Just because a Brust fan likes this Moran character, I think I will have to check him out.
Stephen Brust is amazing. The man can do anything he wants to.
Interesting footnote: I always get my girlfriends to read Agyar. So far, there's been a direct correlation between the length of the relationship and what they think of the book.
Brust is probably the only author to take Zelazny's style and actually be a better writer.
Tolkien did not know when to quit. He also didn't know when to publish. He kept on writing until he died, but never managed to get anything which he thought was ready for publication other than the Big Three plus some miscellaneous shorts. What he Really Wanted I think was to publish twenty volumes of the Silmarillion, but he just couldn't get it organized well enough.
I definitely agree on Shockwave Rider, but of course a close examination of my nick prolly tells you that:) (was haflinger_n taken? anyway, I digress)
But Stand & Sheep? They're great novels, and yes, I think they'll survive pretty well. But they're not representative of a paradigm shift the way Shockwave is, merely really good books which had the good luck of being released relatively early in his career, and so avoided getting ignored as many other really good books he wrote did (particularly in the '80s, when he became Old Hat or something; Jagged Orbit, Traveller in Black, Children of the Thunder, all really amazing books)
Shockwave on the other hand is an incredible predictive novel. The Great Quake hasn't happened (yet), and we don't yet have the kind of vidphone tech he suggests (though things like WebTV come close), but conceptually it's really amazing how close modern society is to the Brunner/Toffler vision.
Software development is not a science in the normal sense. Designing large software systems is an art. It cannot be pigeonholed.
Software development is a science in the normal sense.
Have you ever tried to do scheduling for lab or theoretical scientists? No?
It takes variable amounts of time. You just don't know when the breakthrough will come. You can make estimates, of course, especially when dealing with relatively routine kinds of things like drug testing, where there's a huge history to base your time estimates on.
But, c'mon... hard science does not lend itself to tight scheduling. Probably even less than programming does.
The poster who pointed out that when you're coding for an unfamiliar environment, estimating is rough, is exactly correct. That's why (for example) I can make pretty good estimates for how long it's gonna take me to code something on an OS like VMS that I know extremely well, while my guess for something like Windoze programming is going to probably be way off.
But that also applies to groundbreakers. When you're coding something really new (which still happens, yes), it's hard to guess. Reason? You're looking for the breakthrough, just like the chemist.
I know a guy who used to work there. While they do a lot of work on development, their main source of income is support contracts. Which, of course, they use the open-source community for; when their clients ask them questions, they ask OSS developers questions.
Not that I really have a problem with this. By giving us all a reasonable, working Perl for Win32, they help Perl programmers out; it's a symbiotic relationship.
Disclaimer: I don't run OS X, and I've never configured a Linux kernel.
However, I have configured FreeBSD kernels. And in FreeBSD, some kernel modules are externally loadable, but they always need hooks into the compiled kernel (and it's generally better to put the kernel modules you always need directly into the/kernel file, that way you don't need to do so much disk access)... And, so far as I know (I haven't installed any FreeBSD past 4.0), device drivers are not hookable in any version of FreeBSD. IIRC OS X & FreeBSD share a lot of kernel traits in common, this I would expect to be one of them.
Let me preface my response with this: Since I started programming I've learned/used Applesoft BASIC, 6502 Assembly, Pascal, QuickBASIC, x86 assembly, C++, Java, and Perl. Never once was a language intuitively easy enough for me to jump write in a code without learning the language first. However, out of all of them Perl was the easiest to learn and put into real use.
Interesting.
My languages, more-or-less in order: CBM BASIC 2, Logo, 6510 assembly, FIG-FORTH, VAX Pascal, JFORTH (Amiga FORTH), VAX assembly, VAX C, Java, AppleScript, Perl 5. I'm currently embarking on Mac C & I've also dabbled in _lots_ of shell-script languages, plus a bunch of other languages, like LISP, a whole bunch of BASICs, x86 assembly (the horror), VB (the only thing worse than x86), and some miscellaneous C hacking (well just cleaning up code on occasion that I find in OSS, usually because it was written assuming the world has Linux:)
There is one language out of my list that I can just type commands that I've made up out of my head (or so I think) and watch it DWIM, and that's AppleScript.
