Well, it had a negative effect on me after I was killed by "friendly" fire after lobbing a smoke grenade into a room that was suspected of being a hideout, as preparation to bursting in.:-/
HP is a big enough company that if they put out a real gaming machine, with really good specs for a good price, I'm sure it wouldn't go unnoticed.
...Possibly unintentionally by HP's business customers too, thus diluting their brand amongst that class of customers: "oh, HP's the company that makes those gaming laptops - we'll drop those from consideration".
Then again, it doesn't seem to have done Microsoft or Sony any harm...
I have a feeling that aside from drives that are dead out of the box, the huge majority of problems that people are experiencing are a combonation of crappy drivers/firmware, and crappy heat management.
Along with poor packaging by vendors and poor handling by couriers.
Luckily, all the vendors I've used recently have boxed each drive in a wrap-around foam cage, in an individual box. I've heard horror stories of vendors shipping drives in the anti-static bag, with a handful of 'peanuts' in a large box, or worse, though!
While WD's 500GB RE2 has some of the best stats on the charts, the reliability reviews (at least on Newegg) are dismal.
I've read some of those reviews, and it seems many folks are misunderstanding and/or misapplying WD's RAID Edition drives, presumably because they haven't read the datasheet. Put simply, they are not intended to be used as single drives or in RAID0 configurations, and will be less reliable than regular 'desktop' drives (e.g. WD's 'Special Edition' models) in these roles. My understanding is that the RE drives are also not really suitable for mirrored RAID levels (e.g. RAID1, RAID10) either, and are only intended for use with parity-based RAID levels (RAID5, "RAID6") where missing data that was unable to be read from one device can be reconstructed from the remaining devices.
Sadly, this matches with my own experiences with WD.
I've done OK with WD. I bought three of their 80GB Special Edition drives in 2002, and they've been fine and are still working. I'd probably still be buying them, if Seagate hadn't increased their standard warranty across their entire range to 5 years (Special Editions have 3 years, most other 'desktop' HDDs have 1 year).
Remember also that blocks on HDDs do become unreadable from time to time, and that with the sizes of modern units, the probability of this happening to a block that's occupied by a file you care about is quite high. No problem, though, just re-write the block (e.g. by removing the file, then filling the filesystem with a dummy file to cause all unallocated blocks to be re-written) and the drive's firmware will relocate the block to one of the reserved blocks set aside for this purpose. Many people are overly paranoid and consider a HDD to be 'dying' the first time they see a read error.
What worries me is that, at some point, the Russian government wasn't able to pay all it's employees' wages.
Frankly, given that Russia is paying off all its debts using the unexpectedly high profits from its fossil fuel industries, and the USA is increasing its national debt, I'm be more worried about the USA being unable to pay all its employees wages!
Which brings us to another issue: fusion bombs. All the distructive power, none of the long-lasting ill effects. "Clean" nuclear weapons, so to speak. I wonder how their entrance into widespread use, which will happen at some point
Fusion bombs are already in use, known as Hydrogen Bombs. The fusion reaction is initiated by a fission reaction. Radiation is still a problem.
I just hope that the next generation of battery technolgy is inherently less likely to explode.
I'm not a chemist, but I don't think that's possible.
There are already tweaked Li-Ion battery chemistries that are comparable with Li-Ion for energy density, but which the manufacturer asserts is safer than plain Li-Ion, for example, Saphion.
I think students do have a genuine complaint that their intellectual property is being handed over to a third party company without their permission, and this company is using that I.P. to make a profit by turning around and charging schools for the privelage of searching through the database they've helped build.
The students in question may want to check their university's code of conduct and related documents. When I was at university (1992-1995), it asserted intellectual property rights over all its students' work. You could in theory refuse this, but then they'd terminate your course. If it was like that over a decade ago, and in the UK even, I'm sure the universities have things thoroughly buttoned-up by now.
Regardless, the case against Ethel Rosenberg was strong. It was strong enough to have her executed even without the VENONA decrypts being brought up at trial.
Interestingly, Haynes & Kleher are of the opinion that although the VENONA messages "confirm that she was a participant [...] [b]ut they suggest that she was essentially an accessory to her husband's activity, having knowledge of it and assisting him but not acting as a principal." and that "It is also unlikely, had the messages been made public or circulated more widely within the government than they did, that Ethel Rosenberg would have been executed" (p. 15/16).
