I've got a couple of GPL'ed projects (Avantslash, Tellyguide, MovieGuide) and whilst they have a reasonable amount of usage, when it breaks, everyone sits around and waits until I fix it.
So much for the wonderful idea of many eyes helping me out. Maybe with large projects (although I doubt it, tending to think that you only get a small number of people who actually contribute anything) but for the projects like mine it just doesn't happen.
I've got a crappy FAQ script which I'm rewriting and will also go under the GPL. At the moment it's under some wierdass restrictive job because at the time (1999) I didn't properly understand the GPL and how cool an idea it is - the rewrite will be GPL'ed but i don't expect to be inundated with patches, suggestions and code.
Recently I mooted my SMS application eGenie as going GPL in the next version. I got 1 person interested and 50 people emailing me demanding I give them the code - no, they weren't interested in helping out - they just wanted the code. Bah, sod that then.
I'm fully aware of the Cathedral and Bazar idealogy, but when there is no-one in the Cathedral and you're the only person giving in the Bazar, GPL suddenly doesn't seem to be this wonderful solution to bugs, features and support.
This is probably the wrong place to post it, but IE is my browser of choice. I don't like Opera's inability to render PRE tags to the right size and iffy javascript handling and I unfortunately don't have 20 hours to sit around to download Mozilla at 2k/sec on my modem.
However, I have found Crazy Browser which is a replacement for IE using the IE rendering engine.
In fact thats what I'm using now and for a 690k download, it's lovely. Full support for websites (even those with iffy HTML), tabbed interface, Windows XP theme support, popup filter and a really nifty feature which indicates when pages have changed in your links list.
It's also free (as in beer). Having access to the source doesn't bother me (and 90% of the population) in the slightest since I wouldn't understand a word of it or really look at it.
I appreciate that this is a geek site and therefore most people won't touch IE with a barge pole but if you do like IE (and I do) but want tabbed browsing then check it out.
As far as I'm concerned, it does everything that I'd use in Opera, so therefore I don't really see the point in paying for Opera. Granted they've done a fine job - but it's just not for me.
Here's another fun way to use Linux to eliminate yet another proprietary solution, kids!
Shouldn't that be "Here's another fun way to use Linux to convert a documented into a proprietary format without paying anything to Adobe which, in turn, will only help strengthen their belief that porting their applications to Linux is pointless because they get the impression that people wouldn't buy it as they're using the 'free' concept to disguise the fact that they're a bunch of freeloaders"?
I'm all for the reduction of proprietary file formats, but this doesn't reduce it's usage, merely ends up hurting the company that could, through it's applications, help Linux.
Whilst I'm very impressed with the winner the entry "Robust Hyperlinks" is something that do like a lot.
What would be cool, would be the option to right click on the hyperlink and have the option "Find alternative location".
Or even cooler, have IE (or your favourite browser) on putting up the 404 message have a hyperlink which does the same. Hell, easy enough to do with apache.
What you are proposing would make sense if the compaanies had merged. They didn't. All they did was agree to a certain level of interoperability. So there are still x distinct distros.
They don't have to merge to provide a unified product to the end user. Just bolting "Unified Linux" to the end of their products won't, in the eyes of most, make much difference.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have one brand identity "United Linux" rather than having "Caldera - United Linux", "TurboLinux - United Linux" and so on?
To a large number of people who aren't utter Linux fanatics and don't read/. or other Linux sites to actually understand why, Linux appears fragmented and inconsistent because of the sheer number of players. To remove 4 from the pool of 15 odd companies and come back with one united brand would help against Redhat and Microsoft.
Essentially saying "well you can go with Microsoft OR Redhat or United Linux". Rather than "you can go with Microsoft OR Redhat or Calerda or TurboLinux or Suse or..."
By contrast, you simply say that what he thinks of as free is not free. Care to give us your definition?
This is version 1.0 of the as-truely-free-as-we-can-possibly-make-it licence:
You are free to modify, change, hack, break, tweek, redistribute, copy, broadcast this code as you see fit.
You agree that if something goes wrong, either through direct or indirect usage of the program that you don't hold the authors liable. You use this at your own risk
That is a totally free licence as far as I'm concerned (well, as totally free as I can think without making my life hell).
Sure, it sucks in the sense that someone can take your hard work, change a few credits, make it closed source and sell it - but then thats just a side effect of its totally free nature.
Contratry to popular belief, the GPL does not give you utter freedom. It too has restrictions to protect the work of others (which is a good thing) but it can never be called totally free.
My only problem with it, is that if I am using it for free, I am _forced_ to upgrade when new versions become available.
So pay up and quit whining about it.