Well-written Perl code is extremely easy to read. There may be a lot of ugly Perl code out there, but it doesn't mean that clear, well-written Perl scripts are impossible.
I question the claim that well-written code must, by definition, be easy to read.
I certainly agree with the statement that, in many cases, people write code that will have to be maintained and updated, and it's probably better for this code to be readable. However, near the core of many programs, there are extremely fundamental black-box type routines, and much of this code should never be tampered with. Isn't it better for it to have more functionality than readability?
IMO the emphasis on readability at the expense of all else is in large part responsible for code bloat. "We couldn't do it that way, it would be too hard for idiots to understand."
I've written Perl that's hard to read, especially for the novice (which I was about a year ago:). I've written Perl that's easy to read (usually when I'm in LWP land). Once I got over the $_ construct, I have come to find it useful. In a way, it makes things more readable: Perl, especially non-OO Perl, is a lot like Forth: when you know how it works, it's really easy to read.
You're correct. Paper docs for OpenBSD are extremely minimal; the only book that I've ever seen specific for it was the Linux/OpenBSD firewalls book you mentioned.
OpenBSD forked off of FreeBSD a few versions back, I'm not sure exactly when. Some things are quite similar still, but of course details like driver names have changed. (I run FreeBSD 3.4 and even in FreeBSD 4, there are many, many changes to the names of common devices, even the atapi cd driver has a new name.)
Conceptual stuff of course would be highly similar. Both are BSDs, so follow the rules of BSD operating systems. Therefore, if you buy a *nix book on a specific topic, you can usually use the examples they give for BSD (as opposed to SysV or Linux) and they'll work.
That said, you can look at the FreeBSD handbook on the web: I think I got the url right; it'll give you an idea of what's in it and you can try stuff out, see if they apply to your OpenBSD installation. The other main ref for FreeBSD is The Complete FreeBSD, by Lehey, which I sometimes read in the bookstore. (Big-box stores, love them to death.:) Sometime I'll scrounge some money together and buy a copy.
audio CD autoplay depends on your settings in either Apple CD Audio Player or iTunes. Both can be set to automagically play CDs on insert. However, for iTunes to do it, it has to be open, while Apple CD can do it in background. There's a control strip module to control Apple CD's behaviour.
DVD autoplay defaults to ON in OS 9... sort of. When you stick a DVD movie in the drive, it autolaunches Apple DVD Player, but then does not actually start playing the movie. To defeat it, disable the extension DVD AutoLauncher.
I have seen Mac autoplay CD-ROMs, well kinda. When I stick Norton in the drive, it automagically opens the root folder in Finder. OK, it's not much.:)
No. The product is a copyrighted TV program. That's what TV stations and networks pay for.
The characters are trademarked because they represent the source. When people see Geordi, Picard, and so on, they immediately assume they are watching a show that is produced by the people who make Star Trek.
Trademarks are never products in themselves. That's partly why it's possible to use one trademark for two products, as Coca-Cola has done for example. Sure, people have a tendency to associate trademarks with products, but New Coke didn't violate any principles of trademark law: it came from the same source as classic coke, and so had the perfect right to use the same trademark.
Because it doesn't affect the goodwill associated with the source.
Dilution occurs when the action taken reduces the goodwill associated with the source of the trademark. With things like The Pepsi Generation (have you seen it?) or Star Trick (great improv act, btw - think they're no longer around, oh well) there's no such effect.
This is, of course, a question of fact, left to the jury in the U.S. system. So YMMV. But if I was a juror... you know where I'd be.:)
Then again, all sane counsel will eliminate people with law degrees from the jury box. It's bad enough having to cope with the one on the bench.;)
Tons of people do web design. It's not just e-commerce.
Quite apart from the number of people doing web design as a part of their jobs (for example, all the librarians out there who have to support library websites), there are lots of people who maintain web sites to help enable communications.
Look at any government website. Do you think people work on those monsters, or are they magically created from nothingness?
What's died (almost, we'll always have eBay) is e-commerce. But that's a minority of the web, really.
