No. They aren't. CSS doesn't prevent copying. It controls access to the content. That's why it's the "Content Scrambling System" and not "Copying Something Something". You can copy a DVD a million times if you want. No problem. But for every single one of those million copies you will need a key to unscramble the content. Until DeCSS came along, the only place the keys existed was licensed DVD players and DVD playing software.
It does seem a bit odd to ask interview questions of a guy who reads the site regularly, but given that he is one of the Free Software community's leading lights, I think a formal interview makes sense... and here's my question:
Whenever the topic of Free Software (or Open Source) comes up outside Slashdot, we only seem to hear a few names (not that this is all that different from proprietary software news where the number of recognizable names is possibly even smaller)... In your opinion, other than RMS, ESR, Linus, and yourself, who's out there that's really saying good stuff about Free Software? Who is not only doing interesting stuff, but talking about it in a way that keeps you interested past the sound bites? If the four of you were, um, somehow "unavailable for comment" for an extended period, who from the Free Software community would you hope would take up the reins of being in the public eye and doing spokesperson-like things?
Nope. I think it is very sensible when an existing application exists for a given purpose (like hosting collaborative software development projects) to use that software. If RubyForge were going to be written in Ruby, it would be quite some time before the site were "featureful" enough and stable enough to host other projects. Using existing software means that 1) other projects can get hosted today, 2) perhaps the Ruby version of *Forge can be hosted and developed on the non-Ruby version of *Forge.
I'm with the others who say "they can have it back". I find that the themes intended to imitate Windows and Mac OS are annoying-- and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find things like icons, etc, being clipped out of screenshots. While Microsoft can't lay claim to "look and feel" they can certainly lay claim to actual pieces of artwork within a UI. And if you ask me that's a legitimate complaint. Making icons is non-trivial and not mechanical. Shading a title bar is a different story.
It's also possible that Gates refers to things like the downloading of MS-produced DLLs and incorporating them into otherwise Free programs-- mplayer would be a perfect example. For my part I think that is legal (and if it isn't, it should be)... but I've been wrong before.:)
As far as the whole patent thing goes: I hate to defend Microsoft, but they've never seemed to be real big on the whole patent side of stuff. In fact, I've never heard of them using their own patents aggressively, but they've certainly been the subject of a lot of IP complaints themselves (including two pending patent cases that are fairly important, IIRC). Bill Gates might be a fanatic about "piracy" (going back to his "open letter to hobbyists" back in something like 1978), but I've always had the impression he felt that ideas themselves should be somewhat more fair game.
Nice article. I linked it from my site (which has a whopping TWO legal mp3s of some "music" I did back in the early 90s).
I wonder why you don't mention negativland.com anywhere in the main article page, though. While their music may not be terribly popular (they do have some free downloads on their site) they are constantly on the forefront of the battle for Fair Use rights and against the expanding "intellectual property" movement. They also have an excellent page of other articles on the topic-- including Steve Albini's version of Courtney Love's "Do the Math" speech.
It's not the raw speed that's at issue here, it's the relative speed. And I don't know that I believe that Perl is all that much slower than any other language once a script is loaded into the interpreter and set in motion. It's that startup time that makes us think it's so slow, mostly.
Thank you! What I discovered (once I posted the other post I was too embarrassed to let it go *grin)was that there are separate volume options on this system for headphones versus onboard speaker. I set everything everywhere to mute and that seemed to help. If I hear one more peep out of this machine I'm going to open it up and pull the speaker wires off by hand.:)
That's interesting. I have the exact opposite problem from your mom. I do have sound coming out, but the volume is all the way down AND muted. Any idea how to fix that?:D
While I'm not sure suing you is a viable business plan, I have been wondering what the geek world thought of starting a home computer leasing program where regular users would lease a computer (running GNU/Linux, of course) from my (as yet hypothetical) business for a regular monthly fee. In addition to low initial costs for the users, minimal configuration computer is free with a 12 month contract kinda thing, I would think knowing that someone out there was obligated to help with tech support would be very comforting. Basically take how the typical cell phone plan works and apply that to GNU/Linux system leasing and service support. Would it work?