You're getting something for free, nothing, nada, zip that someone else has spent time and effort on, why are people not appreciative of this fact any more?
You don't go whinging about a free beer your mate gives you do you? And yes, even that beer will come with conditions (like you're supposed to drink it with him).
As a result, not only will they suffer from not having security udpates, but the rest of the internet will suffer from their vulnerable machines when the next Code Red comes around.
Despite the "horribly irresponsible" comment which is a load of rubbish, this point is pretty important.
If people are running a pirated version of XP and install SP1 and are prevented from applying any fixes then the next time some virus starts crawling all over the web that requires a patch to be applied then they won't be able to apply it.
This means that the virus will stay rampant in the wild for longer because a large number of people won't patch it because they can't.
Having said that, getting SP1 to just prevent WinXP from running again causes just the same problems. People with cracked keys won't run the SP update - but at least they will be able to use the emergency patches MS often requires releasing.
What if you decided to give up watching it for a year? Do you still have to pay?
As long as you own a TV set, then you have to pay for it irrespective of whether you watch it or not. There was a case years ago of a guy hacking his TV so it could only get Cable to avoid paying the TV licence - he got away with it, but they fixed that loophole pretty quickly.
What if you have more than one TV?
The one licence covers all TV's in the house. However if you're in a block of flats, student accomodation or anywhere where unrelated people have seperate rooms, then each person who owns a TV set has to buy one.
When ever we go over to the US we are always amazed by how much advertising you have on. Its continual. I think that the US consumer ought to be asking for a better deal than its getting.
A good point. We get approximately 3 minutes of adverts for every 15 minutes of television. So in an half hour programme you'll have one advert break and in a whole hour you'll (only) have three interruptions.
Any more than that and TV will start becoming a turn off. Which would explain that, whilst they're selling, PVR's in the UK aren't as popular as they are in the US.
Gee, and I thought that paying for cable in the first place was meant to eliminate the need for commercial spots.
Not really, it's a suppliment. The rest of the money comes from... you guessed it... adverts. If they really did scrap all adverts, then your monthly fee would skyrocket to the point that it would be horrendiously expensive and no-one would be prepared to pay for it.
Again, I point out that it only works in the UK because:
The BBC don't get into bidding wars for popular programmes - they just pick up the stuff years later when the cost is down
The BBC do a lot of home-grown stuff which, whilst still being expensive, is cheaper than buying it from other companies
The BBC then sell these programmes to others to recoup costs (Tellytubbies is one popular example)
Everyone who owns a TV in Britain is forced to purchase a licence by law. Thats a lot of people and a lot of money.
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
He does have a point. A large amount of the funding of programmes comes from adverts. If advertisers don't use it any more because they're not seeing a return on costs then they won't bother.
Here in the UK we pay a shade over 100 pounds ($150) a year to have a couple of advert free TV channels and a number of advert free radio stations. Yes, they still push out rubbish, but our rubbish is still of a higher quality than elsewhere in the world.
It is worth noting though that it only works because everyone is forced to pay this by law if they own a TV set.
How can Kazaa continue? I was always led to believe that it wasn't true peer-to-peer as you had to sign onto their servers.
Surely if they go down, then all the clients will have nowhere to connect and hence not be able to locate other people connected on it. Unlike Gnutella in which each user maintains a list of nodes and tries all of them until it finds one connected in which to pull off other nodes.
This would also explain why the need to "log on" to kazaa and why it's relativily (compaired to Gnutella) fast to find the nodes.
As much as I hate to point it out, if you really don't like the EULA for any product, just don't buy, download and use it.
So this EULA says that anything you create is basically theirs? Yes, it sucks. But that's the conditions and you have two choices. Either you agree to it, or you don't.
It's not exactly a tough decision. However cool the thing is, you do have the option to not agree to the licence and therefore not use it.
Of course, it may mean you can't create your own Neverwinter Night scenarios, but that is what comes of not agreeing to their terms and conditions.
Put it another way. You can come into my house if you take your shoes off. That's the conditions, you either do it, or you don't and go elsewhere. And if you miss my party (and the copious amounts of beer that was there) because you didn't want to take your shoes off, then that is your decision and can't go blaming me for not letting you abide by my rules (however silly or pointless you felt they were).
I fail to see the issue here. Yes, the licence does suck. But they're not a monopoly, they're not forcing you to agree to the EULA and you certainly can continue to happly live in the world without agreeing to it.
Okay, I admit it. I didn't understand a word of the article. It's not that I'm stupid (although some people might disagree), I just didn't really understand it.
I do know that CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor and it's uses N and P type transistors to do logic functions (AND, OR, XOR) but after that, it's all a bit hazy.