It would be easy to have heard something that contradicted this.
This was a recent BBC docu-drama ("Days That Shook the World: The Cost of Betrayal") that mentioned the VENONA intercepts, that they implicated Ethel's brother and husband, but that they left some doubt as to her involvement and knowledge. I'm not foolish enough to believe everything in a docu-drama, which is why I looked for some sort of official confirmation of that conclusion before posting - like from the NSA, for instance.:-)
I hate when people throw this out all the time. Yes, they are innocent until proven guilty. He didn't round up the Rosenbergs and throw them in jail without trial. He is not a government official making an official statement. He has an opinion, a very distinct opinion, and he stated it.
No, he stated as a fact that the VENONA intercepts showed that the Rosenbergs (plural) were "obviously guilty", which contradicted what I knew about the case (which could have been wrong or mis-remembered), and what was confirmed by the NSA article. That was a wrongful assertion which I felt needed to be corrected, or at least stated rather more cautiously. Of course, these days, "trial by intuition" and "guilty until proven innocent" seem to be the fashion, as I was disappointed to find out when I performed jury service earlier this year.
You're one of the many that doesn't understand the "seperation of church and state" clause also, aren't you?
You're one of the many who assumes that everyone who posts to Slashdot is an American, just because they have some knowledge of the US constitution, laws, history and customs, right?:-P
Where I live (a constitutional monarchy), the head of state is also the head of the Church of England, therefore we have no seperation of church and state.
But yes, I'd expect you're the kind of person who probably has the opinion of me that I'm one who doesn't understand that clause in the US constitution, since I strongly believe in a secular state, but one which allows people to practice whatever religion they follow (or no religion at all) as long as it harms no other person. This belief follows from a) the violence perpetrated centuries ago by the religion into which I was born when it did have political power and b) the fact that despite no longer practicing that religion, I am offended by the principle that in a supposedly modern democracy, a 300 year old discriminatory law would still apply to me, simply because of my ancestry.
Even though the intel was germane to the FBI prosecutions of several traitors, including the Rosenbergs (who were very obviously guilty after having read the Venona decrypts.
Even the NSA doesn't go quite that far; in this article they only claim the intercepts show that Ethel " may have known about her husband's activities" (my emphasis).
1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict. Wtf? Codecs for avi's and DVDs were a simular story; all had to be downloaded via yum (bloody excellent tool!). Seriously; not good, but fixed in the end.
Blame the patent holders for making veiled threats to sue infringing parties, and to a lesser extent, the Fedora Project for not wanting to get sued for something they don't make any money from giving away.
2. Why the hell do I have to install a new kernel? Why? I've never had to on Windows - why is Linux different? Is it so buggy? I installed with a factory version something ending 054. Now I have something ending 122 I believe. I did it ok, but that's not the point I'm making; were there really 68 cock-ups so great in the kernel build from release-time until that now they had to re-release 68 times? I'm guessing probablly not, but still.
The release number simply indicates the number of internal builds the kernel has experienced between releases. You often see this in the least significant decimal in Microsoft version numbers also. And, I'm sure Microsoft have released a few updates to KERNEL.DLL in their time...
3. Point 2 also breaks my nvidia drivers. I don't want to re-compile new drivers everytime there's a new 'patch'. For the love of god, why?!
If you boil it down, because nVidia think that they're more important than the rest of the developers that write your Operating System and don't think they should share, even though everyone else is. Technically, this is because Linus and Co. won't agree a standard internal API for the kernel, since FOSS kernel-space code doesn't really need it, and they disagree with nVidia's opinion of themselves. Also, they feel it would limit their flexibility to rework kernel internals to solve problems and introduce new features.
4. X-Windows. What a mess. Why do I have to tell it my x & y refresh rates for my monitor? Windows just 'knows'. Many more things here I feel that X-Windows should just 'know' - the number of buttons on my USB mouse for-instance. If Windows can do it, there's no reason why Linux can't. Also, X-Windows 'feels' slower than Windows. I'm sure there's good reasons for this, but I don't care; Windows is snappier.
