Public domain code could be distributed under the GPL. The code contributed by the govt would be public domain, and its aggregation with existing code would be under the GPL.
IE, it would be legal to redistribute the public domain code with greater restrictions than the GPL, but it would not be useful until you reimplemented any GPLed functionality that code made use of.
So, if the govt wrote a patch, eg to Linux, that was useless without the existing kernel code, it would take so much effort to reimplement what would be required by this code that it would be effectively GPLed. Ala the NSA security modules.
Thats the popular meme, but developing a usable gui in VB is a complete nightmare.
Many Windows people think that GUI Builder == VB, and there are no other GUI builders. Qt Designer beats the pants off VB, as does Interface Builder on MacOSX, and Glade for GTK2 isn't bad.
The only advantage VB has is third party controls. In any decent recent widget set, the number of times you need these is dwindling, and deriving your own is easy. Especially compared to making a activeX control which actually has functionality. TBH, most activeX controls can be categorised into these three classes: fancy grid, fancy graph area, pointless waste of time.
In short: developing guis in VB is neither quick or easy. It sucks, and VB makes anyone with half a brain want to kill themselves.
Almost all games for the Mac do use OpenGL. And a lot of those are using SDL for input/screen handling etc. For most games, the window system is irrelevant, because they just need input + accelerated fullscreen graphics. Sound is still pretty platform specific, but OpenAL is getting there.
Eventually windows devs are going to realise that using COM from C++ is a complete nightmare, when all you want to do is actually *use* a library. Hopefully they'll start using SDL/OpenGL/OpenAL etc when that happens. Not holding my breath though...
You've completely misunderstood my point. Read it again.
How do you have an attribute of a *directory* with the same name as a child, if they are stored as direct children? In any name mapping you can come up with, there will be a conflict, unless you ban some characters from normal filenames.
ie directory foo, with an attribute bar and a child named..bar. How are they distinguished? This happens whatever you do, you have to ban files beginning ".." or whatever your mapping is. This will break some stuff.
In fact the gimp pretty much needs a pretty major rearchitecture to get it where it needs to be. This is being done in GEGL, the core rewrite for Gimp 2.
The main feature is that of arbitrary color spaces (12/16 bit components, floating point components, CYMK etc ) . From what I can tell, they've implemented thier own template-alike system for acheiving the generic programming techniques this requires. Very efficient polymorphic behaviour almost demands compile time stuff - its just not practical to go through literally millions of function calls when processing a large image. AFIACS, gegl uses a preprocessor to achieve this. The work doesn't appear to be going incredibly fast.
It would have been more interesting to see this written in a non app specific language that supports generic programming like C++ - have a look at Vigra - no i in there! It might be even more interesting, if perhaps restricting to the developer pool, to implement the image processing in an efficiently compilable functional language like Haskell or ML.
I agree with the comments about the gimp interface. I was shocked and saddened when sodipodi adopted the abomination as well... poor gnome.
Quanta + is turning into a pretty damn good web designer thingy - it uses a modified khtml to do Wysiwg or visual page layout as they call it. Thats in cvs. Should be out with KDE 3.2, sometime in the autumn. PHP support is strongest atm, 'twould be good if it got some more JSP and Zope support in there. Maybe even asp.net for mono....
Kivio and Dia are visio like tools. Kivio is getting some active development after a bit of a lull, and Dia has AFAIK been actively developed for quite some time.
I'm surprised at the negativity of some of the comments here, moaning that POSIX semantics are perfect and nothing else can possibly be countenanced...
Plan9 namespaces and Reiser4 really do bring a lot more to the table in terms of useful expanded semantics and utility than all the posix filesystems. Posix extended attributes are very limited, and some filesystem implementors seem to be keen to implement them in the most restricted way possible ( eg size limitations in ext3).
The annoying this with Reiserfs is that the VFS will lag it by a few versions, and very very few apps will make any use of its special system call. Sigh. We'll be stuck with databases in a file for a long while yet.
One thing I would like to know about reiserfs is how attributes are attached to directories? If they are just small files in the "directory" bit of a file, what distinguishes them from children of the directory? Or are attributes just banned from dirs? Seems limiting.