Can anyone provide a nice translation to English for us dummys?
I have complained about this to the Opera support groups [opera.com] but they told me it wasn't possible to do a "complete" fake header.
"Not possible" or "Not possible because they don't want to do it"?
Of course, I've never seen the code but I utterly fail to see how it's not possible to change a couple of lines of code (at the most) so that "Opera" part isn't in there at all.
Hell, I can fake the IE User Agent *perfectly* with telnet and a bit of typing. I can't see why they can't.
The reason I ask is that according to the article there are no applications that support the new silkscreen area.
Since there has been this type of silkscreen on the Handera for a while now I'm a little worried that both formats aren't compatible.
Which would mean that you'd have to have different versions of one application for different PDA's.
This was something that Microsoft had the issue with in regards to CPU's and eventually standardised on one type. Are we going to see this fragmentation of OS 4.x right up until 5.0 comes out to which everyone will come together again?
True enough... but if they're encoding for the first time and have the choice between a standard mp3 and a smaller, better sounding ogg -- each of which is equally playable thanks to winamp -- then...
They'll encode with mp3.
You forgot that fact that players are widely available and most of their music loving friends who understand and use this sort of thing will more than likely be using mp3. So why encode with something different?
The trade off of a (small) amount of disk space pales into insignificance compaired to the hardware support for and sheer availablility of mp3's.
Remember that outside of the slashdot-type crew, Ogg Vobis is pretty much unknown.
but it's quite insulting to see it compared to free software
In a world where the vast majority of individuals have never heard of GNU, Richard Stallman etc.etc. this product is free.
Yes it's free as in "free beer" and not "free speech" but the reality is that the masses don't give a flying fuck about the "free speech" bit.
For them, the criteria for something being free is:
Do I have to pay for it?
Am I prevented from making copies of this and giving it to my mates?
If both answers are "no" then it's free. Period.
Whereas we like the idea of having the source code, being able to modify it and pass it on, your joe sixpack just wants to know if he's going to get the police come chasing after him if he gives it to a load of mates. He doesn't care about the source code (mainly because he can't read it and wouldn't know what to do with it) and he's certainly not interested in making any modifications and redistributing it.
Under this, the following products (and many more) are considered free:
Internet Explorer
Kazaa
Winamp
and so on and so on.
So the point here is that although it's not "truely free" it can and will still be considered "free".
And until the GPL is known to the majority of the people in the world, this is the way "free" is always going to be considered.
If they are going to take it and get a good grade on it, there is only one person losing out here, that's the "theif".
Actually they don't lose out at all. They get an A grade. I'm not advocating cheating, but an A grade is an A grade and 99.9% of people aren't going to know they cheated.
You lose out because there is now one more person in the world with a A grade that they shouldn't really have. Which, once people find out how clueless they are, will significantly devalue your own grade A.
If I gave my grade A work to everyone so they could all get grade A then I'm giving to people who shouldn't really deserve that grade. Two things happen here:
If they all are exposed as clueless, then i'm unfairly assumed to be just as clueless
They end up being a challenger for jobs that they wouldn't have normally got based on the grades they should have had
Of course, you can argue that they should be found out at the interview process, but a lot don't. And when that happens, the chances of that dream job that you've rightfully worked hard on and got those A's fades away...
Subnote: Having said this, I do advocate helping individuals but not just spoon feeding them the answers by allowing them to plagurise your work.
I used a very nifty bit of javascript which masks your mailto address. Provided the person has javascript on (and lets face it, nearly everyone who doesn't read/. does) then it works well.
You can generate the code for your own email address here or, if you want some source code, then you can find an implementation of it here.
Slashdot Mirror
So much for the wonderful idea of many eyes helping me out. Maybe with large projects (although I doubt it, tending to think that you only get a small number of people who actually contribute anything) but for the projects like mine it just doesn't happen.
I've got a crappy FAQ script which I'm rewriting and will also go under the GPL. At the moment it's under some wierdass restrictive job because at the time (1999) I didn't properly understand the GPL and how cool an idea it is - the rewrite will be GPL'ed but i don't expect to be inundated with patches, suggestions and code.
Recently I mooted my SMS application eGenie as going GPL in the next version. I got 1 person interested and 50 people emailing me demanding I give them the code - no, they weren't interested in helping out - they just wanted the code. Bah, sod that then.
I'm fully aware of the Cathedral and Bazar idealogy, but when there is no-one in the Cathedral and you're the only person giving in the Bazar, GPL suddenly doesn't seem to be this wonderful solution to bugs, features and support.
However, I have found Crazy Browser which is a replacement for IE using the IE rendering engine.