However, fan sites don't infringe or dilute trademark rights, by and large. Trademark's a lot narrower than copyright: in order for there to be a violation, generally you have to be representing your commercial product as coming from your competitor's source. For example, if Fox Television decided it was going to make a science-fiction show called Star Trek: A New Beginning (or whatever), that would infringe. However, fan sites - and movies - are very obviously not produced by Paramount. Nobody watching Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation would think it came from Paramount; so, no violation.
The Pepsi Generation probably violates copyright, though, at least outside the United States. In the U.S., parody is a legal defense to copyright infringement; nowhere else in the world is this the case.
That's right, except that the IE bug was actually worse than that: you couldn't download many useful things. Netscape eventually came up with a split download feature that survived IE.
The original poster wasn't talking about experimenting with the technology. He/she/it wanted to test the service. You can't do that without using the service.
Check with the people who run fan sites. I think you'll find that the ones who post images either do so with permission, or haven't gotten big enough to attract anybody's attention.
You mean, check with myself.:)
OK, my site is pretty small. But it's listed on IMDb, as are tons of other, similar fan sites. A simple spider could be written to find us all, and most of us have email links on our pages: these could be spidered, too.
While it hasn't been done, you're correct in that part of the reason why is due to simple enforcement issues. However, it's not just that. Consider what Paramount did to Star Trek fan sites. It is possible to shut down fan sites, it's just fairly hard. I do think that even large media organizations sometimes recognize that they have a self-interest in promoting fan sites.
This attitude spills over in other ways. It's common knowledge that anime companies monitored the illegal importation of Japanese animation into North America, and especially watched the fansub market grow. When there were enough fansubs to make it a worthwhile market, they started licensing commercial subs, and selling them. It just wasn't worth it early on: the fansub pirates were able to cover the costs of distribution, which were much smaller because of their distribution technique, and test the market.
Without copyrighted binary code, the GPL would be unnecessary (and EULAs would be irrelevant). The argument made by Pamela Samuelson and many of her friends was that only source code should get copyright protection.
I think a novelist or an artist can't be innovative in the sense that we normally hear the word bandied about by venture capitalists and that kind of creature.
Also, when it was settled that copyright could be applied to software, the justification was clearly to reward progress/innovation in software development.
That's right. However, there was a huge debate at the time about copyright being applied to binary code.
There was really no debate about copyright applying to source. Source is easily human-readable with minimal technological support, much like an audio CD is human-readable.
The debate was: should copyright apply to binary code? The software industry wanted the answer to be yes, because iff it was, then computer programmers would be able to both conceal their techniques and profit from copyright. Having your cake and eating it too.
When a novelist is innovative, you can easily see the technique that is being used. For an example, look at Tolkien. Many other authors have used his techniques, and in fact we have a genre of fiction largely based on his work. They didn't have to reverse engineer his writing technique, they just read it.
Not so with programmers: and it was this particular decision in the law that the GPL was designed to fight. The GPL seeks to prevent programmers from concealing the source, while our copyright law is designed to encourage programmers to conceal the source.
Many copyright owners overlook infractions, when it's in their best interests.
For example, fan movie sites. Tons and tons of fans put up copyrighted images from motion pictures. This is illegal.
It's also good for sales of those motion pictures. There are exceptions (notably Paramount and their poor relations with the Star Trek fan community; also the X-Files flap a few years back), but by and large, it gets completely ignored. (I'm one of those fans, btw; look up Near Dark on IMDb and get one of my older sites listed...)
Studios do try to go after people ripping the whole movie, but that's a rather different affair.
Trademarks protect the interests of the consumer, by preventing "inferior" knockoffs of a product from being marketed as the original. If a trademark holder ignores infringement, the damage is irreparable, and the mark loses force in fact.
It's not quite as causal as you suggest. The damage may not be irreparable; if the word does not pass into common use, then it doesn't. Also, even if the trademark holder sues vociferously, irreparable damage may still be done. The classic example is Thermos, where the company sued like crazy to stop stores from labelling the sections where vaccuum bottles were sold anything but vaccuum bottles. Still, now, people call vaccuum bottles Thermos, regardless of who actually made them, and it's no longer a trademark.
Trademark lawyers still suggest that their clients should file suit to protect trademarks. It can help, but it's not a guarantee, either way.
You're completely right about copyright of course:)
If you know that your patent is being infringed, and fail to sue, you lose the right to damages for the intervening period: ie if you discover your patent is infringed in 2003, and sue in 2006, you lose three years of damages.
