If you talk to the police without consul, (...) If so please provide consul. If not have a nice day!
It may be because of your insistance to have a Consul present rather than Counsel. Then again, if you don't know the difference not talking without one is most wise.
I could put Windows XP on one of those (with enough RAM) and do most office / browsing tasks about as fast as I could with today's top of the line CPU.
It's wetware-limited, doesn't matter how much hardware or software you throw at it. We can spend two minutes reading a page then expect the computer to render a new one in 0.2 seconds, in practice it will never go faster. I don't know why it's become such a myth that we'll always find new uses for computing power. A few specialized tasks now and then perhaps, but in general? No, people will chat and email and listen to music and do utterly non-intensive thing that go from taking 10% to 1% to 0.1% to 0.01% of your CPU.
Contrast the period 2000-2010 with the period 1990-2000. In 1990 you would be looking at a 25mhz 486DX.
Yes, computers are starting to return to the normal world from Moore's bizarro-universe where unbounded exponential growth is possible. After decades of conditioning you become oblivious to how crazy it is to expect something double as fast for half the price every 18 months (or whichever bastardization you choose to use). Rventually a ten year old computer will be like a ten year old car, sure they've polished the design a little but it's basically the same. And that is normal, it's we that live in abnormal times where computers have improved by several orders of magnitude.
Consoles come out with 1080p/DX11-class graphics. Graphics cards for the PC try to offer 2560x1600+ and whatnot but the returns are extremely diminishing and many current PC games will come to a console with keyboard and mouse. GPGPU remains a small niche for supercomputers and won't carry the cost without mass market gaming cards. The volume is increasingly laptops with CPU+GPU in one package and there'll be Intel CPUs with Intel GPUs using an Intel chipset on Intel motherboards - and they'll be a serious player in the SSD market too. AMD will do the same but suffer from being behind on manufacturing process and continue to struggle but survive like Macs do in a Windows market. nVidia will lose their way if they haven't already lost it, everything they've said so far about Fermi makes me think they're heading down a dead-end street. No i7/i5 motherboards with nVidia chips, new Atoms which kill ION, nVidia is being forced to go discrete in a market that is increasingly more integrated. The good new for them is that Intel will continue to flop on 3D performance including Larrabee so there'll be a market for discrete cards a little longer.
That there should be no BUGS may be a formally realizable goal (at least that's what my functional programmer friends tell me)
It can be formally proven that a computer application is equal to an equally complex and incomprehensible formal description. Though whether you're any closer to achieving what you wanted to do in the real world is highly questionable.
Anyway, there's fundamentally three different types of error messages. One is those where there's an external error condition where you need to inform or guide the user towards fixing it themselves, like say no network connection. Not much choice here, it's beyond your ability to fix.
The second type are those where you intentionally trap errors, even though you don't know exactly what they are like say a database call or RPC call or HTTP request, here people tend to give way too much information. 99.9% of the time what you need to do is collect as much as possible in the background, pop up a dialog box asking them what they were doing and a "send report" or "don't send report" buttons. Users aren't interested in SQL errors or stack traces or whatever else you like to pop up while developing/testing it.
The third are the kind where you didn't expect it, no error catching except maybe very generic ones and most likely is caused by a bug. Long story short, if you knew about the bug you would have fixed it instead of writing a good error message for it so do that.
Fair use is determined by the four factor test and that list is not exhaustive, for example "timeshifting" which was vital to the Betamax case is not listed nor covered by any of the others. So the only one bastardizing the statutes here is you, by asserting that it can't be fair use since it's not on the list.
As an owner of a small business I can't imagine leaving our WiFi open.
I've not yet met a single company that keeps their internal network open, but I've met many companies that have an open guest wifi - completely firewalled off, but for visitors and contractors and whatnot that need it. The internal network usually comes with a ton of restrictions and mandatory proxies and whatnot that makes it near impossible to let guests on it without providing them with corporate laptops, which is overkill for say an online demonstration. For example it means I can pull up my company's VPN solution from a client site, something I can't do using their computers, 1) because they don't have the software and 2) because our policy wouldn't allow it.