In fact thats what I'm using now and for a 690k download, it's lovely. Full support for websites (even those with iffy HTML), tabbed interface, Windows XP theme support, popup filter and a really nifty feature which indicates when pages have changed in your links list.
It's also free (as in beer). Having access to the source doesn't bother me (and 90% of the population) in the slightest since I wouldn't understand a word of it or really look at it.
I appreciate that this is a geek site and therefore most people won't touch IE with a barge pole but if you do like IE (and I do) but want tabbed browsing then check it out.
As far as I'm concerned, it does everything that I'd use in Opera, so therefore I don't really see the point in paying for Opera. Granted they've done a fine job - but it's just not for me.
Shouldn't that be "Here's another fun way to use Linux to convert a documented into a proprietary format without paying anything to Adobe which, in turn, will only help strengthen their belief that porting their applications to Linux is pointless because they get the impression that people wouldn't buy it as they're using the 'free' concept to disguise the fact that they're a bunch of freeloaders"?
I'm all for the reduction of proprietary file formats, but this doesn't reduce it's usage, merely ends up hurting the company that could, through it's applications, help Linux.
Stick with telling people to use RTF.
What would be cool, would be the option to right click on the hyperlink and have the option "Find alternative location".
Or even cooler, have IE (or your favourite browser) on putting up the 404 message have a hyperlink which does the same. Hell, easy enough to do with apache.
They don't have to merge to provide a unified product to the end user. Just bolting "Unified Linux" to the end of their products won't, in the eyes of most, make much difference.
Thats the point I'm making :o)
To a large number of people who aren't utter Linux fanatics and don't read /. or other Linux sites to actually understand why, Linux appears fragmented and inconsistent because of the sheer number of players. To remove 4 from the pool of 15 odd companies and come back with one united brand would help against Redhat and Microsoft.
Essentially saying "well you can go with Microsoft OR Redhat or United Linux". Rather than "you can go with Microsoft OR Redhat or Calerda or TurboLinux or Suse or ..."
This is version 1.0 of the as-truely-free-as-we-can-possibly-make-it licence:
- You are free to modify, change, hack, break, tweek, redistribute, copy, broadcast this code as you see fit.
- You agree that if something goes wrong, either through direct or indirect usage of the program that you don't hold the authors liable. You use this at your own risk
That is a totally free licence as far as I'm concerned (well, as totally free as I can think without making my life hell).Sure, it sucks in the sense that someone can take your hard work, change a few credits, make it closed source and sell it - but then thats just a side effect of its totally free nature.
Contratry to popular belief, the GPL does not give you utter freedom. It too has restrictions to protect the work of others (which is a good thing) but it can never be called totally free.
So pay up and quit whining about it.
You're getting something for free, nothing, nada, zip that someone else has spent time and effort on, why are people not appreciative of this fact any more?
You don't go whinging about a free beer your mate gives you do you? And yes, even that beer will come with conditions (like you're supposed to drink it with him).
It uses the IE dll's for rendering and it's what IE should have been. It's also free (as in beer).
Despite the "horribly irresponsible" comment which is a load of rubbish, this point is pretty important.
If people are running a pirated version of XP and install SP1 and are prevented from applying any fixes then the next time some virus starts crawling all over the web that requires a patch to be applied then they won't be able to apply it.
This means that the virus will stay rampant in the wild for longer because a large number of people won't patch it because they can't.
Having said that, getting SP1 to just prevent WinXP from running again causes just the same problems. People with cracked keys won't run the SP update - but at least they will be able to use the emergency patches MS often requires releasing.
If you own it.
What if you decided to give up watching it for a year? Do you still have to pay?
As long as you own a TV set, then you have to pay for it irrespective of whether you watch it or not. There was a case years ago of a guy hacking his TV so it could only get Cable to avoid paying the TV licence - he got away with it, but they fixed that loophole pretty quickly.
What if you have more than one TV?
The one licence covers all TV's in the house. However if you're in a block of flats, student accomodation or anywhere where unrelated people have seperate rooms, then each person who owns a TV set has to buy one.
A good point. We get approximately 3 minutes of adverts for every 15 minutes of television. So in an half hour programme you'll have one advert break and in a whole hour you'll (only) have three interruptions.
Any more than that and TV will start becoming a turn off. Which would explain that, whilst they're selling, PVR's in the UK aren't as popular as they are in the US.
Not really, it's a suppliment. The rest of the money comes from ... you guessed it ... adverts. If they really did scrap all adverts, then your monthly fee would skyrocket to the point that it would be horrendiously expensive and no-one would be prepared to pay for it.