>>> something.__class__ = B >>> something Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
File "", line 6, in __repr__ AttributeError: B instance has no attribute 'monkey' >>>
I can't reconcile that with my view of languages that are strongly typed...
Guido agrees: http://www.artima.com/intv/strongweak2.ht ml
Notice that strongly typed is always used in opposition to python. Here he seems to use it as a synonym for statically typed, as most do.
I love python, I just wouldn't classify it as strongly typed. Its possible to mess around with types a lot, and really screw yourself up. Thats before you go poking in the stack frame. But this is not a normal thing to do in python.
Python is what it is, a dynamically typed language.
And thats good for a whole lot of programming domains.
If Microsoft opened the source to Windows (perhaps 98) tomorrow, Linux would die a quick death or revert back to being a tool of hobbyists.
No, IMO, we'd just have a near perfect wine in about a year... and Linux use would skyrocket. Be honest, have you ever used anything but windows for more than a day? Really? That kind of comment makes me think not.
Re your software point... wtf? You want to ban people making open source applications? How much sense does that make? Law should not there to sustain any particular business models... You shouldn't ban something just because you don't want to do it.
And the research point... IMO, a lot of the interesting research is done in universities. Integration is done within companies. If the majority of the world was on an OSS platform, universities might make more effort to push their research ideas into production. This should certainly be encouraged. Things like HCI are just starting to get enough academic respect to garner reasonable funding.
Universities are funded by government and industry, along with tuition fees. I think thats where the money will come from to fund new research in software too. Industry forums, which produce specs ( ISO, ECMA, etc etc) will probably evolve to also produce and maintain standard open source reference implementations.
But I still think there will be a few niches for proprietary software. Its funny industrys with maybe a couple of hundred players world wide, with very specific needs, that can drive 2 or 3 entire companies. That kind of stuff will stay proprietary for a long while yet...
What, you mean this bug mattered to you, you like paying for stuff, and you DIDN'T offer anything to the Samba team to fix it? Or try and band up with other people vulnerable to this and pay for it?
Why would the Samba team care about this bug more than those that they themselves are vulnerable to, and a large amount of users are vulnerable to? Theres one way to get them to care a lot more, and that is money.
Software is soon to be a service industry. That means you pay for what is important to you. That means the home user isn't subsidising all the features that only matter to big ass systems like yours. If you want to push the envelope, you pay for it.
I'll tell you what pisses off the vast majority of hardware companies:
If a significant number of them act as their customers would like, they will only be able to compete on hardware.
What hardware vendors *should* do is open up the specs to their hardware. If they are especially competitive, fund the development of open source drivers.
The fact is that hardware with well defined and open specs works brilliantly in linux and the BSDs. Thats because the drivers are generally better written, usually because the drivers can share infrastructure and code from drivers from similar hardware, and these drivers are often written by the same people.
Hardware vendors who do not open their specs or write drivers for Linux are writing themselves out of the future.
If a driver is accepted into the mainline kernel, and has an appreciable userbase, its very unlikely that there will be a lot of tech support issues - IF the hardware isn't flaky.
And thats what they hate. A huge amount of vendors make *really* bad hardware. If it becomes known that a bit of hardware works well in linux, more people buy it. As Linux market share increases, *this* PR ( the hardware is actually *good* and *works*) will take over from the MS crap ( the hardware company has some agreement with MS that says *nothing* about the quality of the hardware).
When you GPL something, you do not give it away. You publish it. You retain copyright, but you grant others a distribution licence. If what you are saying is true, it would not be possible to publish information of any kind in Brazil. It may not be possible to put information in the public domain. This has nothing to do with the GPL.
In fact, when I was in Brazil there were a great many publications on sale, split 50/50 between porn ( Brazillian women are *so* hot) and normal stuff.... quite a lot of Linux stuff too.
Remember Jim Allchin swearing under oath in the DOJ trial that revealing Windows source would present National Security problems?
MS is guilty of either treason or perjury. I'm hoping for the former.
On the other hand, the Linux code already has been looked over quite a few times, there are no glaringly obvious faults that its designers would like to hide away. Obviously bugs come about, that what you pay for software with an expanding feature set.
