Yes, a license is a contract.. That's not what I said.
I said it's not a contract that you agree to before using or obtaining the source. You don't have to agree to any license in order to USE the source.
No, it entails whatever a court or the copyright holders determine is an appropriate remedy.
As for "so many contributors" you might want to look a little deeper... the real copyright holders of many GPL projects are actually very few in numbers.
Just because you submit a patch does not make you a co-author, necessarily. And even if there are many authors, it does not invalidate the point... You need to get over the whole free/open software / gpl thing.. thsi is about standard copyright.
Yes, they haven't complied with it, so they probably won't cite is as a defence against copyright violation....
You seem to think I'm excusing them from stealing code.. I'm not, at all... I think they are guilty as sin if they in fact used mplayer code without license.
I'm just saying it's not a "gpl violation".. there is no such thing. IT's copyright violation, plain and simple.
You either cite compliance with the GPL as your permission to do what copyright law says you can't, or you are in violation of copyright law... you are not in violation of the GPL.
The GPL is not a contract you agree to before using or obtaining source... it is a license that permits you to do things other than those allowed by copryight law alone.
If they are using MPlayer's code without license, that's copyright violation, and all that entails.
They can either come to an agreement with the copyright holders, or cite the GPL as their permission, if they had followed it.
He didn't dodge anything, he's comparing the existing systems and software people would run on it... not whether it's theoretically faster.. that's what a test like this is about.
Benchmarks on linux mean jack shit if the software you need is only available in windows and OSX
Being able to do work and get email (low bandwidth stuff) is MORE valueable to the majority of business people who would use the service than the spare time to grab an ISO is to some geek...
Making 90% of your customers pay almost nothing is a good way to not make any money.
I think if the guy wanted to see secure files, it was a misunderstanding.. they are not allowed to ask to look at confidential documents. They ARE allowed to make you prove to their satisfaction the computer is real. That's their job.
Now, yeah, they aren't geeks, how could they be qualified to determine if i'ts real? We could fake one easily? True enough.. but the fact remains: if they think it's not real, it's your problem to prove otherwise. Being calm, and explaining the situation rather than saying "you are trying to look at my confidential documents!" is likely to get you where you need to go.. often they may not realize the implications of what they are asking.
Second... the best advice I have for travelling is pack light. EIther put most of your stuff in your checked bags, or if it's a short trip and you just have carryon, don't bring every toy you have. Look as normal as possible when travelling, not like some geek freak. A laptop and an mp3 player is normal enough, and not likely to cause you problems.
Pack light, don't be that guy in line who holds up the plane, and don't be that guy who gets on the aircraft and makes everyone wait behind him as he tries to stuff his overpacked bags into the overhead bins.
Further, asking to read FILES is equivalent to reading documents.. if I have a briefcase, do I have to allow the security personel to read all my confidential documents before deciding I'm allowed on the aircraft? No, and if that were the case, you can bet the business travelling public would revolt.
Asking me to prove my equipment is real by performing some tasks, that's just fine.
Asking me to decrypt and view personal documents is not going to happen, ever.
If something went wrong with the electrical system, and they could reasonably show that your modifications to onstar could have caused it, fine, fair enough..
But "voids the warrantee" means that, if you modify the onstar system, and then a week later the rear axle falls off and the right front door hinges sieze up, they can say "sorry, you modified your onstar system, it's your problem".
The act in question means they can't just invalidate teh entire warrantee on the vehicle just because of one unrelated part.
How you equate that to "nearly the same" is beyond reason.
The internet DID have something to do with it, as he received it over the internet.
He was greedy... yay. So are you, so is everyone else. Maybe not in this situation, but it's concievable that when you are 70, there will be some scam going on you will not recognize as one, even if it's obvious to those who are 50 years younger than you.
I have to say, it's probably the same Apple bag that the Apple store gave me for free when I bought my first iBook.... plastic clips, and they have a habit of falling off. Mine dropped my laptop onto the road twice before I chucked it out.
I settled for this:
One of those neoprene slipcases for the laptop... this is for protection. This goes inside the main compartment of a standard courier bag, so I can hold odds and ends.
The standard naming, the only reliable one, is BITS per second.