Again, I point out that it only works in the UK because:
He does have a point. A large amount of the funding of programmes comes from adverts. If advertisers don't use it any more because they're not seeing a return on costs then they won't bother.
Here in the UK we pay a shade over 100 pounds ($150) a year to have a couple of advert free TV channels and a number of advert free radio stations. Yes, they still push out rubbish, but our rubbish is still of a higher quality than elsewhere in the world.
It is worth noting though that it only works because everyone is forced to pay this by law if they own a TV set.
Surely if they go down, then all the clients will have nowhere to connect and hence not be able to locate other people connected on it. Unlike Gnutella in which each user maintains a list of nodes and tries all of them until it finds one connected in which to pull off other nodes.
This would also explain why the need to "log on" to kazaa and why it's relativily (compaired to Gnutella) fast to find the nodes.
Or am I missing something?
So this EULA says that anything you create is basically theirs? Yes, it sucks. But that's the conditions and you have two choices. Either you agree to it, or you don't.
It's not exactly a tough decision. However cool the thing is, you do have the option to not agree to the licence and therefore not use it.
Of course, it may mean you can't create your own Neverwinter Night scenarios, but that is what comes of not agreeing to their terms and conditions.
Put it another way. You can come into my house if you take your shoes off. That's the conditions, you either do it, or you don't and go elsewhere. And if you miss my party (and the copious amounts of beer that was there) because you didn't want to take your shoes off, then that is your decision and can't go blaming me for not letting you abide by my rules (however silly or pointless you felt they were).
I fail to see the issue here. Yes, the licence does suck. But they're not a monopoly, they're not forcing you to agree to the EULA and you certainly can continue to happly live in the world without agreeing to it.
I do know that CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor and it's uses N and P type transistors to do logic functions (AND, OR, XOR) but after that, it's all a bit hazy.
Can anyone provide a nice translation to English for us dummys?
Thanks!
"Not possible" or "Not possible because they don't want to do it"?
Of course, I've never seen the code but I utterly fail to see how it's not possible to change a couple of lines of code (at the most) so that "Opera" part isn't in there at all.
Hell, I can fake the IE User Agent *perfectly* with telnet and a bit of typing. I can't see why they can't.
Oh, Jornada.
Whoops, my mistake.
Which they don't make any effort to hide.
Had you read the BSD licence, you'd have know that they are allowed to do this.
Since there has been this type of silkscreen on the Handera for a while now I'm a little worried that both formats aren't compatible.
Which would mean that you'd have to have different versions of one application for different PDA's.
This was something that Microsoft had the issue with in regards to CPU's and eventually standardised on one type. Are we going to see this fragmentation of OS 4.x right up until 5.0 comes out to which everyone will come together again?
They'll encode with mp3.
You forgot that fact that players are widely available and most of their music loving friends who understand and use this sort of thing will more than likely be using mp3. So why encode with something different?
The trade off of a (small) amount of disk space pales into insignificance compaired to the hardware support for and sheer availablility of mp3's.
Remember that outside of the slashdot-type crew, Ogg Vobis is pretty much unknown.
In a world where the vast majority of individuals have never heard of GNU, Richard Stallman etc.etc. this product is free.
Yes it's free as in "free beer" and not "free speech" but the reality is that the masses don't give a flying fuck about the "free speech" bit.
For them, the criteria for something being free is:
If both answers are "no" then it's free. Period.
Whereas we like the idea of having the source code, being able to modify it and pass it on, your joe sixpack just wants to know if he's going to get the police come chasing after him if he gives it to a load of mates. He doesn't care about the source code (mainly because he can't read it and wouldn't know what to do with it) and he's certainly not interested in making any modifications and redistributing it.
Under this, the following products (and many more) are considered free:
and so on and so on.
So the point here is that although it's not "truely free" it can and will still be considered "free".
And until the GPL is known to the majority of the people in the world, this is the way "free" is always going to be considered.
Actually they don't lose out at all. They get an A grade. I'm not advocating cheating, but an A grade is an A grade and 99.9% of people aren't going to know they cheated.
You lose out because there is now one more person in the world with a A grade that they shouldn't really have. Which, once people find out how clueless they are, will significantly devalue your own grade A.
If I gave my grade A work to everyone so they could all get grade A then I'm giving to people who shouldn't really deserve that grade. Two things happen here:
Of course, you can argue that they should be found out at the interview process, but a lot don't. And when that happens, the chances of that dream job that you've rightfully worked hard on and got those A's fades away ...
Subnote: Having said this, I do advocate helping individuals but not just spoon feeding them the answers by allowing them to plagurise your work.
You can generate the code for your own email address here or, if you want some source code, then you can find an implementation of it here.