Even those coffee shops and such that offer wireless against purchase aren't really interested in who you are, just getting some sales. If you pay cash and get a receipt code, that's normally good enough for them. More remote places where it's not practical to "hang out" nearby and leech just won't bother at all, because they get your business anyway. Lots of places just see the convienience as a plus, not a problem. It only becomes a problem if the police come knocking and say "Hey, I think there's been some nasty things going on from this access point". In which case you need a properly recorded ID to get anywhere, a MAC or knowing he bought a cheesemeal won't help you.
The thing is that if it's got value then they'd be competing against eBay, craigslist, flea markets and whatever else second hand markets there are. There's no particular value to buying it from the manufacturer's second hand shop. The whole business model and process is completely different, there's no reason to think they'd be any good at it.
All I see in the story is innuendo; no hint of any actual evidence.
Yeah, I suspect mostly what you're looking at is capacity limitations. Remember when AMD was kicking Intel's ass in CPUs yet never came close to taking over the market? No capacity. So you build a big electronics plant, it's a success but it's only scaled to produce X units/year. To build more you'd have to start building more, which would take so long the market is gone before it is done. Instead you just rise prices, turn a nice profit but the rest of the market still earns good money on old technology. I guess from the outside it can look very much like collusion.
I really think someone should add up all the hours required to experience every movie/game released in a year and compare it to the the average persons free time, a lot of stuff is over-produced and it would be good if someone was out there modelling how many products you could possibly want to experience over a yearly period.
But that makes good recommendations more important, not less. If you go into a library it's highly unlikely you'll be able to read every book in it, but does that matter? You just want to read the good books about things that interest you. If Spotify was on full shuffle and you could get everything from death metal to yodeling in the next song, you wouldn't want it - you'd go back to your own favorites. On the other hand, if everything is interpolated you only get more and more of the same. People don't work like that, you may have your favorite food but it's not something you want to perfect and have every day.
A good search helper should be something in between - keeping to things you're reasonably likely to like but on the other hand challenge you a little to explore and listen to things a little outside your normal repertoire. Yes of course I realize the marketing potential here in sending the masses to their new hit wonder but I don't think the concept is that unreasonable. Think about how your friends are influencing your music taste, they're not interpolating they're gently pulling in the direction they like. If they hit the right mix this would be a real asset because you go to that site because of the good recommendations and that's not such an easy thing to copy.
Even if you know that some OSS tool would do the trick better, easier and of course cheaper. Nobody wants change in their office world. They are already used to the previous version of whatever you get to buy. So whatever change you plan to employ will be met with utmost resistance, on all levels, from your CEO to the post office grunt.
That's not against open source, that's a barrier to competition at all. But what I think is that too many in large corporations have been involved - or rather victim of - huge switchover projects that just don't go well. It turns out that this other huge software company that looked so shiny on the outside got equally much dirt on the inside but nobody wants to really back out of a huge migration project and admit this was a waste of time and money. The migration is pushed through, focus is held on the shiny spots that actually got better but the average employee just think everything stayed the same or got worse. That brings out the "Oh God, not this again" in people.
Not that long ago I got roughly the same comment about workplace, was from a guy that was moving again for the 7th time in five years. You really have to ask, is this corporate version of musical chairs productive? Or is it just because some bean counter drew up a new office plan or some PHB redrew the organization chart that is supposed to be 1% more effective but will never live long enough to justify the cost? Even if it's a tiny thing to pick up your laptop and personal effects you end up relearning a lot of trivial things like what meeting rooms are on this level and what they're called, the new coffee machine, finding out where everybody ended up, setting up the printer and so on. If you want change you'd better make sure there's a point and that the people see it. Demonstrate the workflow and there's a much better hope people will accept it.
Then what needs to be done is make the libraries have this security implemented *by design*.
Libraries do, but they're powerless against string concatenation unless it's impossible to run raw SQL. I think the only thing you could do is deny non-paramter values at all, but it'd make everything a lot more annoying and probably have a performance impact. Like you couldn't say "WHERE is_active = 1" but had to use "WHERE is_active = ?" and bind the value.
This reminds me a little of the Bill of Rights discussion on whether or not they should enumerate rights because it'd lead to only considering those rights and ignore unenumerated but possibly equally valid rights. Granted, the list may be less legally precise than the four factor test but I think it sets a much clearer idea of what the scope should be. After all, despite the four factor test saying you should consider "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and" you can interpret that very strictly or very loosely. The list does say "as much as you'd normally find in commentary, criticism, research etc." was intended to be ok. I think it's meaningful.