Hmmm. I run Gentoo Linux and initially had some problems getting the emusic client to connect, so I'm aware that's it's not all roses... but a couple of emails to tech support later the problem was solved (by my simply deleting some of the files in/usr/lib/emusic I think). Between the fact that they have any sort of Linux support, that the files you download are NOT in a proprietary, DRMed format, and that you have a 50 song trial period (if it's not working, you gave it the old college try and didn't lose anything but some time), I think emusic.com makes a very likely candidate for an online music service for those of us who have concerns (either technical or ideological) with Apple or buy.com's services.
Well, I could see why you wouldn't run Quicken at work, or do your finances in a Gnumeric spreadsheet saved on a network drive, but aren't things like web banking encrypted by the web client (i.e. your browser) and only decryptable by the bank's server on the other end?
Why don't you check out emusic.com? They give you plain old mp3s and rely on your sense of ethics and existing copyright laws to keep you from infringing. Not only that emusic.com has a working Linux client (sorry, it is not free software), but the client is only needed for downloading. Once you have the mp3, you're set. I realize that some people consider their quality and/or selection to be limited, but it's certainly a value when you consider that you get unlimited downloads with your monthly subscription price.
Well, GNU is hardly based on Linux. A case could be made for the exact opposite, though. And Perl was built for Unix and got Linux as a gimme.
As to your original assertion that SCO and this case won't hamper Linux (the system, not just the kernel). I tend to believe that's true only because they will likely be shown to have very little substantial case for infringement-- of such a level that the offending code can be removed without harm, should such code be found to exist at all (and found to be infringing in the form in which it is included).
But much of the development of things like KDE and GNOME are dependent on having a Free and legal kernel. And to some extent they are dependent on corporate projects and money to help cover development expenses. I should think that each of the projects you mentioned would be quite concerned if it suddenly should happen that their work would only run on proprietary Unix because Linux was gone (although there are still the BSDs-- and because of SCO's vagueness we have no idea if those are also at risk).
Not that I find SCO remotely credible at this point, but should they happen to win even a small monetary settlement in their case against IBM this will set them up for larger wins later, because they will continue to be able to afford to pursue these cases in court. The snowball effect could be very deadly. And because most of the places where Linux development happens have copyright laws that would favor SCO if SCO won cases here in the U.S. the idea that this is just a U.S. problem seems a little off.
No. This is exactly one of those cases. The benchmark clearly favors using print LIST over a for loop.
Rate foreach print list foreach 107043/s -- -82% print list 592417/s 453% --
It's 5x faster AND more readable to use print LIST. If you want to persist in the delusional use of overly clever constructs without a good reason, be my guest, but you are just making your life more difficult along with the lives of anyone who has to use or maintain your code. BTW, none of this should be construed as blanket condemnation of $_ or any other clever Perl construct. In many cases the implied or context sensitive constructs in Perl are a major win in terms of writability and readability. Had the ACs example contained a map or done something more interesting with each element of the array than just print it out, he/she would just as likely have been right on the money.
Except that those do different things unless you flog the field seperator to "" first.
OK then: print for @array; #the idea here is that we're printing something, not that we're doing something with each element of an array, so let's get the print at the front if we can.
To my way of thinking, changing default values of those kinds of global values (like $,) is a bad idea and should be confined to very specific blocks as needed by using local. That way people can use built-in functions in other pieces of the code without worrying what you've done to the defaults somewhere else.
Sometimes one of the ways to do it really is better.
Re:Is there anyone out there
on
Perl 6 Essentials
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In the same way, in a statement such as//
foreach ( @array ) { print }//
It is extremely obvious,
The only thing that's obvious to me is that the code example you gave is a poor way to write "print @array;" The urge to be clever is way too prevalent in Perl.
