Out of curiosity, if you're 800 years old and completely, crushingly tired of being alive, but you have the wherewithal to afford continued "eternity treatments", is opting not to the same as committing suicide? Someone else may've already hashed this out, but I just started wondering about it. It seems like there is a lot of non-obvious legal and philosophical ground to be covered when we inevitably figure out a way to do it.
On the other hand, I'd finally get to see "Duke Nukem Forever" and maybe a copyright-free Disney movie. Maybe.
Send an email to your congressman describing your complaints with the law.
When the mail doesn't bounce (thus proving that the congressman uses a P2P app according to the new legal definition - an email client in this case), sue the living crap out of said congressman and convince a young up-and-coming DA wanting to make a name for himself to file criminal charges as well.
When it hits the media - and the proverbial fan - profit!
I am sooo not a lawyer, but I'd guess that here, although you are using their code in that you're compiling it into your own software, you are not extending it... you're just building on top of their API?
You don't have to extend it to invoke the GPL's protections - you just have to link to it.
Don't get me wrong: the GPL is a good thing and I wholeheartedly support its goals and intentions, but this is a horrible place to use it. As far as I know, you can even use the Oracle and MS SQL client libraries without such restrictions.
As long as you dont' use MySQL code in your own product
There's the problem, though: how do you access MySQL without using their client library (short of some lame shell-script hack)? I guess you could write some loosely-coupled adapter, such as a GPLed stub that links to libmysqlclient.so and that communicates with the main non-GPL application via SOAP or something, and then pray that you're covering yourself legally and that the overhead in the interconnect doesn't kill performance.
Alternatively, you can take the unambiguously clear path of using PostgreSQL's BSD-licensed client and server and avoid the issue altogether.
I think you missed his point. The MySQL client libraries are GPL, so you can't distribute an application that links to them without using a GPL-compatible license. You're free, of course, to write your own non-GPL version of mysqlclient.so but I doubt that's likely to happen.
From a user perspective, most people are more comfortable with KDE because it is closer to Windows, which they are used to.
If you convince yourself that KDE is "Unix for Windows users", then you'll do yourself a grave disservice. I last used Windows on a regular basis in '97 (and only used it then because I worked tech support at a small ISP), but switched from Gnome to KDE a couple of years ago because I liked the extra control it gave me and loved the Unix-like way applications are built from discrete parts.
Gnome's still OK - I certainly wouldn't make fun of someone for using it - but understand that quite a few advanced users prefer KDE for reasons that have nothing to do with Windows.
Mul and div have got higher precedence than addition in every language.
And since I forgot to mention it earlier, just about any language that uses RPN expressions would have evaluated to "not enough operands" after the "+" sign. You're making the (naive) assumption that all languages have the concept of "precedence". Don't worry; you'll get to that in a couple of semesters.
If a company leaves a position open for a year because they want a year's experience in something - they could have brought in a guy with a broad background and brought him up to speed in the year, and trained him to think the way they wanted.
Exactly. I mean, once you've seen twenty or thirty procedural languages, it's honestly not that hard to learn the syntax of another one. I assume that they actually needed the productivity of a programmer or they wouldn't be trying to hire one, so they've lost at least two years' of output in order to save one month of training (at the most).
A local company (in a town of 25,000) was advertising for a Fortran programmer. While I know nothing about Fortran, I made it through a CompSci degree and a series of jobs using a bizarre mix of pretty much everything short of PROLOG. I was upfront with them about my lack of specific knowledge, but told them I'm a fast learner and would spend all available time between the interview and the start date bringing myself up to speed.
The test was along test of:
Which of the following is the name of an unsigned 16-bit integer?
A. LONG
B. FLOAT
C. CHAR
D. SHORTINT
and
What's the result of this arithmetic problem:
1 + 5 / 10 * 8
My answer to the second was:
If those are integers in Fortran's notation, and it is evaluated left-to-right, then the answer is 0. If they're integers and evaluated in the standard precedence, then it's 1. If they're floating point numbers left-to-right, then it's 4.8. If they're floating point numbers in the standard order, then it's 5.0.
I'll go out on a limb and say that even if I didn't know Fortran, I certainly understood the concepts involved and could figure it out pretty quickly. Alas, I didn't get the job (in retrospect, thank God!). Too bad for them; two years later that ad is still running at least once a month.
Exactly. I'm the only person in my office using a non-Windows (rah!-rah! Debian!) desktop system. A few days ago my boss was walking past my office and I called him in to show him the 17" LCD monitor he just bought for me and to thank him for it, when I realized that he'd never actually seen a graphical Linux system before. He agreed that KDE looked pretty nice, but said (with a smirk) that "we're still not going to use it."
That's OK. Just as long as everyone keeps using and enjoying OpenOffice, and using Psi to connect to our new Jabber server, and Firefox to use our web applications (FreeBSD/PostgreSQL/Zope), and now Evolution to read the email that gets filtered by our happy little Postfix server before it can choke the Exchange server to death, I'll smile and nod in agreement.
The truth of the matter is that except for one or two in-house apps, everything our employees use is either a port from Unix or interacting with a Unix server. We're really not that far from being able to drop Windows altogether, and Evolution will close the largest part of that gap.
I'm pretty sure Novell has more than one programmer. I could see hiring a Windows person to port the UI while still having someone else work on the backend.
The average user simply isn't willing to have an "administrator" account that they have to use every time they want to install an app.
