I bought the/Pick of Destiny/ picture disc LP, and it came with a code to download non-DRM MP3s as well. Can't remember who released it for certain; was it Sony? (Seems ironic, I know.)
and now for something completely different (the opinion of a cs teaching assistant at a major university (uiuc)).
i've been assisting in an introductory cs course for two semesters now that is taught in java, and java is too laden with syntax due to its espousal of oop as the One True Way to be an optimal introductory language. the students are hit with it from day one when they don't know what it means. it is rather frustrating to have to say, `here's a program that prints "hello world," but just look at this println statement, don't worry about this public class stuff and don't worry about what `public static void main' means.
i learnt to program in pascal, and anything from the list [pascal, c, python, lisp] would make a pretty good introductory language since you don't get bogged down early on with a bunch of stuff you don't understand. oop certainly does not belong in an introductory class, but guess what, we have no choice but to discuss it. and if you think that introductory level students are prepared to grasp why you would want to use any of this object-oriented nonsense, you are sadly mistaken.
being a grad student at uiuc, i've heard older professors from time to time talk about the good old days of computing. back in the day, our department was all about asynchronous logic because everybody was convinced it would be faster than having to distribute a clock signal all about the computer. well, it turned out that the asynchronous machines were really slow, so they cheated a little bit by mixing in a bit of synchronous logic to speed things up. if anything were to come of this, it would be a long time in coming.
ianal, but i do know a bit about US contract law, and this particular clause would be found if you went to court. you cannot agree to a contract when you are not aware of the terms.
this is probably mostly due to standard regulations regarding use of the airwaves. you can't send porn, bad words, etc. on most radio services because some kid might tune in and be forever harmed because he saw someone else's private parts.
i know a married couple or two that has met online, and they seem happy enough. as for myself, although i'm quite the hacker, meeting
members of the opposite sex is still one thing
that i prefer to do in meatspace.
a non-executable stack does nothing, you just return either into your data segment or into libc. this has all been hashed out before on various mailing lists. all of these patches only disable a particular method of exploitation, but the overflow still exists to be exploited in some other way!
this is security through obscurity, plain and simple.
Well my school, which is in the top five in the country for a few majors, has a total of 22Mbps of commodity bandwidth to the Internet. Considering that two desktop machines can saturate that connection, I don't see what the point of having 100Mbps Ethernet to the desktop is. Neither does my school, and it's not planning on paying for any more bandwidth any time soon.
Do you even know how much that much bandwidth costs?! No, you probably just want your MP3z and w4r3z.
I don't understand. The older versions of BIND work fine, and they're still perfectly free. They will always be free because free software cannot be made non-free. Only derivatives of (BSD and similarly licensed) free software can be made non-free.
All in all, this seems like a non-issue. The world will go on using the free version, and a few people will use the non-free version. Maybe everyone forgot about a small unpleasantness called X11R6.4.
as a data point, i write free (free, free, free) software. i want it to be of use to as many people as possible; free for *any* purpose.
using the bsd license was pretty much a no brainer. politics aside, it's the only choice if you want your code to be as free as possible, unless you want people to be able to claim they wrote it, in which case you would release it to the public domain. sorry, you can't say you wrote my software, but you can do *anything* else you want with it.
i must say that what struck me as the dumbest thing about the imac was the colour issue. i'm glad to see that someone at apple realised some users' desire for more conservative tones. now all that's keeping me from buying one is the os issue....
Wait a minute! You mean that if I write my program as a parallel program to begin with, that I can run it in parallel on a parallel computer or cluster of workstations? Holy cow!
All of these export controls, whether they be restricting hardware, software, or cows are related. The repeal of any one of them is hypocrisy. The solution is the repeal of them all.
The GPL is indeed self-explantory. Its point, however, is to infect as much software as possible with the GPL virus (a.k.a. GPV), and to advance the political agenda of RMS and the FSF.
If you want to talk about the FSF's non-free software, let's talk about the fact that for anything to be considered part of the GNU Project, the author must assign the copyright to the FSF. He couldn't even relicense it under a free or proprietary license if he wanted! That doesn't seem too free to me.
If my proprietary program contains tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of my own code and I want to include a few hundred of GPLed code, forcing me to GPL the entire thing doesn't seem like too fair of a trade.
Oh, I see the problem. You didn't want your code to be truly free to begin with.
