are rather idiosyncratic. Especially nested block IF behavior in COBOL 74.:-)
I might also note that reading offline makes such things as regex scoring on the message BODY (and not just headers) quite possible. There isn't much performance penalty for doing that when everything resides in a database on your local machine...
Yes, running a local news server would accomplish something similar. In my case, though, both mailing lists and nntp newsgroups are harvested and imported into the same database (e-mails can be filtered into "pseudo-newsgroups with threading), and each can be scored against to remove trolls. This isn't rocket science -- Yarn has been around for a long, long time...
(1) Use nntp via cron at night to harvest messages from the newsgroups you want to participate in as a batch from USENET. I use an OS2 tool called VSoup for this, though others like Souper exist. slrnpull uses a similar type of approach for offline reading via slrn, BTW.
(2) Convert the results from #1 into a SOUP packet for later use by a SOUP packet reader. This is analogous to an old BBS-Style QWK door creating a QWK packet for you.
(3) When you want to read USENET, start the SOUP packet reader (in my case Yarn, though there are several other readers which read that format including MultiMail for Linux). No nntp required.
(4) At some point, when you want to send replies back, you send them back in a batch using nntp.
I suspect you'd be quite surprised how efficient it is to grab the few thousand messages in the background and then read through the threads with no need for any network connection. There are no pauses at all. It's so much faster than the Google Groups interface that it isn't even a contest...
To those who marked this "troll" -- you obviously don't remember the days of QWK packets. That's how a SOUP reader works -- you download things as part of a batch, and then read it interactively without any need for a network connection.
Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the
on
R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Google Groups doesn't support score files, is slow as heck, depends on a net connection for interactive use, etc.
My SOUP packet reader (Yarn) has none of those limitations.
I've been writing software for a living for 20 years now, I like collecting older software, and I've been a fan of both shareware and FOSS for many years, so that makes for lots of incentive to to cobble together interesting and inexpensive solutions. I'd rather be creative and use multiple platforms (OS/2 and Linux mostly) than break the law if it can be avoided.
My old copy of Photoshop 3.04 cost me $25 on eBay. What do I want a new one for?;-) Besides, I always have IrfanView, Embellish/Colorworks, GIMP, NeoPaint, and a bazillion free Windows tools available if I can't use that one, and I also have older copies of Visio 4, ABC SnapGraphics, A&L Draw, etc. for vector drawing. And GeoDraw!:-)
IANAL, but it's my layman's understanding that copyright violations only apply to verbatim copying. Sorry.
The name "Scrabulous" may actually be actionable from a trademark standpoint, but changing the name will fix that problem.
What else specifically is in violation?
I'm very curious if the Scrabulous folks choose to fight this in court. I think they have a very good chance of winning. Maybe this case is something to ask sites like Groklaw about?
Which property? What law was broken? What copyright was violated? Which patents? Any?
Scrabulous didn't use the Scrabble logo and didn't use the same board. It was similar, but that in itself is not infringement of anything in the US. Hasbro is hassling a perfectly legal implementation of a game which is roughly similar to Scrabble, but there are no laws (at least in the US) against creating a game with rules similar to another game.
Slashdot Mirror
Sales tax in the US is generally far less than 10%. In Minnesota it was generally 6%, and here in Georgia (Cobb County) it's also 6%.
I need to armor-up my ego first before I dare wade into areas where real opponents dwell. :-)
I don't play it seriously. If I did, though, I'd be Prootwadl. :-)
Nah, my RTS gaming is also pretty much limited to Spring right now, and I *MUCH* prefer classic TA's general approach to SC, WC, C&C, etc.
Since you obviously have impeccable taste in RTS games, I'm willing to forgive you. :-)
Guess I should provide links. :-) Spring is here (TA fans check it out!), and Nexuiz would be here.
Are those too old school, or what? :-(
I've been playing those on VestaPup (a nice Puppy Linux variant), and it's been wonderful! :-)
For folks who are only RUNNING software and not modifying the source code, most of those open source licenses are complete nonissues. They apply to programmers modifying the code, not to end users.
Maybe on the left or right coasts. In the midwest that was a fairly decent wage for an experienced programmer even in the 90's, and data entry folks made more like 30k. In the 70's and 80's it was less.
Of course, those managers could also be managing teams in a remote location. :-)
In a small metro area ... in 2002 ... with a specialized airline skillset? You tell me. :-)
It took me 32 months to find something other than contract work, I had to move 1200 miles to do it, and I actually had some C/UNIX skills to fall back on. I know others with more experience and arguably greater skills who took even longer to find something permanent.
Circumstances can greatly change the receptivity of a given local job market (especially a saturated market) to new hires regardless of their skills or experience, so that isn't always a good indicator.
Unless the company or (in some cases) entire industry that you work for goes into the tanker. Then all bets are off.