My bag with my 30GB ipod in it was stolen like about a month after buying it.
Bloody irritating - I'm buying a new one and hopefully get something back on my credit card insurance..
The funny thing was is how depressing going to and from work is without it, and the ability to choose ANY of my music to listen to... Apple are making themselves one loyal band of customers with this kind of quality. I just wish they would fully document the iTunesDB, its boring reverse engineering it for every new feature to use on Linux.
Just got to save up for that dual 970 Powerbook when its out;-)
The gimps ui is totally app centered. The "in charge" window is the toolbox.
The gimp could be fixed pretty easily to annoy a lot of people less:
1) Menus across the top of each image window.
The right click to access the main menu is not familiar at all to most people. To fitts law lovers:
when gtk supports universal menus, that will work,
currently, it doesn't.
2) The toolbox should not be the master of the universe -
When the last image is closed, the gimp should close.
But I think the whole thing would be even better off with a "normal" interface, ie like Koffice or Gnumeric, with dockable toolboxes, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Public domain code could be distributed under the GPL.
The code contributed by the govt would be public domain, and its aggregation with existing code would be under the GPL.
IE, it would be legal to redistribute the public domain code with greater restrictions than the GPL, but it would not be useful until you reimplemented any GPLed functionality that code made use of.
So, if the govt wrote a patch, eg to Linux, that was useless without the existing kernel code, it would take so much effort to reimplement what would be required by this code that it would be effectively GPLed. Ala the NSA security modules.
I'm having a hard time believing you.
The case might end around then, but it won't take that long to start.
And the Red Hat case will almost certainly go to court before the IBM one, as its for a declaratory judgement.
I know, IBHT.
Thats the popular meme, but developing a usable gui in VB is a complete nightmare.
Many Windows people think that GUI Builder == VB, and there are no other GUI builders. Qt Designer beats the pants off VB, as does Interface Builder on MacOSX, and Glade for GTK2 isn't bad.
The only advantage VB has is third party controls. In any decent recent widget set, the number of times you need these is dwindling, and deriving your own is easy. Especially compared to making a activeX control which actually has functionality. TBH, most activeX controls can be categorised into these three classes: fancy grid, fancy graph area, pointless waste of time.
In short: developing guis in VB is neither quick or easy. It sucks, and VB makes anyone with half a brain want to kill themselves.
Base ten weenie.
Almost all games for the Mac do use OpenGL.
And a lot of those are using SDL for input/screen handling etc.
For most games, the window system is irrelevant, because they just need input + accelerated fullscreen graphics.
Sound is still pretty platform specific, but OpenAL is getting there.
Eventually windows devs are going to realise that using COM from C++ is a complete nightmare, when all you want to do is actually *use* a library. Hopefully they'll start using SDL/OpenGL/OpenAL etc when that happens. Not holding my breath though...
You've completely misunderstood my point. Read it again.
..bar. How are they distinguished? This happens whatever you do, you have to ban files beginning ".." or whatever your mapping is.
How do you have an attribute of a *directory* with the same name as a child, if they are stored as direct children? In any name mapping you can come up with, there will be a conflict, unless you ban some characters from normal filenames.
ie directory foo, with an attribute bar and a child named
This will break some stuff.
In fact the gimp pretty much needs a pretty major rearchitecture to get it where it needs to be. This is being done in GEGL, the core rewrite for Gimp 2.
The main feature is that of arbitrary color spaces (12/16 bit components, floating point components, CYMK etc ) . From what I can tell, they've implemented thier own template-alike system for acheiving the generic programming techniques this requires. Very efficient polymorphic behaviour almost demands compile time stuff - its just not practical to go through literally millions of function calls when processing a large image. AFIACS, gegl uses a preprocessor to achieve this. The work doesn't appear to be going incredibly fast.
It would have been more interesting to see this written in a non app specific language that supports generic programming like C++ - have a look at Vigra - no i in there!
It might be even more interesting, if perhaps restricting to the developer pool, to implement the image processing in an efficiently compilable functional language like Haskell or ML.