`Here, you can use my code, but you can only use it in noncommercial projects. Or for projects whose code does not run on computers running a Microsoft operating system. Or on Intel hardware. Or on a computer manufactured by a non-capitalist economy. Or for any project where you will not give me all of your code, no matter how many other improvements you've made with hundred and thousands of hours of your own time, completely unrelated to my code.'
I think I can tell which is the free and non-viral and which is the non-free and viral license.
Perhaps you need to make an effort to understand the reasons people refer to the GPL as viral.
If I spend years writing a program using no code other than my own, I can release it under any license I want. If I incorporate BSD licensed code into my program, I can still use any license I want, so long as I preserve copyright notices. If, however, I want to include GPLed code in my program, the GPL forces me to release my program under the GPL. It has *infected* my program. This is where the term `viral' originates with regard to the GPL.
The BSD license does not affect code and cannot affect code since it can always be placed under another license. If someone makes proprietary enhancements to my BSD licensed code on his own time with his own money, the only code that has been infected with a non-free virus is his. My code is still perfectly free. I can give it to whoever I want and it is still as free as ever. The only thing I can't do is give away the other person's proprietary enhancements made with his own time and his own money and which could possibly completely overshadow the features provided by my small amount of code.
Although the BSD license encourages the reuse of code for *any* reason, including in projects released under non-free licenses like the GPL or one of the dozens of proprietary software licenses, doing it to piss people off will not get you very far, and it will make you look foolhardy, especially in the eyes of the people who wrote the free software (free for *any* purpose) that you would be making non-free. I guess you think no one understands the BSD license.
All in all, a fine spirit to take in the name of free software....
the openbsd project has reviewed every line of code it distributes. unless these folks are prepared to do the same and adopt a bsd-style development model, this is pointless.
Oh, I see. You just want to force people to give you the changes they make on their own time to your non-free software, as well as to force people to give you the changes they make on their own time to other people's non-free software in which you had no involvement in at all.
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I bought the /Pick of Destiny/ picture disc LP, and it came with a code to download non-DRM MP3s as well. Can't remember who released it for certain; was it Sony? (Seems ironic, I know.)
and now for something completely different (the opinion of a cs teaching assistant at a major university (uiuc)).
i've been assisting in an introductory cs course for two semesters now that is taught in java, and java is too laden with syntax due to its espousal of oop as the One True Way to be an optimal introductory language. the students are hit with it from day one when they don't know what it means. it is rather frustrating to have to say, `here's a program that prints "hello world," but just look at this println statement, don't worry about this public class stuff and don't worry about what `public static void main' means.
i learnt to program in pascal, and anything from the list [pascal, c, python, lisp] would make a pretty good introductory language since you don't get bogged down early on with a bunch of stuff you don't understand. oop certainly does not belong in an introductory class, but guess what, we have no choice but to discuss it. and if you think that introductory level students are prepared to grasp why you would want to use any of this object-oriented nonsense, you are sadly mistaken.
-- your friendly cs 125 ta
being a grad student at uiuc, i've heard older professors from time to time talk about the good old days of computing. back in the day, our department was all about asynchronous logic because everybody was convinced it would be faster than having to distribute a clock signal all about the computer. well, it turned out that the asynchronous machines were really slow, so they cheated a little bit by mixing in a bit of synchronous logic to speed things up. if anything were to come of this, it would be a long time in coming.
ianal, but i do know a bit about US contract law, and this particular clause would be found if you went to court. you cannot agree to a contract when you are not aware of the terms.
this is probably mostly due to standard regulations regarding use of the airwaves. you can't send porn, bad words, etc. on most radio services because some kid might tune in and be forever harmed because he saw someone else's private parts.
sc
now just watch microsoft and friends champion this as a glorious case for the use of security through obscurity.
sc
i know a married couple or two that has met online, and they seem happy enough. as for myself, although i'm quite the hacker, meeting
members of the opposite sex is still one thing
that i prefer to do in meatspace.
a non-executable stack does nothing, you just return either into your data segment or into libc. this has all been hashed out before on various mailing lists. all of these patches only disable a particular method of exploitation, but the overflow still exists to be exploited in some other way!
this is security through obscurity, plain and simple.
man, wyse sure made a dumb move.
Well my school, which is in the top five in the country for a few majors, has a total of 22Mbps of commodity bandwidth to the Internet. Considering that two desktop machines can saturate that connection, I don't see what the point of having 100Mbps Ethernet to the desktop is. Neither does my school, and it's not planning on paying for any more bandwidth any time soon.