This is intended to prevent patentholders from blackmailing innocent infringers by waiting until the patent has nearly expired before filing suit.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because a Brust fan likes this Moran character, I think I will have to check him out.
Stephen Brust is amazing. The man can do anything he wants to.
Interesting footnote: I always get my girlfriends to read Agyar. So far, there's been a direct correlation between the length of the relationship and what they think of the book.
Brust is probably the only author to take Zelazny's style and actually be a better writer.
Inaccurate perception.
Tolkien did not know when to quit. He also didn't know when to publish. He kept on writing until he died, but never managed to get anything which he thought was ready for publication other than the Big Three plus some miscellaneous shorts. What he Really Wanted I think was to publish twenty volumes of the Silmarillion, but he just couldn't get it organized well enough.
You may be right about Jordan, though. :)
I definitely agree on Shockwave Rider, but of course a close examination of my nick prolly tells you that :) (was haflinger_n taken? anyway, I digress)
But Stand & Sheep? They're great novels, and yes, I think they'll survive pretty well. But they're not representative of a paradigm shift the way Shockwave is, merely really good books which had the good luck of being released relatively early in his career, and so avoided getting ignored as many other really good books he wrote did (particularly in the '80s, when he became Old Hat or something; Jagged Orbit, Traveller in Black, Children of the Thunder, all really amazing books)
Shockwave on the other hand is an incredible predictive novel. The Great Quake hasn't happened (yet), and we don't yet have the kind of vidphone tech he suggests (though things like WebTV come close), but conceptually it's really amazing how close modern society is to the Brunner/Toffler vision.
Software development is a science in the normal sense.
Have you ever tried to do scheduling for lab or theoretical scientists? No?
It takes variable amounts of time. You just don't know when the breakthrough will come. You can make estimates, of course, especially when dealing with relatively routine kinds of things like drug testing, where there's a huge history to base your time estimates on.
But, c'mon... hard science does not lend itself to tight scheduling. Probably even less than programming does.
The poster who pointed out that when you're coding for an unfamiliar environment, estimating is rough, is exactly correct. That's why (for example) I can make pretty good estimates for how long it's gonna take me to code something on an OS like VMS that I know extremely well, while my guess for something like Windoze programming is going to probably be way off.
But that also applies to groundbreakers. When you're coding something really new (which still happens, yes), it's hard to guess. Reason? You're looking for the breakthrough, just like the chemist.
No, you're thinking of ActiveState. :)
I know a guy who used to work there. While they do a lot of work on development, their main source of income is support contracts. Which, of course, they use the open-source community for; when their clients ask them questions, they ask OSS developers questions.
Not that I really have a problem with this. By giving us all a reasonable, working Perl for Win32, they help Perl programmers out; it's a symbiotic relationship.
Disclaimer: I don't run OS X, and I've never configured a Linux kernel.
However, I have configured FreeBSD kernels. And in FreeBSD, some kernel modules are externally loadable, but they always need hooks into the compiled kernel (and it's generally better to put the kernel modules you always need directly into the /kernel file, that way you don't need to do so much disk access)... And, so far as I know (I haven't installed any FreeBSD past 4.0), device drivers are not hookable in any version of FreeBSD. IIRC OS X & FreeBSD share a lot of kernel traits in common, this I would expect to be one of them.
Interesting.
My languages, more-or-less in order: CBM BASIC 2, Logo, 6510 assembly, FIG-FORTH, VAX Pascal, JFORTH (Amiga FORTH), VAX assembly, VAX C, Java, AppleScript, Perl 5. I'm currently embarking on Mac C & I've also dabbled in _lots_ of shell-script languages, plus a bunch of other languages, like LISP, a whole bunch of BASICs, x86 assembly (the horror), VB (the only thing worse than x86), and some miscellaneous C hacking (well just cleaning up code on occasion that I find in OSS, usually because it was written assuming the world has Linux :)
There is one language out of my list that I can just type commands that I've made up out of my head (or so I think) and watch it DWIM, and that's AppleScript.
I question the claim that well-written code must, by definition, be easy to read.