You don't talk about communication gear in terms of bytes. You use bits. Ethernet is 10 million bits per second (or 100 or 1000 or 10000). A t1 is 1544000 bits/second. An E1 is 2000000 bits/second (forgive my rounding).
Modem speeds like 2400bps and 56kbps are in bits per second.
Firewire is 800mbps.. bits per second.
Capital B is not necessarily a standard for "Bytes".. people just like to pretend it is.
And the prefixes are metric, too....M=1000000 K=1000 etc.
My favorites, and all games I still like playing now:
Raid on Bungling Bay (sp?) Raid over Moscow Summmer Games/Winter games series Mission Impossible & MI 2 Hacker & Hacker2 Bruce Lee Karateka Spy-vs-Spy series Beach Head series Barbarian
First, in elementary school, I forget which grade, but it was down there,,, 3 or 4, I guess... my school got some computers.
a few TRS-80 model 3's. They had names, too, like "Fred" and "George".. we put stickers on them.
Now, we got to play with those a bit, and do some stuff... not much, though.
Later, my parents bought me a Vic-20, and later, a C64. I have to say those were my first two computers, and I have to mention both, because both were really important in getting me going.
Rolling forward a decade and a bit, to University.
I was finishing my last year of computing, and a truckload of old computers from the local school district rolled in (the university takes donations of stuff like this to be used for teaching low level stuff, usually). What rolls in, but, much mroe beat up, Fred and George, with the stickers still on them, but faded to nothing! Surely, this was a sign! The powers that be let me take one home, as only I could appreciate such a machine anyway.
So then by definition, you have 7 years of web technology experience... I don't get how you find this hard to understand.
Perahsp you are thinking of a more recent catchphrase like "web services" which tends to denote XML, SOAP, and some platform like JSP or PHP or ASP?
"web technologies" is a generic term my friend... "technologies surrounding the web". You know, like html, cgi, perl, php, apache, HTTP, browsers, caches, proxies, etc..."
It's not about CGI, or coding, or anything, it's about experience with the web and the technologies surrounding it.
IF they had said "At least 7 years experience in web development related areas" it would suit you better?
No, you may not be using CGI now.. but your experience working with web applications, even if you used CGI at the time, DOES matter...
Let's see, 7 years ago.. that'd be December, 1996.
I was professionally desgining ecommerce and interactive websites for about a year at that time. (Professionally means at my full time job, not spare time at school). Certainly, it was a new market, but there were others workign with me, and we had competition. And it's not like we were in The Valley or anything.. or even in the United States, where things were moving faster.
Just because you discovered the web 4 years ago doesn't mean the rest of us did.
So I'd say yes, that experience matters, as the languages you use change, adn the medium has evolved over time, but the basic principles are the same.. just as someone who has been programming for 20 years generally writes cleaner, better code, no matter what language they write in... someone who has been working with web technologies for 7 years will have a far easier time digesting how a new project is going to unfold than some java jockey fresh out of university.
A local-only DOS bug is a LOT different, severeity wise, than a remote root exploit.
Answer me this: On your linux machine, if a user has a shell account, can they affect the service of the machine? Do you have hard memory and CPU limits for every single user, so that no matter what, those users can't hurt the machine?
If your system is like most, a two line shell script can bring the system to it's knees or eat up all remaining memory and swap, or often eat up some critical disk space (like/tmp), bringing the system to an unusable state.
All of THAT is a security problem... so don't start about some local crash bug being a severe security problem.
In other words, local users are usually trusted not to take down the system on purpose. The debian compromise didn't start with this bug.. someone got access through an account they should not have had.. the physical security MODEL broke first... and if it wasn't this bug that was used, some other one would have cropped up eventually.
If it had been repoted that it could cause a root exploit, it would have been patched sooner.
However.... expecting the end user to learn it all themselves, well, they won't, and that's why you have a job.
Microsoft IS responsible for creating stupid users, though... if outlook just told the user a real error message, instead of trying to be clever about it, a good portion of those users would figure out what was wrong, and fix themselves.
The same goes for IE.. thoes generic "page cannot be found" screens that can be caused by a half dozen situations do not help anyone, at all.
Microsoft tries to look smarter than they are, and encourages the image that there is all kinds of technical magic going on behind the scenes...that an average person cannot possibly understand. They like to overcomplicate things for no reason.
Things don't have to be complicated to be well designed and easy to use.