When I worked as a senior programmer/analyst for a major airline and 9/11 hit, almost half of the IT department was axed during one day, and it was normally done by project or team -- whole branches of the org chart were removed seemingly w/o much regard for the individuals/tasks/skills present in the branch.
If it was pure development or something not seen as operationally critical, it was gone.
I know a number of 25+ year developers who were highly skilled and (in some cases) were *the* subject matter experts in their areas who lost their jobs during those layoffs.
It doesn't always happen that way, but I know from firsthand experience that it can. :-(
We've been using cloth bags for groceries for roughly three years now. Not only are they environmentally friendly, but I find them a LOT easier to carry. And you can put mroe stuff in them than in those little plastic bags (many grocery stores in Atlanta don't even offer paper as an option, only plastic).
Mostly true, I think especially in the IBM world. Freespace files are fast preallocated fixed records with no real organization, but you only see those on fast online transaction systems (TIP/HVTIP). I think payrool tends to be more batch-oriented.
I work for a living writing a mix of mainframe (Fortran), UNIX (C++, Perl), and Java code, and I prefer the Fortran side of life. There are times when I wonder just WTF the designers of UNIX and/or C-like languages were thinking. Most of the time they seem to have gotten things "right", but there are certain synctactical elements or general concepts that make me wonder at times where their heads were...
Hard to way. I've worked on systems which themselves weren't that complex, but which were so interconnected with other systems that replacement was very difficult.
This is a payroll system, though, and 10's of thousands of LOC isn't really that large as applications go. I've written utilities larger than that. :-)
COBOL isn't that hard (heck, it was one of the core languages back when I got my CompSci degree, and assembler was considered the "weed out" language), but there are some things which are rather idiosyncratic. Especially nested block IF behavior in COBOL 74. :-)
ISAM? Maybe in the IBM world. All of the COBOL I've dealt with used either RDMS (OS2200), DMS (OS2200), DMSII (MCP), or Freespace (OS2200) files. :-)
Yes, running a local news server would accomplish something similar. In my case, though, both mailing lists and nntp newsgroups are harvested and imported into the same database (e-mails can be filtered into "pseudo-newsgroups with threading), and each can be scored against to remove trolls. This isn't rocket science -- Yarn has been around for a long, long time...
The normal process is as follows:
(1) Use nntp via cron at night to harvest messages from the newsgroups you want to participate in as a batch from USENET. I use an OS2 tool called VSoup for this, though others like Souper exist. slrnpull uses a similar type of approach for offline reading via slrn, BTW.
(2) Convert the results from #1 into a SOUP packet for later use by a SOUP packet reader. This is analogous to an old BBS-Style QWK door creating a QWK packet for you.
(3) When you want to read USENET, start the SOUP packet reader (in my case Yarn, though there are several other readers which read that format including MultiMail for Linux). No nntp required.
(4) At some point, when you want to send replies back, you send them back in a batch using nntp.
I suspect you'd be quite surprised how efficient it is to grab the few thousand messages in the background and then read through the threads with no need for any network connection. There are no pauses at all. It's so much faster than the Google Groups interface that it isn't even a contest...
To those who marked this "troll" -- you obviously don't remember the days of QWK packets. That's how a SOUP reader works -- you download things as part of a batch, and then read it interactively without any need for a network connection.
Google Groups doesn't support score files, is slow as heck, depends on a net connection for interactive use, etc.
My SOUP packet reader (Yarn) has none of those limitations.
I've been writing software for a living for 20 years now, I like collecting older software, and I've been a fan of both shareware and FOSS for many years, so that makes for lots of incentive to to cobble together interesting and inexpensive solutions. I'd rather be creative and use multiple platforms (OS/2 and Linux mostly) than break the law if it can be avoided.
My old copy of Photoshop 3.04 cost me $25 on eBay. What do I want a new one for? ;-) Besides, I always have IrfanView, Embellish/Colorworks, GIMP, NeoPaint, and a bazillion free Windows tools available if I can't use that one, and I also have older copies of Visio 4, ABC SnapGraphics, A&L Draw, etc. for vector drawing. And GeoDraw! :-)
IANAL, but it's my layman's understanding that copyright violations only apply to verbatim copying. Sorry.
The name "Scrabulous" may actually be actionable from a trademark standpoint, but changing the name will fix that problem.
What else specifically is in violation?
I'm very curious if the Scrabulous folks choose to fight this in court. I think they have a very good chance of winning. Maybe this case is something to ask sites like Groklaw about?
Which property? What law was broken? What copyright was violated? Which patents? Any?
Scrabulous didn't use the Scrabble logo and didn't use the same board. It was similar, but that in itself is not infringement of anything in the US. Hasbro is hassling a perfectly legal implementation of a game which is roughly similar to Scrabble, but there are no laws (at least in the US) against creating a game with rules similar to another game.