That would highly depend on the WebKit project. Basically, I think it's much easier to say to Steam that "Sorry, but we don't want broken or non-standard rendering in Safari, Chrome, Konqueror, iTunes, Midori, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone and WebOS, and soon on the Blackberry, you fix your application" than it was for the IE team to do it. Not to mention that for a large part Microsoft didn't want to create a standards-compliant, compatible web competing with the Windows platform and IE. And when it comes to being an application toolkit like Steam the only thing a broken rendering would do is break your own product, it's very different from the web browser market.
Of course it didn't. It's not a desktop OS (...) I made damn sure to check the HCL
Sorry, but this has nothing with being a desktop OS and everything about that in 2010 people expect to drop in an OS and have it work on any reasonable hardware. Maybe not the supported, recommended configuration but they still expect it to work. Windows and Linux runs on almost any server, Solaris/AIX/OS X Server etc. only come on their supported hardware and everything else is fail. You see exactly the same on desktops except there Windwos runs on almost any desktop, OS X only comes on its supported hardware and Linux is fail. It's just as unfair when people expect to plug in any USB printer or gadget in Linux and have it work, but the world isn't fair.
As someone that's collected 100,000s of pictures and verified them against CSVs, I can just say that this "bit flip" paranoia is in fact mostly paranoia. 99% of the time it's a complete media or process failure like say a broken network connection or computer freezeup or whatever. And even on the few occasions it does happen it's often not very visible, and normally a single picture is not the big deal. It's losing the whole collection with all photos of some family member or event that is a disaster. If it was really such a big problem as some make it out to be, applications would randomly stop working all the time, as they're very sensitive to the smallest change. That just doesn't happen.
It's like if your local authority decided to revoke your driver's license while you're driving the car, and then fines you for driving without a license.
You just took the silliest example you can think of to set up an easy straw man right? Lots and lots of products are revoked because they no longer comply with health, safety or environmental standards, emission standards or are no longer legal to sell without the product changing at all. There's no right that you'll be able to sell your product for all time, the only difference is that here a private company is the one cutting you off. If you throw yourself at one company's mercy to sell your product, don't be surprised if they have a sword for you to fall on.
The alleged dilemma would only arise if there was a decision that makes a failure more likely now and less likely later. In practice I expect they do their damndest to avoid it both now and later, but somewhere there'll be a flaw sooner or later. As for what is best, a baseline that works is clearly better. Yes shit can happen because of a bad tweak or poor QA or external damage but having a design you know it basically working is a helluva lot easier than one that is not.
The problem is that some people expect to be able to live off of their open source projects, or at least feel they are entitled to earn a buck. Feel free to ask for donations, add a couple of ads to your website or even offering an "enterprise version", but having a successful project doesn't mean that people should pay you for it. Those people you are demanding cash from are the same people who made your project a success. Then again, it is their project. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot by alienating their community, nobody can stop them. There are always alternatives.
In order to be able to relicense the project, you must be the sole copyright holder. So basically you are saying the author should be grateful for doing all the work and being allowed to give away his application? Almost sounds like it. If you feel like it yon can come work as my personal slave too, I promise lots of work and no pay but I may give you a trinket from time to time. Open source is a great way to show that you are a capable developer and project manager, but as the project grows so will the work and if the rewards don't grow at all then sooner or later this will become a grind where you're getting nothing in return.
Around here there's not much respect for people that abandon the community but I understand people that say "I can't keep putting hours and hours down this big black hole who no one will ever pay me for. I'm moving to a paid model, if you really liked my work then pay for it." It's not that person shooting himself in the foot, it's the community. He's ending an endless time sink where the attitude is that it "doesn't mean that people should pay you for it". That you lose a successful project is from your own POV, not his. And I would dare say that in many cases there aren't any alternatives of equal quality.
MySQL merely used it to muddy the waters, confuse people over licensing and get people to pay for licenses when perhaps they didn't really need to. Certainly, the vast majority of software for internal use doesn't require licenses from MySQL.
Shocker, dual licensing company points people in direction of product with highest margins. In other stunning news, this applies to retail clerks and pretty much everyone else. I remember Trolltech's site also went very far into pointing you in direction of the commercial version, you'd have to know the GPL to know you could use it in a commercial setting with some caveats.