I certainly agree with the statement that, in many cases, people write code that will have to be maintained and updated, and it's probably better for this code to be readable. However, near the core of many programs, there are extremely fundamental black-box type routines, and much of this code should never be tampered with. Isn't it better for it to have more functionality than readability?
IMO the emphasis on readability at the expense of all else is in large part responsible for code bloat. "We couldn't do it that way, it would be too hard for idiots to understand."
I've written Perl that's hard to read, especially for the novice (which I was about a year ago :). I've written Perl that's easy to read (usually when I'm in LWP land). Once I got over the $_ construct, I have come to find it useful. In a way, it makes things more readable: Perl, especially non-OO Perl, is a lot like Forth: when you know how it works, it's really easy to read.
because they're not being asked by the court.
note the headline: states ask for more time. they'll prolly get it.
they only asked for 4 days to a week, because they don't want to slow down the litigation process, unlike M$
You're correct. Paper docs for OpenBSD are extremely minimal; the only book that I've ever seen specific for it was the Linux/OpenBSD firewalls book you mentioned.
OpenBSD forked off of FreeBSD a few versions back, I'm not sure exactly when. Some things are quite similar still, but of course details like driver names have changed. (I run FreeBSD 3.4 and even in FreeBSD 4, there are many, many changes to the names of common devices, even the atapi cd driver has a new name.)
Conceptual stuff of course would be highly similar. Both are BSDs, so follow the rules of BSD operating systems. Therefore, if you buy a *nix book on a specific topic, you can usually use the examples they give for BSD (as opposed to SysV or Linux) and they'll work.
That said, you can look at the FreeBSD handbook on the web: I think I got the url right; it'll give you an idea of what's in it and you can try stuff out, see if they apply to your OpenBSD installation. The other main ref for FreeBSD is The Complete FreeBSD, by Lehey, which I sometimes read in the bookstore. (Big-box stores, love them to death. :) Sometime I'll scrounge some money together and buy a copy.
audio CD autoplay depends on your settings in either Apple CD Audio Player or iTunes. Both can be set to automagically play CDs on insert. However, for iTunes to do it, it has to be open, while Apple CD can do it in background. There's a control strip module to control Apple CD's behaviour.
DVD autoplay defaults to ON in OS 9... sort of. When you stick a DVD movie in the drive, it autolaunches Apple DVD Player, but then does not actually start playing the movie. To defeat it, disable the extension DVD AutoLauncher.
I have seen Mac autoplay CD-ROMs, well kinda. When I stick Norton in the drive, it automagically opens the root folder in Finder. OK, it's not much. :)
No. The product is a copyrighted TV program. That's what TV stations and networks pay for.
The characters are trademarked because they represent the source. When people see Geordi, Picard, and so on, they immediately assume they are watching a show that is produced by the people who make Star Trek.
Trademarks are never products in themselves. That's partly why it's possible to use one trademark for two products, as Coca-Cola has done for example. Sure, people have a tendency to associate trademarks with products, but New Coke didn't violate any principles of trademark law: it came from the same source as classic coke, and so had the perfect right to use the same trademark.
Because it doesn't affect the goodwill associated with the source.
Dilution occurs when the action taken reduces the goodwill associated with the source of the trademark. With things like The Pepsi Generation (have you seen it?) or Star Trick (great improv act, btw - think they're no longer around, oh well) there's no such effect.
This is, of course, a question of fact, left to the jury in the U.S. system. So YMMV. But if I was a juror... you know where I'd be. :)
Then again, all sane counsel will eliminate people with law degrees from the jury box. It's bad enough having to cope with the one on the bench. ;)
Tons of people do web design. It's not just e-commerce.
Quite apart from the number of people doing web design as a part of their jobs (for example, all the librarians out there who have to support library websites), there are lots of people who maintain web sites to help enable communications.
Look at any government website. Do you think people work on those monsters, or are they magically created from nothingness?
What's died (almost, we'll always have eBay) is e-commerce. But that's a minority of the web, really.
However, fan sites don't infringe or dilute trademark rights, by and large. Trademark's a lot narrower than copyright: in order for there to be a violation, generally you have to be representing your commercial product as coming from your competitor's source. For example, if Fox Television decided it was going to make a science-fiction show called Star Trek: A New Beginning (or whatever), that would infringe. However, fan sites - and movies - are very obviously not produced by Paramount. Nobody watching Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation would think it came from Paramount; so, no violation.