Most of those X's settings can be autoprobed these days. Frankly, I'm surprised you had to tell it anything, given you claim to be using a recent version of Fedora. Certainly, X can use DDC to get specification information directly from your monitor via the VGA cable, if your monitor supports it. Regarding performance, if you're using Free drivers, then as they're often reverse-engineered, it may be that they're not using your video hardware as optimally as the manufacturer's own drivers do under Windows. Also, they may be taking less shortcuts and be more reliable than the manufacturer's own drivers. nVidia's closed drivers should perform identically, if not a little faster under Linux, than under Windows, as the vast majority of the code is identical.
5. Lack of decent file-browser. The best I've come across is Nautilus in a mode that resembles Windows Explorer. It'll do for now, but as far as I'm aware, offers no context-sensitive menus for applications (like the Winamp "Play in Winamp" right-click menu on folders.
Nautilus in FC3 offers that facility; right-click and you get a default 'Open With' option, an 'Open With' submenu with every application that's correctly registered what filetypes it handles, and a manual 'Open With Other Application' option which allows you to manually specify an application (I'm pretty sure this is recorded for future use also).
Lens is 90% of your picture. Camera quality the next 8% and megapixels make up the last 2%
On a digicam, I'd say that the preset JPEG quality settings make up at least 50%, reducing the lens' importance to ~40%. If you can shoot raw or TIFF, that's an option, but it'll dramatically increase the cost of storage, and, in the case of raw, the time and effort it takes to get usable pictures. One of the things I look for is a demo shot that includes a leafy tree, to see whether the "best quality" JPEG settings over-compress the image, reducing the leaves to a blotchy green mess.
Metcalfe's Law explains well why a cellular network grows rapidly.
Not really, as you can dial into and out of the cellular network from/to an existing landline network.
People buy mobile phones because they see value in them; whether that's witnessing first hand the usefulness of being able to be contacted (nearly) anywhere on the planet, or simply being seen to be important enough to have a mobile phone. The value isn't really brought from the network itself, though.
But the subject isn't about a MythTV DVR at all. It's ONLY about playing DVDs, so you can omit the TV tuner cards, and go with the smallest hard drive you can find. You also don't need an infrared keyboard/mouse, just a simple remote.
Sure, but the article's recommendation was to "get rid of your DVD player and connect a media centre PC to your LCD television!", and I think that these days, "media centre PC" is defined as to include at least a single TV capture card and a large enough HDD to facilitate recordings.
But pedantic nitpicking aside, if you were to build or buy a PC for DVD playback, anyone with a shred of economic wisdom would surely invest the extra ~50% to allow it to perform all the other duties; music jukebox, games console, PVR, etc. ? This was the approach I took instead of buying a pile of seperate AV appliances to do these things.
$300 for a media center PC sounds like a great deal. Do you have a link to where I can buy one at that price?
Realistically I think we're talking about a $1000-$2000 media center PC vs. $1000-$2000 high-end DVD player.
My MythTV box is only a 256MB DDR/64MB nVidia MX440/Celeron 1.7 that used to be my 'scratch' machine (it wasn't getting used much, so I repurposed it). That machine cost about 300 GBP to build in 2002, but you could probably buy a low-end Dell for 200 GBP today that would be better. To it, I added 2 Hauppauge Nova-T DVB-T cards (40 GBP each), an Infra-Red keyboard/mousepad (17 GBP), a DVD-everything writer (20 GBP) and a 300GB disc (70 GBP), so I think a feasible cost for a MythTV media PC today is 400 GBP or about US$800. Not quite US$300, admittedly, but less than your US$1000-2000 estimate.
I'd just loaded a disc and the drive was just spinning it up when there was a 'pop' and the disc spun down. At that point, it disappeared off the ATA bus and every attempt to access it generated ATA errors. There was a slight smell of burning, so I shut down and opened the drive; sure enough, an IC (some kind of servo controller if I remember correctly) had ejected its die through the resin.
By a developer making his libraries "free" only under the GPL (and not a more free license like the MIT/BSD or even LGPL), then he's forcing anyone that wants to use this shiny tool to also make their software free under the same restrictions. That is why the GPL is "viral" -- not because it "infects" any software that it is stored next to -- but rather because GPL code is useless unless you're working on other GPL'd code.
"Mere aggregation" (i.e. storing GPLed software next to non-GPLed software) doesn't 'infect' the non-GPLed software. Otherwise, Linux distributions would have forced all those non-GPLed projects (Xorg/XFree86, Apache, Perl, Python,...) into GPL-space years ago.