Over 5 years, Bob Jacobsen put in thousands of hours of work on this case. He was threatened with loss of his employment, and with all of the money and property that he had. The $100,000 he eventually received doesn't compensate him for this. But I'm sure that the feeling of achievement does.
If you count being tied up in court for five years, getting lots and lots of pro bono lawyer time and still not breaking even. I call this "How to snuff out a potential upstart for $100,000" even though he probably wasn't competition in the first place.
Bars that won't let you enter unless you're over 25, although the drinking age is 21. (...) In both these cases, the reverse would be unthinkable.
I can't speak for the US but here in Norway at least some night clubs actually have a maximum age, seems some old guys were there just to ogle 18 yos (drinking age here) and the clubs wanted to get rid of them so they did.
First of all, flamebait? What the hell? There wasn't an inflammatory word in my post! I'm starting to get the impression that I'm being censored for my opinions, not their presentation.
Agreed. Delusional perhaps, but flamebait is no substitute.
You want a specific example where playing by the rules gets us where we want to be? Nixon. Thanks to some fine reporting, Woodward and Bernstein took him down. Of course, they couldn't come in all guns blazing, hurling accusations,
I'm sorry, what laws did Watergate change again? I wasn't talking about due process, I was talking about a law changed by people ceasing to break it. You provided an utterly off-topic attempt at an example.
Why? Why does a subset of the people choosing not to obey a law make it broken? Can they not be, well, just plain wrong? (...) Don't you see? That's exactly what's happening! Piracy is currently a reality, and the laws are being adjusted to suit said reality.
There's mostly two reasons why people don't break the law, it's either because they think it is wrong or because they fear the punishment. The third kind who'll just uphold an unjust law because it is the law is a small minority.
Regarding the first, of course they can be wrong but I'm saying that is how many laws change. The change comes first in the population, then only later in law not the other way around. This is particularly true where the law is hampered by political interests, lobbying or other things that prevent the true will of the people to prevail. Already there was a poll in Sweden showing that 75% of people 15-25 did not think file sharing is wrong, so that won't stop people.
The other is risk, but risk = probability * impact. They're trying to increase the impact, but with enough probability the risk is still negligible. This is why the fastest way to make the law ineffective is to just ask everybody to ignore it. Together, a large enough group of the people will effectively change the law whether the politicians like it or not. Not as an argument of right or wrong, but as a practical reality this is fastest road to show that the law is broken and can not be mended.
Seriously, all this civil disobedience stuff. What's the point in having a law, when any person can break any law they feel like, any time they feel like, and shout "civil disobedience!"?
There's a substantial difference between "I think this is wrong and the law should change for everyone" and "I'd just like to get away with what I do". I don't want to live in a country where you get robbed and beaten up and stolen from, and neither do most of the people perpetrating these crimes. They'd just like to get away with their own crimes.
Google bought On2 for 106 million dollars, and the FSFs is now asking them to give away one of their core technologies. That sounds like fairly real money to me, don't you think?
Carefully explain that the best way to end this war, or at least people on our side, is to first take the moral high ground over these corporations
Hahahahaha, I bet you think you'll get your rights back right after they catch all the terrorists too. Never once in history has it worked that way, one excuse is simply replaced by another. Like the people that somehow conclude that they'll legalize drugs after people stop taking them, it just doesn't pass the giggle test. And not that I really want to drag the civil rights movement into this, but that colored people would get their rights by staying at the back of the bus and taking the moral high ground. Or that prohibition would ever have ended if people still weren't drinking alcohol everywhere. Can you show one example from history where your "best way" has worked? Please?
Copyright is best shown to be broken by total and complete disregard for its existence, eventually the law is updated to reflect reality or it becomes a sleeping paragraph of law. I can tell you that if this goes through and three-strike disconnects become mandatory in Europe, then there will be a political upheaval as the disconnect becomes too great and people rebel.
But who sets the proceeds? Can a non-profit like Project Gutenberg assume that the copyright holder is making no proceeds today, so not generating any proceeds themselves is also okay? If so, then essentially they could start indexing all works in copyright or not and only halt when so ordered. That'd go a long way to limit copyright...