But you need to realize is that the reason email works, on the global scale it does, is precisely because of that lack of authentication, and it's decentralized, open nature.
I'm not saying "it's impossible"... it's certainly not.. but the more layers of authentication, and the beurocracies needed to manage them, the less workably any system becomes.
Do people *really* demand choice? Did everyone DEMAND a big choice of window managers and desktop systems? No.. they really didn't... that's just how things evolved.
I use OSX all the time, and I'm traditionally that guy who uses linux and whatever window manager currently catches my eye.
It's not just about lack of choice.. it's about stability of the target. A developer can know clearly what his target audience has when developing applications for OSX. That's hard, with linux.
Though you may feel the classic MacOS environments were about lack of choice, and confining the user to an unchanging experience, that's not the case anymore.
I don't NEED to mess around with every aspect of my GUI.. I know it can be fun.. but if it was well designed in the first place, we would have a lot less people worrying about skinning it. Go look at a room full of OS X users.. most of the desktops look the same. Any one user could quickly make use of any other user's desktop.. and believe me, it's not because skinning and manipulating the GUI is any harder than it is with X (though I"m sure someone will come up with examples of things)
More important is the fact that the OS X Gui is designed *well*. IT's open; you can write apps for it easily. IT WORKS.. if you have never really sat down to use it, and spent an hour or two getting to know it, you don't know even know what a good GUI *IS*, because you've probably never used one. Windows is pale by comparison, KDE as well (it's on par with windows in my books, in terms of usability). Some GNOME setups I've seen are better... more well thought out, not just copying windows... but still a far cry from what Apple has achieved.
If the desktop is well designed, yet extensible, there is no reason to hvae 20 totally different versions floating around.
Also, it's not because the end user doesn't want choice.. tis' because the developer needs a stable target.
Ask yourself: If you want to write a state of the art gui app for linux, that interoprates with the OS properly, drag and drop, print menus, cut and paste, etc... how will you do it? what toolkits and libraries will you choose? KDE? Gnome? Neither, just use TK? Do it totally self contained, so it looks like a uniqe app, sort of like xmms?
That choice is clear with Apple, and clear with Microsoft.
I mean, I'm sure openness is a factor.. but from the beginning, things were this way.
I think it's more about focus.... or maybe lack of focus...
See, the kernel teams worries about the kernel, and exporting usable interfaces to that kernel. Not that interesting to Mom & Pop jones, but of great interest to other developers... like those who, say, build distributions.
MS takes a whole systems approach... the libraries and kernel and everything altogether.. they don't have a group just concened with releasing the best kernel... they have to meet whatever requirements happen internally.
It's flexible because in the open source world, the kernel team doesn't have to compromise for lazy app developers, or vice versa.
They have always done this; typically to get a movie down to a lower rating to increase distribution. If only a few minor changes will let the movie jump down a notch to PG13, they'll do it.
Note: Blockbuster doesn't edit it themselves, rather, the studio gives blockbuster an edited version.
There is a ferry port in Gib.. it's just only used a few days a week.
The airport is hilarious.... one of the trickiest places to land in europe due to the constant winds, and the fact that it stretches into ocean on both sides. It's common for pilots to abort their first or second landing attempt... and equally common for the occupants of the departure lounge to give a standing ovation to the plane when it manages to touch down.
The shitty part is that, if the winds kick up and, say, your flight from London can't land, they have to divert to Tangiers, refuel, then fly to Malaga, Spain, and bus you to Gibraltar... all because Spain refuses to recognize Gibraltar's airport as a commercial airport.
This adds about 3 hours to your travel time, at least. For contrast, if they could simply land in Malaga, wait for the wind to die down, then hop over to Gibraltar, well, it's would only be a 10 minute flight or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay....
Yes, a license is a contract.. That's not what I said.
I said it's not a contract that you agree to before using or obtaining the source. You don't have to agree to any license in order to USE the source.
No, it entails whatever a court or the copyright holders determine is an appropriate remedy.
As for "so many contributors" you might want to look a little deeper... the real copyright holders of many GPL projects are actually very few in numbers.
Just because you submit a patch does not make you a co-author, necessarily. And even if there are many authors, it does not invalidate the point... You need to get over the whole free/open software / gpl thing.. thsi is about standard copyright.