As far as I know neither RMS nor Larry Wall are involved in Linux development. The one guy has been working on a complete, from-scratch Unix replacement (GNU) since the 80s and has actually been critical of the Linux kernel project for both its use of a proprietary version management tool and the inclusion of not-quite-available-as-source-code drivers. The other has written a general purpose interpreted programming ("scripting") language that runs on all kinds of different operating systems.
(please note: I'm still learning C) So what should I be using instead of scanf? The article recommends against it, but doesn't say whether there is a better way to get some input and get interesting chunks out of it.
The amount of money in the economy has nothing to do with how much people spend. It has to do with how much money the government prints and how much the government allows banks to lend. Further, most of us are not likely to reap any direct rewards from increased efficiency on the part of large businesses unless the better efficiencies lead to a corresponding drop in the price of the goods and services which are primarily robot-provided.
That said, robots are expensive. They also break. Until robots are cheap and can easily fix each other, they aren't going to make ROIs jump through the roof. But if they can increase it even slightly by displacing human workers, then businesses would logically choose to use them. This means there will be an extensive period of time where the vast majority of the earth's population (who perform "unskilled" labor) will be without jobs or a means of providing themselves with income. Without a massive welfare system set up to feed, clothe, house, and (re)educate these folks, there will be widespread poverty as the humans won't be able to find jobs doing anything.
Ah, I've been moderated down for simply asking why you feel the need to inform us that you don't care! So I'll try again, only maybe with a bit of attempted humor...
Commodore-64 user *sneeze* *burp* no need for me to care *sneeze* *burp*
See how much fun it is to include bodily function sounds in your posts?:)
Swimming, hiking, camping, and listening to music... I hate sitting in one place basically doing nothing for more than 5 mins.
So you'd rather move around in a circle in a pool, walk around in a circle, sleep in the woods, or stare at your stereo than "basically doing nothing" for more than 5 minutes?:)
Slashdot Mirror
dvd's are vastly more copy-protected than vhs
No. They aren't. CSS doesn't prevent copying. It controls access to the content. That's why it's the "Content Scrambling System" and not "Copying Something Something". You can copy a DVD a million times if you want. No problem. But for every single one of those million copies you will need a key to unscramble the content. Until DeCSS came along, the only place the keys existed was licensed DVD players and DVD playing software.
It does seem a bit odd to ask interview questions of a guy who reads the site regularly, but given that he is one of the Free Software community's leading lights, I think a formal interview makes sense... and here's my question:
Whenever the topic of Free Software (or Open Source) comes up outside Slashdot, we only seem to hear a few names (not that this is all that different from proprietary software news where the number of recognizable names is possibly even smaller)... In your opinion, other than RMS, ESR, Linus, and yourself, who's out there that's really saying good stuff about Free Software? Who is not only doing interesting stuff, but talking about it in a way that keeps you interested past the sound bites? If the four of you were, um, somehow "unavailable for comment" for an extended period, who from the Free Software community would you hope would take up the reins of being in the public eye and doing spokesperson-like things?
Nope. I think it is very sensible when an existing application exists for a given purpose (like hosting collaborative software development projects) to use that software. If RubyForge were going to be written in Ruby, it would be quite some time before the site were "featureful" enough and stable enough to host other projects. Using existing software means that 1) other projects can get hosted today, 2) perhaps the Ruby version of *Forge can be hosted and developed on the non-Ruby version of *Forge.
I'm with the others who say "they can have it back". I find that the themes intended to imitate Windows and Mac OS are annoying-- and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find things like icons, etc, being clipped out of screenshots. While Microsoft can't lay claim to "look and feel" they can certainly lay claim to actual pieces of artwork within a UI. And if you ask me that's a legitimate complaint. Making icons is non-trivial and not mechanical. Shading a title bar is a different story.
:)
It's also possible that Gates refers to things like the downloading of MS-produced DLLs and incorporating them into otherwise Free programs-- mplayer would be a perfect example. For my part I think that is legal (and if it isn't, it should be)... but I've been wrong before.