Linking against a GPLed library (or object file) is a whole different matter, and is a short-term tactic to ensure that only GPL-compatibly-licensed software can gain the benefit of powerful and/or unique features included in said GPLed libraries. In a way, it's anti-competitive, but it's one of the few ways the Free Software community has of fighting back against offensive proprietary software authors.
Now, I'm not going to defend the use of the GPL wholesale for libraries and similar software; the question of whether to choose GPL, LGPL or MIT/BSD depends on what the code is intended to do. If I was creating something that was intended to be a canonical implementation of a file format or network protocol that I would like to see become widely-used and deployed, I'd probably use a MIT/BSD license for it.
There's nothing forcing you to use the GPL license on your own code unless you're including someone else's GPLed code in it. In that case, you're getting presumably good software for free, with only that one condition. If you don't like it, find some other code to use.
Heck, or study the GPL'ed code and use it to write your own functional equivalent and license that as you see fit. That's allowed under the GPL, and is a right that proprietary libraries etc. don't usually offer.
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...or even Wordpad!
Well, it had a negative effect on me after I was killed by "friendly" fire after lobbing a smoke grenade into a room that was suspected of being a hideout, as preparation to bursting in. :-/
Then again, it doesn't seem to have done Microsoft or Sony any harm...
Along with poor packaging by vendors and poor handling by couriers.
Luckily, all the vendors I've used recently have boxed each drive in a wrap-around foam cage, in an individual box. I've heard horror stories of vendors shipping drives in the anti-static bag, with a handful of 'peanuts' in a large box, or worse, though!
I've read some of those reviews, and it seems many folks are misunderstanding and/or misapplying WD's RAID Edition drives, presumably because they haven't read the datasheet. Put simply, they are not intended to be used as single drives or in RAID0 configurations, and will be less reliable than regular 'desktop' drives (e.g. WD's 'Special Edition' models) in these roles. My understanding is that the RE drives are also not really suitable for mirrored RAID levels (e.g. RAID1, RAID10) either, and are only intended for use with parity-based RAID levels (RAID5, "RAID6") where missing data that was unable to be read from one device can be reconstructed from the remaining devices.
Sadly, this matches with my own experiences with WD.
I've done OK with WD. I bought three of their 80GB Special Edition drives in 2002, and they've been fine and are still working. I'd probably still be buying them, if Seagate hadn't increased their standard warranty across their entire range to 5 years (Special Editions have 3 years, most other 'desktop' HDDs have 1 year).
Remember also that blocks on HDDs do become unreadable from time to time, and that with the sizes of modern units, the probability of this happening to a block that's occupied by a file you care about is quite high. No problem, though, just re-write the block (e.g. by removing the file, then filling the filesystem with a dummy file to cause all unallocated blocks to be re-written) and the drive's firmware will relocate the block to one of the reserved blocks set aside for this purpose. Many people are overly paranoid and consider a HDD to be 'dying' the first time they see a read error.
Frankly, given that Russia is paying off all its debts using the unexpectedly high profits from its fossil fuel industries, and the USA is increasing its national debt, I'm be more worried about the USA being unable to pay all its employees wages!
Fusion bombs are already in use, known as Hydrogen Bombs. The fusion reaction is initiated by a fission reaction. Radiation is still a problem.
I'm not a chemist, but I don't think that's possible.
There are already tweaked Li-Ion battery chemistries that are comparable with Li-Ion for energy density, but which the manufacturer asserts is safer than plain Li-Ion, for example, Saphion.
The students in question may want to check their university's code of conduct and related documents. When I was at university (1992-1995), it asserted intellectual property rights over all its students' work. You could in theory refuse this, but then they'd terminate your course. If it was like that over a decade ago, and in the UK even, I'm sure the universities have things thoroughly buttoned-up by now.
No worries; it's been an informative and educational discussion, and you kept it civil. :-)
Why? What does it gain the Free/Open Source/Linux community to do so?
Interestingly, Haynes & Kleher are of the opinion that although the VENONA messages "confirm that she was a participant [...] [b]ut they suggest that she was essentially an accessory to her husband's activity, having knowledge of it and assisting him but not acting as a principal." and that "It is also unlikely, had the messages been made public or circulated more widely within the government than they did, that Ethel Rosenberg would have been executed" (p. 15/16).