Yes, they haven't complied with it, so they probably won't cite is as a defence against copyright violation....
You seem to think I'm excusing them from stealing code.. I'm not, at all... I think they are guilty as sin if they in fact used mplayer code without license.
I'm just saying it's not a "gpl violation".. there is no such thing. IT's copyright violation, plain and simple.
You either cite compliance with the GPL as your permission to do what copyright law says you can't, or you are in violation of copyright law... you are not in violation of the GPL.
It's a copyright violation.
The GPL is not a contract you agree to before using or obtaining source... it is a license that permits you to do things other than those allowed by copryight law alone.
If they are using MPlayer's code without license, that's copyright violation, and all that entails.
They can either come to an agreement with the copyright holders, or cite the GPL as their permission, if they had followed it.
He didn't dodge anything, he's comparing the existing systems and software people would run on it... not whether it's theoretically faster.. that's what a test like this is about.
Benchmarks on linux mean jack shit if the software you need is only available in windows and OSX
Is that you are totally ignoring the market.
Being able to do work and get email (low bandwidth stuff) is MORE valueable to the majority of business people who would use the service than the spare time to grab an ISO is to some geek...
Making 90% of your customers pay almost nothing is a good way to not make any money.
I think if the guy wanted to see secure files, it was a misunderstanding.. they are not allowed to ask to look at confidential documents. They ARE allowed to make you prove to their satisfaction the computer is real. That's their job.
Now, yeah, they aren't geeks, how could they be qualified to determine if i'ts real? We could fake one easily? True enough.. but the fact remains: if they think it's not real, it's your problem to prove otherwise. Being calm, and explaining the situation rather than saying "you are trying to look at my confidential documents!" is likely to get you where you need to go.. often they may not realize the implications of what they are asking.
Second... the best advice I have for travelling is pack light. EIther put most of your stuff in your checked bags, or if it's a short trip and you just have carryon, don't bring every toy you have. Look as normal as possible when travelling, not like some geek freak. A laptop and an mp3 player is normal enough, and not likely to cause you problems.
Pack light, don't be that guy in line who holds up the plane, and don't be that guy who gets on the aircraft and makes everyone wait behind him as he tries to stuff his overpacked bags into the overhead bins.
This is about the TSA.
Further, asking to read FILES is equivalent to reading documents.. if I have a briefcase, do I have to allow the security personel to read all my confidential documents before deciding I'm allowed on the aircraft? No, and if that were the case, you can bet the business travelling public would revolt.
Asking me to prove my equipment is real by performing some tasks, that's just fine.
Asking me to decrypt and view personal documents is not going to happen, ever.
If something went wrong with the electrical system, and they could reasonably show that your modifications to onstar could have caused it, fine, fair enough..
But "voids the warrantee" means that, if you modify the onstar system, and then a week later the rear axle falls off and the right front door hinges sieze up, they can say "sorry, you modified your onstar system, it's your problem".
The act in question means they can't just invalidate teh entire warrantee on the vehicle just because of one unrelated part.
1991, eh?
that was 12 years ago.
He is 73 years old.
How you equate that to "nearly the same" is beyond reason.
The internet DID have something to do with it, as he received it over the internet.
He was greedy... yay. So are you, so is everyone else. Maybe not in this situation, but it's concievable that when you are 70, there will be some scam going on you will not recognize as one, even if it's obvious to those who are 50 years younger than you.
96 might be early to you, but in 96 I can count a number of people I know from my neck of the woods working with web stuff.
This is basically like asking for a seasoned web veteran... and the number is right on the money.
I have to say, it's probably the same Apple bag that the Apple store gave me for free when I bought my first iBook.... plastic clips, and they have a habit of falling off. Mine dropped my laptop onto the road twice before I chucked it out.
I settled for this:
One of those neoprene slipcases for the laptop... this is for protection.
This goes inside the main compartment of a standard courier bag, so I can hold odds and ends.
The standard naming, the only reliable one, is BITS per second.
/second (forgive my rounding).
You don't talk about communication gear in terms of bytes. You use bits. Ethernet is 10 million bits per second (or 100 or 1000 or 10000). A t1 is 1544000 bits/second. An E1 is 2000000 bits
Modem speeds like 2400bps and 56kbps are in bits per second.
Firewire is 800mbps.. bits per second.