As far as the whole patent thing goes: I hate to defend Microsoft, but they've never seemed to be real big on the whole patent side of stuff. In fact, I've never heard of them using their own patents aggressively, but they've certainly been the subject of a lot of IP complaints themselves (including two pending patent cases that are fairly important, IIRC). Bill Gates might be a fanatic about "piracy" (going back to his "open letter to hobbyists" back in something like 1978), but I've always had the impression he felt that ideas themselves should be somewhat more fair game.
Nice article. I linked it from my site (which has a whopping TWO legal mp3s of some "music" I did back in the early 90s).
I wonder why you don't mention negativland.com anywhere in the main article page, though. While their music may not be terribly popular (they do have some free downloads on their site) they are constantly on the forefront of the battle for Fair Use rights and against the expanding "intellectual property" movement. They also have an excellent page of other articles on the topic-- including Steve Albini's version of Courtney Love's "Do the Math" speech.
It's not the raw speed that's at issue here, it's the relative speed. And I don't know that I believe that Perl is all that much slower than any other language once a script is loaded into the interpreter and set in motion. It's that startup time that makes us think it's so slow, mostly.
Thank you! What I discovered (once I posted the other post I was too embarrassed to let it go *grin)was that there are separate volume options on this system for headphones versus onboard speaker. I set everything everywhere to mute and that seemed to help. If I hear one more peep out of this machine I'm going to open it up and pull the speaker wires off by hand. :)
That's interesting. I have the exact opposite problem from your mom. I do have sound coming out, but the volume is all the way down AND muted. Any idea how to fix that? :D
Seriously. Dumbest thing I've ever seen.
While I'm not sure suing you is a viable business plan, I have been wondering what the geek world thought of starting a home computer leasing program where regular users would lease a computer (running GNU/Linux, of course) from my (as yet hypothetical) business for a regular monthly fee. In addition to low initial costs for the users, minimal configuration computer is free with a 12 month contract kinda thing, I would think knowing that someone out there was obligated to help with tech support would be very comforting. Basically take how the typical cell phone plan works and apply that to GNU/Linux system leasing and service support. Would it work?
Hmmm. I run Gentoo Linux and initially had some problems getting the emusic client to connect, so I'm aware that's it's not all roses... but a couple of emails to tech support later the problem was solved (by my simply deleting some of the files in /usr/lib/emusic I think). Between the fact that they have any sort of Linux support, that the files you download are NOT in a proprietary, DRMed format, and that you have a 50 song trial period (if it's not working, you gave it the old college try and didn't lose anything but some time), I think emusic.com makes a very likely candidate for an online music service for those of us who have concerns (either technical or ideological) with Apple or buy.com's services.
Well, I could see why you wouldn't run Quicken at work, or do your finances in a Gnumeric spreadsheet saved on a network drive, but aren't things like web banking encrypted by the web client (i.e. your browser) and only decryptable by the bank's server on the other end?
Why don't you check out emusic.com? They give you plain old mp3s and rely on your sense of ethics and existing copyright laws to keep you from infringing. Not only that emusic.com has a working Linux client (sorry, it is not free software), but the client is only needed for downloading. Once you have the mp3, you're set. I realize that some people consider their quality and/or selection to be limited, but it's certainly a value when you consider that you get unlimited downloads with your monthly subscription price.
Well, GNU is hardly based on Linux. A case could be made for the exact opposite, though. And Perl was built for Unix and got Linux as a gimme.
As to your original assertion that SCO and this case won't hamper Linux (the system, not just the kernel). I tend to believe that's true only because they will likely be shown to have very little substantial case for infringement-- of such a level that the offending code can be removed without harm, should such code be found to exist at all (and found to be infringing in the form in which it is included).
But much of the development of things like KDE and GNOME are dependent on having a Free and legal kernel. And to some extent they are dependent on corporate projects and money to help cover development expenses. I should think that each of the projects you mentioned would be quite concerned if it suddenly should happen that their work would only run on proprietary Unix because Linux was gone (although there are still the BSDs-- and because of SCO's vagueness we have no idea if those are also at risk).