This was a recent BBC docu-drama ("Days That Shook the World: The Cost of Betrayal") that mentioned the VENONA intercepts, that they implicated Ethel's brother and husband, but that they left some doubt as to her involvement and knowledge. I'm not foolish enough to believe everything in a docu-drama, which is why I looked for some sort of official confirmation of that conclusion before posting - like from the NSA, for instance. :-)
I hate when people throw this out all the time. Yes, they are innocent until proven guilty. He didn't round up the Rosenbergs and throw them in jail without trial. He is not a government official making an official statement. He has an opinion, a very distinct opinion, and he stated it.
No, he stated as a fact that the VENONA intercepts showed that the Rosenbergs (plural) were "obviously guilty", which contradicted what I knew about the case (which could have been wrong or mis-remembered), and what was confirmed by the NSA article. That was a wrongful assertion which I felt needed to be corrected, or at least stated rather more cautiously. Of course, these days, "trial by intuition" and "guilty until proven innocent" seem to be the fashion, as I was disappointed to find out when I performed jury service earlier this year.
You're one of the many that doesn't understand the "seperation of church and state" clause also, aren't you?
You're one of the many who assumes that everyone who posts to Slashdot is an American, just because they have some knowledge of the US constitution, laws, history and customs, right? :-P
Where I live (a constitutional monarchy), the head of state is also the head of the Church of England, therefore we have no seperation of church and state.
But yes, I'd expect you're the kind of person who probably has the opinion of me that I'm one who doesn't understand that clause in the US constitution, since I strongly believe in a secular state, but one which allows people to practice whatever religion they follow (or no religion at all) as long as it harms no other person. This belief follows from a) the violence perpetrated centuries ago by the religion into which I was born when it did have political power and b) the fact that despite no longer practicing that religion, I am offended by the principle that in a supposedly modern democracy, a 300 year old discriminatory law would still apply to me, simply because of my ancestry.
Even the NSA doesn't go quite that far; in this article they only claim the intercepts show that Ethel " may have known about her husband's activities" (my emphasis).
Innocent until proven guilty, right?
1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict. Wtf? Codecs for avi's and DVDs were a simular story; all had to be downloaded via yum (bloody excellent tool!). Seriously; not good, but fixed in the end.
Blame the patent holders for making veiled threats to sue infringing parties, and to a lesser extent, the Fedora Project for not wanting to get sued for something they don't make any money from giving away.
2. Why the hell do I have to install a new kernel? Why? I've never had to on Windows - why is Linux different? Is it so buggy? I installed with a factory version something ending 054. Now I have something ending 122 I believe. I did it ok, but that's not the point I'm making; were there really 68 cock-ups so great in the kernel build from release-time until that now they had to re-release 68 times? I'm guessing probablly not, but still.
The release number simply indicates the number of internal builds the kernel has experienced between releases. You often see this in the least significant decimal in Microsoft version numbers also. And, I'm sure Microsoft have released a few updates to KERNEL.DLL in their time...
3. Point 2 also breaks my nvidia drivers. I don't want to re-compile new drivers everytime there's a new 'patch'. For the love of god, why?!
If you boil it down, because nVidia think that they're more important than the rest of the developers that write your Operating System and don't think they should share, even though everyone else is. Technically, this is because Linus and Co. won't agree a standard internal API for the kernel, since FOSS kernel-space code doesn't really need it, and they disagree with nVidia's opinion of themselves. Also, they feel it would limit their flexibility to rework kernel internals to solve problems and introduce new features.
4. X-Windows. What a mess. Why do I have to tell it my x & y refresh rates for my monitor? Windows just 'knows'. Many more things here I feel that X-Windows should just 'know' - the number of buttons on my USB mouse for-instance. If Windows can do it, there's no reason why Linux can't. Also, X-Windows 'feels' slower than Windows. I'm sure there's good reasons for this, but I don't care; Windows is snappier.
Most of those X's settings can be autoprobed these days. Frankly, I'm surprised you had to tell it anything, given you claim to be using a recent version of Fedora. Certainly, X can use DDC to get specification information directly from your monitor via the VGA cable, if your monitor supports it. Regarding performance, if you're using Free drivers, then as they're often reverse-engineered, it may be that they're not using your video hardware as optimally as the manufacturer's own drivers do under Windows. Also, they may be taking less shortcuts and be more reliable than the manufacturer's own drivers. nVidia's closed drivers should perform identically, if not a little faster under Linux, than under Windows, as the vast majority of the code is identical.