The Pepsi Generation probably violates copyright, though, at least outside the United States. In the U.S., parody is a legal defense to copyright infringement; nowhere else in the world is this the case.
It was fixed in IE4 IIRC :)
It doesn't emulate the uptime of their servers, or their customer service, or any of that. Jeez.
That's right, except that the IE bug was actually worse than that: you couldn't download many useful things. Netscape eventually came up with a split download feature that survived IE.
Read before you reply.
The original poster wasn't talking about experimenting with the technology. He/she/it wanted to test the service. You can't do that without using the service.
Duh.
I live in Canada. We don't have any fair use doctrine. Fair dealing up here is much more restrictive on the user.
On the other hand, DeCSS is legal :)
You mean, check with myself. :)
OK, my site is pretty small. But it's listed on IMDb, as are tons of other, similar fan sites. A simple spider could be written to find us all, and most of us have email links on our pages: these could be spidered, too.
While it hasn't been done, you're correct in that part of the reason why is due to simple enforcement issues. However, it's not just that. Consider what Paramount did to Star Trek fan sites. It is possible to shut down fan sites, it's just fairly hard. I do think that even large media organizations sometimes recognize that they have a self-interest in promoting fan sites.
This attitude spills over in other ways. It's common knowledge that anime companies monitored the illegal importation of Japanese animation into North America, and especially watched the fansub market grow. When there were enough fansubs to make it a worthwhile market, they started licensing commercial subs, and selling them. It just wasn't worth it early on: the fansub pirates were able to cover the costs of distribution, which were much smaller because of their distribution technique, and test the market.
Without copyrighted binary code, the GPL would be unnecessary (and EULAs would be irrelevant). The argument made by Pamela Samuelson and many of her friends was that only source code should get copyright protection.
I think a novelist or an artist can't be innovative in the sense that we normally hear the word bandied about by venture capitalists and that kind of creature.
That's right. However, there was a huge debate at the time about copyright being applied to binary code.
There was really no debate about copyright applying to source. Source is easily human-readable with minimal technological support, much like an audio CD is human-readable.
The debate was: should copyright apply to binary code? The software industry wanted the answer to be yes, because iff it was, then computer programmers would be able to both conceal their techniques and profit from copyright. Having your cake and eating it too.
When a novelist is innovative, you can easily see the technique that is being used. For an example, look at Tolkien. Many other authors have used his techniques, and in fact we have a genre of fiction largely based on his work. They didn't have to reverse engineer his writing technique, they just read it.
Not so with programmers: and it was this particular decision in the law that the GPL was designed to fight. The GPL seeks to prevent programmers from concealing the source, while our copyright law is designed to encourage programmers to conceal the source.
Many copyright owners overlook infractions, when it's in their best interests.
For example, fan movie sites. Tons and tons of fans put up copyrighted images from motion pictures. This is illegal.
It's also good for sales of those motion pictures. There are exceptions (notably Paramount and their poor relations with the Star Trek fan community; also the X-Files flap a few years back), but by and large, it gets completely ignored. (I'm one of those fans, btw; look up Near Dark on IMDb and get one of my older sites listed...)
Studios do try to go after people ripping the whole movie, but that's a rather different affair.
It's not quite as causal as you suggest. The damage may not be irreparable; if the word does not pass into common use, then it doesn't. Also, even if the trademark holder sues vociferously, irreparable damage may still be done. The classic example is Thermos, where the company sued like crazy to stop stores from labelling the sections where vaccuum bottles were sold anything but vaccuum bottles. Still, now, people call vaccuum bottles Thermos, regardless of who actually made them, and it's no longer a trademark.
Trademark lawyers still suggest that their clients should file suit to protect trademarks. It can help, but it's not a guarantee, either way.
You're completely right about copyright of course :)
If you know that your patent is being infringed, and fail to sue, you lose the right to damages for the intervening period: ie if you discover your patent is infringed in 2003, and sue in 2006, you lose three years of damages.
This is intended to prevent patentholders from blackmailing innocent infringers by waiting until the patent has nearly expired before filing suit.
However, that's it.