Not that I find SCO remotely credible at this point, but should they happen to win even a small monetary settlement in their case against IBM this will set them up for larger wins later, because they will continue to be able to afford to pursue these cases in court. The snowball effect could be very deadly. And because most of the places where Linux development happens have copyright laws that would favor SCO if SCO won cases here in the U.S. the idea that this is just a U.S. problem seems a little off.
No. This is exactly one of those cases. The benchmark clearly favors using print LIST over a for loop.
Rate foreach print list
foreach 107043/s -- -82%
print list 592417/s 453% --
It's 5x faster AND more readable to use print LIST. If you want to persist in the delusional use of overly clever constructs without a good reason, be my guest, but you are just making your life more difficult along with the lives of anyone who has to use or maintain your code. BTW, none of this should be construed as blanket condemnation of $_ or any other clever Perl construct. In many cases the implied or context sensitive constructs in Perl are a major win in terms of writability and readability. Had the ACs example contained a map or done something more interesting with each element of the array than just print it out, he/she would just as likely have been right on the money.
Except that those do different things unless you flog the field seperator to "" first.
OK then: print for @array; #the idea here is that we're printing something, not that we're doing something with each element of an array, so let's get the print at the front if we can.
To my way of thinking, changing default values of those kinds of global values (like $,) is a bad idea and should be confined to very specific blocks as needed by using local. That way people can use built-in functions in other pieces of the code without worrying what you've done to the defaults somewhere else.
Sometimes one of the ways to do it really is better.
In the same way, in a statement such as// foreach ( @array ) { print }// It is extremely obvious,
The only thing that's obvious to me is that the code example you gave is a poor way to write "print @array;" The urge to be clever is way too prevalent in Perl.
As far as I know neither RMS nor Larry Wall are involved in Linux development. The one guy has been working on a complete, from-scratch Unix replacement (GNU) since the 80s and has actually been critical of the Linux kernel project for both its use of a proprietary version management tool and the inclusion of not-quite-available-as-source-code drivers. The other has written a general purpose interpreted programming ("scripting") language that runs on all kinds of different operating systems.
(please note: I'm still learning C) So what should I be using instead of scanf? The article recommends against it, but doesn't say whether there is a better way to get some input and get interesting chunks out of it.
Nah... if the PREVIEW function actually did something useful, like highlight potential spelling mistakes, then I could see using it.
:)
Hmmmm.
The amount of money in the economy has nothing to do with how much people spend. It has to do with how much money the government prints and how much the government allows banks to lend. Further, most of us are not likely to reap any direct rewards from increased efficiency on the part of large businesses unless the better efficiencies lead to a corresponding drop in the price of the goods and services which are primarily robot-provided.
That said, robots are expensive. They also break. Until robots are cheap and can easily fix each other, they aren't going to make ROIs jump through the roof. But if they can increase it even slightly by displacing human workers, then businesses would logically choose to use them. This means there will be an extensive period of time where the vast majority of the earth's population (who perform "unskilled" labor) will be without jobs or a means of providing themselves with income. Without a massive welfare system set up to feed, clothe, house, and (re)educate these folks, there will be widespread poverty as the humans won't be able to find jobs doing anything.
And at BEST-WORST he could be an incompetent, lying scuzzball. (they aren't mutually exclusive traits, after all)
Ah, I've been moderated down for simply asking why you feel the need to inform us that you don't care! So I'll try again, only maybe with a bit of attempted humor...
:)
Commodore-64 user *sneeze* *burp* no need for me to care *sneeze* *burp*
See how much fun it is to include bodily function sounds in your posts?
So then why are you posting? Also: you might want to see a doctor if you are coughing so much it shows up in your posts.
Swimming, hiking, camping, and listening to music... I hate sitting in one place basically doing nothing for more than 5 mins.
:)
So you'd rather move around in a circle in a pool, walk around in a circle, sleep in the woods, or stare at your stereo than "basically doing nothing" for more than 5 minutes?