Capital B is not necessarily a standard for "Bytes".. people just like to pretend it is.
And the prefixes are metric, too....M=1000000 K=1000 etc.
My favorites, and all games I still like playing now:
Raid on Bungling Bay (sp?)
Raid over Moscow
Summmer Games/Winter games series
Mission Impossible & MI 2
Hacker & Hacker2
Bruce Lee
Karateka
Spy-vs-Spy series
Beach Head series
Barbarian
My vote for best all around game: Paradroid!
First, in elementary school, I forget which grade, but it was down there,,, 3 or 4, I guess... my school got some computers.
a few TRS-80 model 3's. They had names, too, like "Fred" and "George".. we put stickers on them.
Now, we got to play with those a bit, and do some stuff... not much, though.
Later, my parents bought me a Vic-20, and later, a C64. I have to say those were my first two computers, and I have to mention both, because both were really important in getting me going.
Rolling forward a decade and a bit, to University.
I was finishing my last year of computing, and a truckload of old computers from the local school district rolled in (the university takes donations of stuff like this to be used for teaching low level stuff, usually). What rolls in, but, much mroe beat up, Fred and George, with the stickers still on them, but faded to nothing! Surely, this was a sign! The powers that be let me take one home, as only I could appreciate such a machine anyway.
So then by definition, you have 7 years of web technology experience... I don't get how you find this hard to understand.
Perahsp you are thinking of a more recent catchphrase like "web services" which tends to denote XML, SOAP, and some platform like JSP or PHP or ASP?
"web technologies" is a generic term my friend... "technologies surrounding the web". You know, like html, cgi, perl, php, apache, HTTP, browsers, caches, proxies, etc..."
It's not about CGI, or coding, or anything, it's about experience with the web and the technologies surrounding it.
IF they had said "At least 7 years experience in web development related areas" it would suit you better?
No, you may not be using CGI now.. but your experience working with web applications, even if you used CGI at the time, DOES matter...
Let's see, 7 years ago.. that'd be December, 1996.
I was professionally desgining ecommerce and interactive websites for about a year at that time. (Professionally means at my full time job, not spare time at school). Certainly, it was a new market, but there were others workign with me, and we had competition. And it's not like we were in The Valley or anything.. or even in the United States, where things were moving faster.
Just because you discovered the web 4 years ago doesn't mean the rest of us did.
So I'd say yes, that experience matters, as the languages you use change, adn the medium has evolved over time, but the basic principles are the same.. just as someone who has been programming for 20 years generally writes cleaner, better code, no matter what language they write in... someone who has been working with web technologies for 7 years will have a far easier time digesting how a new project is going to unfold than some java jockey fresh out of university.
A local-only DOS bug is a LOT different, severeity wise, than a remote root exploit.
/tmp), bringing the system to an unusable state.
Answer me this: On your linux machine, if a user has a shell account, can they affect the service of the machine? Do you have hard memory and CPU limits for every single user, so that no matter what, those users can't hurt the machine?
If your system is like most, a two line shell script can bring the system to it's knees or eat up all remaining memory and swap, or often eat up some critical disk space (like
All of THAT is a security problem... so don't start about some local crash bug being a severe security problem.
In other words, local users are usually trusted not to take down the system on purpose. The debian compromise didn't start with this bug.. someone got access through an account they should not have had.. the physical security MODEL broke first... and if it wasn't this bug that was used, some other one would have cropped up eventually.
If it had been repoted that it could cause a root exploit, it would have been patched sooner.
They didn't say 7 years of java. Or 7 years of .NET.
.NET, and that you should have at least 7 years of web technology experience.
They said they want you to be proficient in either java or
They want someone who has been in the web business for a long time... whether they have used java the whole time isn't relevant.
However.... expecting the end user to learn it all themselves, well, they won't, and that's why you have a job.
Microsoft IS responsible for creating stupid users, though... if outlook just told the user a real error message, instead of trying to be clever about it, a good portion of those users would figure out what was wrong, and fix themselves.
The same goes for IE.. thoes generic "page cannot be found" screens that can be caused by a half dozen situations do not help anyone, at all.
Microsoft tries to look smarter than they are, and encourages the image that there is all kinds of technical magic going on behind the scenes...that an average person cannot possibly understand. They like to overcomplicate things for no reason.