I agree with the comments about the gimp interface. I was shocked and saddened when sodipodi adopted the abomination as well... poor gnome.
Quanta + is turning into a pretty damn good web designer thingy - it uses a modified khtml to do Wysiwg or visual page layout as they call it. Thats in cvs. Should be out with KDE 3.2, sometime in the autumn. PHP support is strongest atm, 'twould be good if it got some more JSP and Zope support in there. Maybe even asp.net for mono....
Kivio and Dia are visio like tools.
Kivio is getting some active development after a bit of a lull, and Dia has AFAIK been actively developed for quite some time.
I'm surprised at the negativity of some of the comments here, moaning that POSIX semantics are perfect and nothing else can possibly be countenanced...
Plan9 namespaces and Reiser4 really do bring a lot more to the table in terms of useful expanded semantics and utility than all the posix filesystems. Posix extended attributes are very limited, and some filesystem implementors seem to be keen to implement them in the most restricted way possible ( eg size limitations in ext3).
The annoying this with Reiserfs is that the VFS will lag it by a few versions, and very very few apps will make any use of its special system call. Sigh. We'll be stuck with databases in a file for a long while yet.
One thing I would like to know about reiserfs is how attributes are attached to directories? If they are just small files in the "directory" bit of a file, what distinguishes them from children of the directory? Or are attributes just banned from dirs? Seems limiting.
I was refuting the parents idea that casting strings around proved python was "stronger" typing than perl...
... def __init__(self, crap): ... self.crap = crap ... ... def __init__(self, monkey): ... self.monkey = monkey ... ... def __repr__(self): ... return self.monkey ...
t ml
>>> class A:
>>> class B:
>>> something = A("thing")
>>> something.__class__
>>> something.__class__ = B
>>> something
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
File "", line 6, in __repr__
AttributeError: B instance has no attribute 'monkey'
>>>
I can't reconcile that with my view of languages that are strongly typed...
Guido agrees:
http://www.artima.com/intv/strongweak2.h
Notice that strongly typed is always used in opposition to python.
Here he seems to use it as a synonym for statically typed, as most do.
I love python, I just wouldn't classify it as strongly typed. Its possible to mess around with types a lot, and really screw yourself up. Thats before you go poking in the stack frame. But this is not a normal thing to do in python.
Python is what it is, a dynamically typed language.
And thats good for a whole lot of programming domains.
If Microsoft opened the source to Windows (perhaps 98) tomorrow, Linux would die a quick death or revert back to being a tool of hobbyists.
No, IMO, we'd just have a near perfect wine in about a year... and Linux use would skyrocket. Be honest, have you ever used anything but windows for more than a day? Really? That kind of comment makes me think not.
Re your software point... wtf? You want to ban people making open source applications? How much sense does that make? Law should not there to sustain any particular business models...
You shouldn't ban something just because you don't want to do it.
And the research point... IMO, a lot of the interesting research is done in universities. Integration is done within companies. If the majority of the world was on an OSS platform, universities might make more effort to push their research ideas into production. This should certainly be encouraged. Things like HCI are just starting to get enough academic respect to garner reasonable funding.
Universities are funded by government and industry, along with tuition fees. I think thats where the money will come from to fund new research in software too. Industry forums, which produce specs ( ISO, ECMA, etc etc) will probably evolve to also produce and maintain standard open source reference implementations.
But I still think there will be a few niches for proprietary software. Its funny industrys with maybe a couple of hundred players world wide, with very specific needs, that can drive 2 or 3 entire companies. That kind of stuff will stay proprietary for a long while yet...
So strings are the be and and end all of your "weakly typed languages coerce types" argument?
python:
>>> 2 + 3.0
5.0
>>> type(3)
< type 'int'>
>>> type(3.0)
< type 'float'>
>>>
So ints are coerced to floats in practice in python. Of course in a multi dispatch langauge + could be defined over Float, Int
If you want a real strongly typed language as in all type errors are detected use Haskell or ML.
You can change the type of an object at runtime via .__class__ right?
You have got to be kidding...
Python is *SO* much easier to read than perl.
Neither python or perl are strongly typed, dumbass.