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If you talk to the police without consul, (...) If so please provide consul. If not have a nice day!
It may be because of your insistance to have a Consul present rather than Counsel. Then again, if you don't know the difference not talking without one is most wise.
I could put Windows XP on one of those (with enough RAM) and do most office / browsing tasks about as fast as I could with today's top of the line CPU.
It's wetware-limited, doesn't matter how much hardware or software you throw at it. We can spend two minutes reading a page then expect the computer to render a new one in 0.2 seconds, in practice it will never go faster. I don't know why it's become such a myth that we'll always find new uses for computing power. A few specialized tasks now and then perhaps, but in general? No, people will chat and email and listen to music and do utterly non-intensive thing that go from taking 10% to 1% to 0.1% to 0.01% of your CPU.
Contrast the period 2000-2010 with the period 1990-2000. In 1990 you would be looking at a 25mhz 486DX.
Yes, computers are starting to return to the normal world from Moore's bizarro-universe where unbounded exponential growth is possible. After decades of conditioning you become oblivious to how crazy it is to expect something double as fast for half the price every 18 months (or whichever bastardization you choose to use). Rventually a ten year old computer will be like a ten year old car, sure they've polished the design a little but it's basically the same. And that is normal, it's we that live in abnormal times where computers have improved by several orders of magnitude.
Consoles come out with 1080p/DX11-class graphics. Graphics cards for the PC try to offer 2560x1600+ and whatnot but the returns are extremely diminishing and many current PC games will come to a console with keyboard and mouse. GPGPU remains a small niche for supercomputers and won't carry the cost without mass market gaming cards. The volume is increasingly laptops with CPU+GPU in one package and there'll be Intel CPUs with Intel GPUs using an Intel chipset on Intel motherboards - and they'll be a serious player in the SSD market too. AMD will do the same but suffer from being behind on manufacturing process and continue to struggle but survive like Macs do in a Windows market. nVidia will lose their way if they haven't already lost it, everything they've said so far about Fermi makes me think they're heading down a dead-end street. No i7/i5 motherboards with nVidia chips, new Atoms which kill ION, nVidia is being forced to go discrete in a market that is increasingly more integrated. The good new for them is that Intel will continue to flop on 3D performance including Larrabee so there'll be a market for discrete cards a little longer.
That there should be no BUGS may be a formally realizable goal (at least that's what my functional programmer friends tell me)
It can be formally proven that a computer application is equal to an equally complex and incomprehensible formal description. Though whether you're any closer to achieving what you wanted to do in the real world is highly questionable.
Anyway, there's fundamentally three different types of error messages. One is those where there's an external error condition where you need to inform or guide the user towards fixing it themselves, like say no network connection. Not much choice here, it's beyond your ability to fix.
The second type are those where you intentionally trap errors, even though you don't know exactly what they are like say a database call or RPC call or HTTP request, here people tend to give way too much information. 99.9% of the time what you need to do is collect as much as possible in the background, pop up a dialog box asking them what they were doing and a "send report" or "don't send report" buttons. Users aren't interested in SQL errors or stack traces or whatever else you like to pop up while developing/testing it.
The third are the kind where you didn't expect it, no error catching except maybe very generic ones and most likely is caused by a bug. Long story short, if you knew about the bug you would have fixed it instead of writing a good error message for it so do that.
Fair use is determined by the four factor test and that list is not exhaustive, for example "timeshifting" which was vital to the Betamax case is not listed nor covered by any of the others. So the only one bastardizing the statutes here is you, by asserting that it can't be fair use since it's not on the list.
As an owner of a small business I can't imagine leaving our WiFi open.
I've not yet met a single company that keeps their internal network open, but I've met many companies that have an open guest wifi - completely firewalled off, but for visitors and contractors and whatnot that need it. The internal network usually comes with a ton of restrictions and mandatory proxies and whatnot that makes it near impossible to let guests on it without providing them with corporate laptops, which is overkill for say an online demonstration. For example it means I can pull up my company's VPN solution from a client site, something I can't do using their computers, 1) because they don't have the software and 2) because our policy wouldn't allow it.