Things don't have to be complicated to be well designed and easy to use.
But you need to realize is that the reason email works, on the global scale it does, is precisely because of that lack of authentication, and it's decentralized, open nature.
I'm not saying "it's impossible"... it's certainly not.. but the more layers of authentication, and the beurocracies needed to manage them, the less workably any system becomes.
It really stands for:
Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift
which should be obvious to anyone has ever used it.
The name also rang true for a long time, back when memory was a bit more expenisve, as:
Eight-Megs-And-Constantly-Swapping
Do people *really* demand choice? Did everyone DEMAND a big choice of window managers and desktop systems? No.. they really didn't... that's just how things evolved.
I use OSX all the time, and I'm traditionally that guy who uses linux and whatever window manager currently catches my eye.
It's not just about lack of choice.. it's about stability of the target. A developer can know clearly what his target audience has when developing applications for OSX. That's hard, with linux.
Though you may feel the classic MacOS environments were about lack of choice, and confining the user to an unchanging experience, that's not the case anymore.
I don't NEED to mess around with every aspect of my GUI.. I know it can be fun.. but if it was well designed in the first place, we would have a lot less people worrying about skinning it. Go look at a room full of OS X users.. most of the desktops look the same. Any one user could quickly make use of any other user's desktop.. and believe me, it's not because skinning and manipulating the GUI is any harder than it is with X (though I"m sure someone will come up with examples of things)
More important is the fact that the OS X Gui is designed *well*. IT's open; you can write apps for it easily. IT WORKS.. if you have never really sat down to use it, and spent an hour or two getting to know it, you don't know even know what a good GUI *IS*, because you've probably never used one. Windows is pale by comparison, KDE as well (it's on par with windows in my books, in terms of usability). Some GNOME setups I've seen are better... more well thought out, not just copying windows... but still a far cry from what Apple has achieved.
If the desktop is well designed, yet extensible, there is no reason to hvae 20 totally different versions floating around.
Also, it's not because the end user doesn't want choice.. tis' because the developer needs a stable target.
Ask yourself: If you want to write a state of the art gui app for linux, that interoprates with the OS properly, drag and drop, print menus, cut and paste, etc... how will you do it? what toolkits and libraries will you choose? KDE? Gnome? Neither, just use TK? Do it totally self contained, so it looks like a uniqe app, sort of like xmms?
That choice is clear with Apple, and clear with Microsoft.
I mean, I'm sure openness is a factor.. but from the beginning, things were this way.
I think it's more about focus.... or maybe lack of focus...
See, the kernel teams worries about the kernel, and exporting usable interfaces to that kernel. Not that interesting to Mom & Pop jones, but of great interest to other developers... like those who, say, build distributions.
MS takes a whole systems approach... the libraries and kernel and everything altogether.. they don't have a group just concened with releasing the best kernel... they have to meet whatever requirements happen internally.
It's flexible because in the open source world, the kernel team doesn't have to compromise for lazy app developers, or vice versa.
They have always done this; typically to get a movie down to a lower rating to increase distribution.
If only a few minor changes will let the movie jump down a notch to PG13, they'll do it.
Note: Blockbuster doesn't edit it themselves, rather, the studio gives blockbuster an edited version.
It's not imaginary, though....
YEs, you could do it with windows, with VMWare, or VPC.. and it would be a lot faster, too.
Remember, VPC on PPC is doing emulation.. not virtualization.
WinXP in VPC on an iBook 800 is damn slow.
WinXP in VPC on a 500 mhz PII is totally usable.
There is a ferry port in Gib.. it's just only used a few days a week.
The airport is hilarious.... one of the trickiest places to land in europe due to the constant winds, and the fact that it stretches into ocean on both sides. It's common for pilots to abort their first or second landing attempt... and equally common for the occupants of the departure lounge to give a standing ovation to the plane when it manages to touch down.
The shitty part is that, if the winds kick up and, say, your flight from London can't land, they have to divert to Tangiers, refuel, then fly to Malaga, Spain, and bus you to Gibraltar... all because Spain refuses to recognize Gibraltar's airport as a commercial airport.
This adds about 3 hours to your travel time, at least. For contrast, if they could simply land in Malaga, wait for the wind to die down, then hop over to Gibraltar, well, it's would only be a 10 minute flight or so.