5. Lack of decent file-browser. The best I've come across is Nautilus in a mode that resembles Windows Explorer. It'll do for now, but as far as I'm aware, offers no context-sensitive menus for applications (like the Winamp "Play in Winamp" right-click menu on folders.
Nautilus in FC3 offers that facility; right-click and you get a default 'Open With' option, an 'Open With' submenu with every application that's correctly registered what filetypes it handles, and a manual 'Open With Other Application' option which allows you to manually specify an application (I'm pretty sure this is recorded for future use also).
I'm 99.99% sure that ALL modern PATA, SATA and SCSI drives have reserved blocks.
On a digicam, I'd say that the preset JPEG quality settings make up at least 50%, reducing the lens' importance to ~40%. If you can shoot raw or TIFF, that's an option, but it'll dramatically increase the cost of storage, and, in the case of raw, the time and effort it takes to get usable pictures. One of the things I look for is a demo shot that includes a leafy tree, to see whether the "best quality" JPEG settings over-compress the image, reducing the leaves to a blotchy green mess.
Not all Hauppauge cards; my MythTV box works flawlessly with a pair of Hauppauge Nova-T DVB-T cards and a FC4 base OS.
Not really, as you can dial into and out of the cellular network from/to an existing landline network.
People buy mobile phones because they see value in them; whether that's witnessing first hand the usefulness of being able to be contacted (nearly) anywhere on the planet, or simply being seen to be important enough to have a mobile phone. The value isn't really brought from the network itself, though.
Sure, but the article's recommendation was to "get rid of your DVD player and connect a media centre PC to your LCD television!", and I think that these days, "media centre PC" is defined as to include at least a single TV capture card and a large enough HDD to facilitate recordings.
But pedantic nitpicking aside, if you were to build or buy a PC for DVD playback, anyone with a shred of economic wisdom would surely invest the extra ~50% to allow it to perform all the other duties; music jukebox, games console, PVR, etc. ? This was the approach I took instead of buying a pile of seperate AV appliances to do these things.
Realistically I think we're talking about a $1000-$2000 media center PC vs. $1000-$2000 high-end DVD player.
My MythTV box is only a 256MB DDR/64MB nVidia MX440/Celeron 1.7 that used to be my 'scratch' machine (it wasn't getting used much, so I repurposed it). That machine cost about 300 GBP to build in 2002, but you could probably buy a low-end Dell for 200 GBP today that would be better. To it, I added 2 Hauppauge Nova-T DVB-T cards (40 GBP each), an Infra-Red keyboard/mousepad (17 GBP), a DVD-everything writer (20 GBP) and a 300GB disc (70 GBP), so I think a feasible cost for a MythTV media PC today is 400 GBP or about US$800. Not quite US$300, admittedly, but less than your US$1000-2000 estimate.
I'd just loaded a disc and the drive was just spinning it up when there was a 'pop' and the disc spun down. At that point, it disappeared off the ATA bus and every attempt to access it generated ATA errors. There was a slight smell of burning, so I shut down and opened the drive; sure enough, an IC (some kind of servo controller if I remember correctly) had ejected its die through the resin.
"Mere aggregation" (i.e. storing GPLed software next to non-GPLed software) doesn't 'infect' the non-GPLed software. Otherwise, Linux distributions would have forced all those non-GPLed projects (Xorg/XFree86, Apache, Perl, Python, ...) into GPL-space years ago.
Linking against a GPLed library (or object file) is a whole different matter, and is a short-term tactic to ensure that only GPL-compatibly-licensed software can gain the benefit of powerful and/or unique features included in said GPLed libraries. In a way, it's anti-competitive, but it's one of the few ways the Free Software community has of fighting back against offensive proprietary software authors.
Now, I'm not going to defend the use of the GPL wholesale for libraries and similar software; the question of whether to choose GPL, LGPL or MIT/BSD depends on what the code is intended to do. If I was creating something that was intended to be a canonical implementation of a file format or network protocol that I would like to see become widely-used and deployed, I'd probably use a MIT/BSD license for it.
Heck, or study the GPL'ed code and use it to write your own functional equivalent and license that as you see fit. That's allowed under the GPL, and is a right that proprietary libraries etc. don't usually offer.