Even those coffee shops and such that offer wireless against purchase aren't really interested in who you are, just getting some sales. If you pay cash and get a receipt code, that's normally good enough for them. More remote places where it's not practical to "hang out" nearby and leech just won't bother at all, because they get your business anyway. Lots of places just see the convienience as a plus, not a problem. It only becomes a problem if the police come knocking and say "Hey, I think there's been some nasty things going on from this access point". In which case you need a properly recorded ID to get anywhere, a MAC or knowing he bought a cheesemeal won't help you.
The thing is that if it's got value then they'd be competing against eBay, craigslist, flea markets and whatever else second hand markets there are. There's no particular value to buying it from the manufacturer's second hand shop. The whole business model and process is completely different, there's no reason to think they'd be any good at it.
All I see in the story is innuendo; no hint of any actual evidence.
Yeah, I suspect mostly what you're looking at is capacity limitations. Remember when AMD was kicking Intel's ass in CPUs yet never came close to taking over the market? No capacity. So you build a big electronics plant, it's a success but it's only scaled to produce X units/year. To build more you'd have to start building more, which would take so long the market is gone before it is done. Instead you just rise prices, turn a nice profit but the rest of the market still earns good money on old technology. I guess from the outside it can look very much like collusion.
I really think someone should add up all the hours required to experience every movie/game released in a year and compare it to the the average persons free time, a lot of stuff is over-produced and it would be good if someone was out there modelling how many products you could possibly want to experience over a yearly period.
But that makes good recommendations more important, not less. If you go into a library it's highly unlikely you'll be able to read every book in it, but does that matter? You just want to read the good books about things that interest you. If Spotify was on full shuffle and you could get everything from death metal to yodeling in the next song, you wouldn't want it - you'd go back to your own favorites. On the other hand, if everything is interpolated you only get more and more of the same. People don't work like that, you may have your favorite food but it's not something you want to perfect and have every day.
A good search helper should be something in between - keeping to things you're reasonably likely to like but on the other hand challenge you a little to explore and listen to things a little outside your normal repertoire. Yes of course I realize the marketing potential here in sending the masses to their new hit wonder but I don't think the concept is that unreasonable. Think about how your friends are influencing your music taste, they're not interpolating they're gently pulling in the direction they like. If they hit the right mix this would be a real asset because you go to that site because of the good recommendations and that's not such an easy thing to copy.
Even if you know that some OSS tool would do the trick better, easier and of course cheaper. Nobody wants change in their office world. They are already used to the previous version of whatever you get to buy. So whatever change you plan to employ will be met with utmost resistance, on all levels, from your CEO to the post office grunt.
That's not against open source, that's a barrier to competition at all. But what I think is that too many in large corporations have been involved - or rather victim of - huge switchover projects that just don't go well. It turns out that this other huge software company that looked so shiny on the outside got equally much dirt on the inside but nobody wants to really back out of a huge migration project and admit this was a waste of time and money. The migration is pushed through, focus is held on the shiny spots that actually got better but the average employee just think everything stayed the same or got worse. That brings out the "Oh God, not this again" in people.
Not that long ago I got roughly the same comment about workplace, was from a guy that was moving again for the 7th time in five years. You really have to ask, is this corporate version of musical chairs productive? Or is it just because some bean counter drew up a new office plan or some PHB redrew the organization chart that is supposed to be 1% more effective but will never live long enough to justify the cost? Even if it's a tiny thing to pick up your laptop and personal effects you end up relearning a lot of trivial things like what meeting rooms are on this level and what they're called, the new coffee machine, finding out where everybody ended up, setting up the printer and so on. If you want change you'd better make sure there's a point and that the people see it. Demonstrate the workflow and there's a much better hope people will accept it.
Then what needs to be done is make the libraries have this security implemented *by design*.
Libraries do, but they're powerless against string concatenation unless it's impossible to run raw SQL. I think the only thing you could do is deny non-paramter values at all, but it'd make everything a lot more annoying and probably have a performance impact. Like you couldn't say "WHERE is_active = 1" but had to use "WHERE is_active = ?" and bind the value.
This reminds me a little of the Bill of Rights discussion on whether or not they should enumerate rights because it'd lead to only considering those rights and ignore unenumerated but possibly equally valid rights. Granted, the list may be less legally precise than the four factor test but I think it sets a much clearer idea of what the scope should be. After all, despite the four factor test saying you should consider "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and" you can interpret that very strictly or very loosely. The list does say "as much as you'd normally find in commentary, criticism, research etc." was intended to be ok. I think it's meaningful.