What, you mean this bug mattered to you, you like paying for stuff, and you DIDN'T offer anything to the Samba team to fix it? Or try and band up with other people vulnerable to this and pay for it?
Why would the Samba team care about this bug more than those that they themselves are vulnerable to, and a large amount of users are vulnerable to? Theres one way to get them to care a lot more, and that is money.
Software is soon to be a service industry. That means you pay for what is important to you. That means the home user isn't subsidising all the features that only matter to big ass systems like yours. If you want to push the envelope, you pay for it.
I'll tell you what pisses off the vast majority of hardware companies:
If a significant number of them act as their customers would like, they will only be able to compete on hardware.
What hardware vendors *should* do is open up the specs to their hardware. If they are especially competitive, fund the development of open source drivers.
The fact is that hardware with well defined and open specs works brilliantly in linux and the BSDs. Thats because the drivers are generally better written, usually because the drivers can share infrastructure and code from drivers from similar hardware, and these drivers are often written by the same people.
Hardware vendors who do not open their specs or write drivers for Linux are writing themselves out of the future.
If a driver is accepted into the mainline kernel, and has an appreciable userbase, its very unlikely that there will be a lot of tech support issues - IF the hardware isn't flaky.
And thats what they hate. A huge amount of vendors make *really* bad hardware. If it becomes known that a bit of hardware works well in linux, more people buy it. As Linux market share increases, *this* PR ( the hardware is actually *good* and *works*) will take over from the MS crap ( the hardware company has some agreement with MS that says *nothing* about the quality of the hardware).
I know which kind of PR I take more seriously.
Wow, you can deadlock the kernel by inserting random code into the kernel ( vmware binary kernel modules)? Thats amazing!!
As soon as you mess with binary kernel modules you can not expect Linux to guarantee stability, the modules could do anything they like. Really.
When you GPL something, you do not give it away.
You publish it. You retain copyright, but you grant others a distribution licence.
If what you are saying is true, it would not be possible to publish information of any kind in Brazil. It may not be possible to put information in the public domain. This has nothing to do with the GPL.
In fact, when I was in Brazil there were a great many publications on sale, split 50/50 between porn ( Brazillian women are *so* hot) and normal stuff.... quite a lot of Linux stuff too.
No, it uses libdvdcss, which is very hard to call illegal. It cracks the css keys for any DVD you put in.
DeCSS was questionably a derivative work of Xings DVD player as it used the keys.
Are there any claims against libdvdcss that you know of? It'd be pretty damn hard to make it stick. In the free world, that is.....
Remember Jim Allchin swearing under oath in the DOJ trial that revealing Windows source would present National Security problems?
MS is guilty of either treason or perjury. I'm hoping for the former.
On the other hand, the Linux code already has been looked over quite a few times, there are no glaringly obvious faults that its designers would like to hide away. Obviously bugs come about, that what you pay for software with an expanding feature set.
build your own CDN ($$$)
Build your own Canadian dollar? I know its a weak currency, but thats going a bit far....
My bag with my 30GB ipod in it was stolen like about a month after buying it.
;-)
Bloody irritating - I'm buying a new one and hopefully get something back on my credit card insurance..
The funny thing was is how depressing going to and from work is without it, and the ability to choose ANY of my music to listen to...
Apple are making themselves one loyal band of customers with this kind of quality. I just wish they would fully document the iTunesDB, its boring reverse engineering it for every new feature to use on Linux.
Just got to save up for that dual 970 Powerbook when its out
The gimps ui is totally app centered. The "in charge" window is the toolbox.
:
The gimp could be fixed pretty easily to annoy a lot of people less:
1) Menus across the top of each image window.
The right click to access the main menu is not familiar at all to most people. To fitts law lovers
when gtk supports universal menus, that will work,
currently, it doesn't.
2) The toolbox should not be the master of the universe -
When the last image is closed, the gimp should close.
But I think the whole thing would be even better off with a "normal" interface, ie like Koffice or Gnumeric, with dockable toolboxes, etc.
That is not real CYMK.
That will come in Gimp 2, along with toolkit independence.
Look up the elastic limit. Materials do not necessarily plasticly deform with any shape change.