Do you even know how much that much bandwidth costs?! No, you probably just want your MP3z and w4r3z.
sc
Not necessarily, as `he' is a gender-neutral pronoun. It has been so for some time.
sc
I don't understand. The older versions of BIND work fine, and they're still perfectly free. They will always be free because free software cannot be made non-free. Only derivatives of (BSD and similarly licensed) free software can be made non-free.
All in all, this seems like a non-issue. The world will go on using the free version, and a few people will use the non-free version. Maybe everyone forgot about a small unpleasantness called X11R6.4.
sc
as a data point, i write free (free, free, free) software. i want it to be of use to as many people as possible; free for *any* purpose.
using the bsd license was pretty much a no brainer. politics aside, it's the only choice if you want your code to be as free as possible, unless you want people to be able to claim they wrote it, in which case you would release it to the public domain. sorry, you can't say you wrote my software, but you can do *anything* else you want with it.
sc
i must say that what struck me as the dumbest thing about the imac was the colour issue. i'm glad to see that someone at apple realised some users' desire for more conservative tones. now all that's keeping me from buying one is the os issue....
sc
pdf is open, you troll. go write your own viewer. the format is extensible, so i would be very surprised if it could not handle jpg and png images.
sc
So it seems the point of the GPL is to prevent people from using the code. Sounds an awful lot like proprietary software licenses to me....
sc
Wait a minute! You mean that if I write my program as a parallel program to begin with, that I can run it in parallel on a parallel computer or cluster of workstations? Holy cow!
sc
All of these export controls, whether they be restricting hardware, software, or cows are related. The repeal of any one of them is hypocrisy. The solution is the repeal of them all.
The GPL is indeed self-explantory. Its point, however, is to infect as much software as possible with the GPL virus (a.k.a. GPV), and to advance the political agenda of RMS and the FSF.
If you want to talk about the FSF's non-free software, let's talk about the fact that for anything to be considered part of the GNU Project, the author must assign the copyright to the FSF. He couldn't even relicense it under a free or proprietary license if he wanted! That doesn't seem too free to me.
sc
If my proprietary program contains tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of my own code and I want to include a few hundred of GPLed code, forcing me to GPL the entire thing doesn't seem like too fair of a trade.
Oh, I see the problem. You didn't want your code to be truly free to begin with.
`Here, you can use my code, but you can only use it in noncommercial projects. Or for projects whose code does not run on computers running a Microsoft operating system. Or on Intel hardware. Or on a computer manufactured by a non-capitalist economy. Or for any project where you will not give me all of your code, no matter how many other improvements you've made with hundred and thousands of hours of your own time, completely unrelated to my code.'
I think I can tell which is the free and non-viral and which is the non-free and viral license.
sc
Perhaps you need to make an effort to understand the reasons people refer to the GPL as viral.
If I spend years writing a program using no code other than my own, I can release it under any license I want. If I incorporate BSD licensed code into my program, I can still use any license I want, so long as I preserve copyright notices. If, however, I want to include GPLed code in my program, the GPL forces me to release my program under the GPL. It has *infected* my program. This is where the term `viral' originates with regard to the GPL.
The BSD license does not affect code and cannot affect code since it can always be placed under another license. If someone makes proprietary enhancements to my BSD licensed code on his own time with his own money, the only code that has been infected with a non-free virus is his. My code is still perfectly free. I can give it to whoever I want and it is still as free as ever. The only thing I can't do is give away the other person's proprietary enhancements made with his own time and his own money and which could possibly completely overshadow the features provided by my small amount of code.
Although the BSD license encourages the reuse of code for *any* reason, including in projects released under non-free licenses like the GPL or one of the dozens of proprietary software licenses, doing it to piss people off will not get you very far, and it will make you look foolhardy, especially in the eyes of the people who wrote the free software (free for *any* purpose) that you would be making non-free. I guess you think no one understands the BSD license.
All in all, a fine spirit to take in the name of free software....
sc
the openbsd project has reviewed every line of code it distributes. unless these folks are prepared to do the same and adopt a bsd-style development model, this is pointless.
sc
Oh, I see. You just want to force people to give you the changes they make on their own time to your non-free software, as well as to force people to give you the changes they make on their own time to other people's non-free software in which you had no involvement in at all.
Thanks for clearing that up.
sc
If I give you BSD licenced code, you can do anything with it that you want.
How is that not guaranteed free? I can't put the cat back into the bag.
Perhaps you need to read the licence...
sc