That would highly depend on the WebKit project. Basically, I think it's much easier to say to Steam that "Sorry, but we don't want broken or non-standard rendering in Safari, Chrome, Konqueror, iTunes, Midori, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone and WebOS, and soon on the Blackberry, you fix your application" than it was for the IE team to do it. Not to mention that for a large part Microsoft didn't want to create a standards-compliant, compatible web competing with the Windows platform and IE. And when it comes to being an application toolkit like Steam the only thing a broken rendering would do is break your own product, it's very different from the web browser market.
Of course it didn't. It's not a desktop OS (...) I made damn sure to check the HCL
Sorry, but this has nothing with being a desktop OS and everything about that in 2010 people expect to drop in an OS and have it work on any reasonable hardware. Maybe not the supported, recommended configuration but they still expect it to work. Windows and Linux runs on almost any server, Solaris/AIX/OS X Server etc. only come on their supported hardware and everything else is fail. You see exactly the same on desktops except there Windwos runs on almost any desktop, OS X only comes on its supported hardware and Linux is fail. It's just as unfair when people expect to plug in any USB printer or gadget in Linux and have it work, but the world isn't fair.
As someone that's collected 100,000s of pictures and verified them against CSVs, I can just say that this "bit flip" paranoia is in fact mostly paranoia. 99% of the time it's a complete media or process failure like say a broken network connection or computer freezeup or whatever. And even on the few occasions it does happen it's often not very visible, and normally a single picture is not the big deal. It's losing the whole collection with all photos of some family member or event that is a disaster. If it was really such a big problem as some make it out to be, applications would randomly stop working all the time, as they're very sensitive to the smallest change. That just doesn't happen.
It's like if your local authority decided to revoke your driver's license while you're driving the car, and then fines you for driving without a license.
You just took the silliest example you can think of to set up an easy straw man right? Lots and lots of products are revoked because they no longer comply with health, safety or environmental standards, emission standards or are no longer legal to sell without the product changing at all. There's no right that you'll be able to sell your product for all time, the only difference is that here a private company is the one cutting you off. If you throw yourself at one company's mercy to sell your product, don't be surprised if they have a sword for you to fall on.
The alleged dilemma would only arise if there was a decision that makes a failure more likely now and less likely later. In practice I expect they do their damndest to avoid it both now and later, but somewhere there'll be a flaw sooner or later. As for what is best, a baseline that works is clearly better. Yes shit can happen because of a bad tweak or poor QA or external damage but having a design you know it basically working is a helluva lot easier than one that is not.
The problem is that some people expect to be able to live off of their open source projects, or at least feel they are entitled to earn a buck. Feel free to ask for donations, add a couple of ads to your website or even offering an "enterprise version", but having a successful project doesn't mean that people should pay you for it. Those people you are demanding cash from are the same people who made your project a success. Then again, it is their project. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot by alienating their community, nobody can stop them. There are always alternatives.
In order to be able to relicense the project, you must be the sole copyright holder. So basically you are saying the author should be grateful for doing all the work and being allowed to give away his application? Almost sounds like it. If you feel like it yon can come work as my personal slave too, I promise lots of work and no pay but I may give you a trinket from time to time. Open source is a great way to show that you are a capable developer and project manager, but as the project grows so will the work and if the rewards don't grow at all then sooner or later this will become a grind where you're getting nothing in return.
Around here there's not much respect for people that abandon the community but I understand people that say "I can't keep putting hours and hours down this big black hole who no one will ever pay me for. I'm moving to a paid model, if you really liked my work then pay for it." It's not that person shooting himself in the foot, it's the community. He's ending an endless time sink where the attitude is that it "doesn't mean that people should pay you for it". That you lose a successful project is from your own POV, not his. And I would dare say that in many cases there aren't any alternatives of equal quality.
MySQL merely used it to muddy the waters, confuse people over licensing and get people to pay for licenses when perhaps they didn't really need to. Certainly, the vast majority of software for internal use doesn't require licenses from MySQL.
Shocker, dual licensing company points people in direction of product with highest margins. In other stunning news, this applies to retail clerks and pretty much everyone else. I remember Trolltech's site also went very far into pointing you in direction of the commercial version, you'd have to know the GPL to know you could use it in a commercial setting with some caveats.
Over 5 years, Bob Jacobsen put in thousands of hours of work on this case. He was threatened with loss of his employment, and with all of the money and property that he had. The $100,000 he eventually received doesn't compensate him for this. But I'm sure that the feeling of achievement does.
If you count being tied up in court for five years, getting lots and lots of pro bono lawyer time and still not breaking even. I call this "How to snuff out a potential upstart for $100,000" even though he probably wasn't competition in the first place.
Bars that won't let you enter unless you're over 25, although the drinking age is 21. (...) In both these cases, the reverse would be unthinkable.
I can't speak for the US but here in Norway at least some night clubs actually have a maximum age, seems some old guys were there just to ogle 18 yos (drinking age here) and the clubs wanted to get rid of them so they did.
First of all, flamebait? What the hell? There wasn't an inflammatory word in my post! I'm starting to get the impression that I'm being censored for my opinions, not their presentation.
Agreed. Delusional perhaps, but flamebait is no substitute.
You want a specific example where playing by the rules gets us where we want to be? Nixon. Thanks to some fine reporting, Woodward and Bernstein took him down. Of course, they couldn't come in all guns blazing, hurling accusations,
I'm sorry, what laws did Watergate change again? I wasn't talking about due process, I was talking about a law changed by people ceasing to break it. You provided an utterly off-topic attempt at an example.
Why? Why does a subset of the people choosing not to obey a law make it broken? Can they not be, well, just plain wrong? (...) Don't you see? That's exactly what's happening! Piracy is currently a reality, and the laws are being adjusted to suit said reality.
There's mostly two reasons why people don't break the law, it's either because they think it is wrong or because they fear the punishment. The third kind who'll just uphold an unjust law because it is the law is a small minority.
Regarding the first, of course they can be wrong but I'm saying that is how many laws change. The change comes first in the population, then only later in law not the other way around. This is particularly true where the law is hampered by political interests, lobbying or other things that prevent the true will of the people to prevail. Already there was a poll in Sweden showing that 75% of people 15-25 did not think file sharing is wrong, so that won't stop people.
The other is risk, but risk = probability * impact. They're trying to increase the impact, but with enough probability the risk is still negligible. This is why the fastest way to make the law ineffective is to just ask everybody to ignore it. Together, a large enough group of the people will effectively change the law whether the politicians like it or not. Not as an argument of right or wrong, but as a practical reality this is fastest road to show that the law is broken and can not be mended.
Seriously, all this civil disobedience stuff. What's the point in having a law, when any person can break any law they feel like, any time they feel like, and shout "civil disobedience!"?
There's a substantial difference between "I think this is wrong and the law should change for everyone" and "I'd just like to get away with what I do". I don't want to live in a country where you get robbed and beaten up and stolen from, and neither do most of the people perpetrating these crimes. They'd just like to get away with their own crimes.
Google bought On2 for 106 million dollars, and the FSFs is now asking them to give away one of their core technologies. That sounds like fairly real money to me, don't you think?
Carefully explain that the best way to end this war, or at least people on our side, is to first take the moral high ground over these corporations
Hahahahaha, I bet you think you'll get your rights back right after they catch all the terrorists too. Never once in history has it worked that way, one excuse is simply replaced by another. Like the people that somehow conclude that they'll legalize drugs after people stop taking them, it just doesn't pass the giggle test. And not that I really want to drag the civil rights movement into this, but that colored people would get their rights by staying at the back of the bus and taking the moral high ground. Or that prohibition would ever have ended if people still weren't drinking alcohol everywhere. Can you show one example from history where your "best way" has worked? Please?
Copyright is best shown to be broken by total and complete disregard for its existence, eventually the law is updated to reflect reality or it becomes a sleeping paragraph of law. I can tell you that if this goes through and three-strike disconnects become mandatory in Europe, then there will be a political upheaval as the disconnect becomes too great and people rebel.
But who sets the proceeds? Can a non-profit like Project Gutenberg assume that the copyright holder is making no proceeds today, so not generating any proceeds themselves is also okay? If so, then essentially they could start indexing all works in copyright or not and only halt when so ordered. That'd go a long way to limit copyright...