My wife isn't terribly computer savvy (at least, she wouldn't be if she weren't married to a CompSci person), but she's perfectly content with Mac OS X asking for her password before updating system software. It's an immediate red flag that something important is about to happen, and I think she'd be extremely hesitant to type it in response to clicking on a link to a web page.
i mean, any operating system is vulnerable to an exploit if it's security infrastructure is sufficiently loose.
It's lose, darnit, loseloseLOSE!
Wait a minute, you actually meant to say "loose", didn't you?
Between using "lose/loose" correctly and not writing "This begs the questions:", I'm prompted to ask: what are you doing on Slashdot? We don't take decent grammar lightly around here, bucko.
Why must any application that uses MySQL be GPL unless a commercial license is obtained from MySQL AB?
If you're asking "what legal reason is there?", then the answer is because they decided in their infinite wisdom to GPL the client libraries, which is a more restrictive policy than any of the commercial DBs impose as far as I know.
If you meant "why on Earth would they do that?", then I have no answer. They had to invent a stupid "FOSS License Exception" (see the above link for details) to allow popular non-GPL projects like PHP to offer MySQL support, and have basically removed any chance of commercial software support.
In a nutshell, if you want to use a database in your non-GPL project (whether Free or proprietary) then MySQL is a poor choice. They've already added huge client library restrictions by moving from the LGPL to the GPL, and I don't see any reason to believe that they won't drop the "FOSS License Exception" kludge in the future. Note that I like the GPL - it's a good license and I support its goals - but this seems like a wholly inappropriate place to use it.
int main() { printf("foo is %d\n", foo); return 0; } $ make test cc -O2 -pipe -fno-strict-aliasing -march=athlon-tbird test.c -o test In file included from test.c:2: inc2.h:1: error: redefinition of 'foo' inc1.h:1: error: previous definition of 'foo' was here *** Error code 1
Stop in/tmp.
Sticking the variables in separate files doesn't automatically get you namespace safety. Maybe you were thinking of Python?
I don't believe that. The real problem is the stupid companies who believe that spammers can increase their profits! If no one buys from a spammer, but someone paid him spammer $10,000 to broadcast their ad, then he just made ten grand without selling a single thing.
The real solution is to beat it through the heads of small (and not-so-small) businessmen everywhere that you get get rich by paying a spammer. When that happens, the problem will disappear.
I do the exact same thing, except that I keep my entire CD collection on CD. If I ever need a new format, I can go back to the CD and reencode without transcoding from another lossy format.
I've got about 350GB of lossless audio goodness in a set of nice oak bookshelves built into my wall. Considering that the time it takes to get up, get a CD, rip it, and encode it is not much longer than it takes to locate a FLACed album on my fileserver and encode it - that is, the encoding stage is several times longer than the "get up and rip the first track before starting to encode" phase - I think I'll stick with my current system.
I think the only real question is, how soon until FLAC becomes pointless because you might as well stick with WAVs?
Never. Debian packages all ship with compressed text documentation even though it probably only saves a few hundred bytes in many cases. The manpages on most Unix systems are gzipped until you actually read them. Compare a 2KB text file with a several-meg.wav - if it's worthwhile to compress the former, then there will be a benefit to compressing the latter for years to come.
Check out the sshd(8) manpage, particular the command="command" option to authorized_keys:
[...] This option might be useful to restrict certain public keys to perform just a specific operation. An example might be a key that permits remote backups but nothing else. [...]
If you need to use passphraseless keys, then at least you can severely limit the commands available to the connecting user.
In CompSci terms, a greedy algorithm is often not the optimal solution to a problem - you and I are in complete agreement there. Most of the "bad people" I've known, though, were so convinced of their own inherent and obvious superiority that it simply never occurred to them that the sub-humans around them could ever catch them in their lies or otherwise hold them accountable.
That's not a backup - that's a userland implementation of RAID 1 with very high latency.
I make daily differential backups (via AMANDA) to a rotating set of 12 tapes. If I accidentally delete/etc/shadow or some other important file, I have nearly two weeks to discover the problem and restore a previous version from tape. Your idea gives you, oh, until about the time that rsync discovers the missing file and dutifully nukes it from your "backup" drive.
What you're doing is certainly better than nothing, but it's not a backup solution by any definition of the term beyond "keeps zero or one copy of the file somewhere else".
Far, far better would be for your script to use dump or tar to create incremental backup files on your USB drive and to rotate them out on a regular basis.
just like those orphan traders at tsunami disaster areas... i really would like to have a chance to confront these disguisting people and try to make sense of their thought process...
This isn't a popular view these days, but it's always been generally accepted that their are bad people. Not people who are inwardly good but act poorly, but genuinely bad people. One relatively modern name giving to such people is "sociopaths". They have no regard for other people, if they even see other people as fellow human beings at all.
These people have always existed, and to them the idea of whether a certain profitable action is moral is moot, because morality doesn't really have a place in their worldview. As long as their are sociopaths (or Bad People), there will be spam, orphan traders, and personal injury lawyers. Do not try to understand their thought process. First, it's usually amazingly simple ("What course of action will benefit me the most?") and you'll get all tied up in trying to find a hidden meaning in their rather straightforward behavior. Second, you really don't want to go there - seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I'd finally get to see "Duke Nukem Forever" and maybe a copyright-free Disney movie. Maybe.
You don't have to extend it to invoke the GPL's protections - you just have to link to it.
Don't get me wrong: the GPL is a good thing and I wholeheartedly support its goals and intentions, but this is a horrible place to use it. As far as I know, you can even use the Oracle and MS SQL client libraries without such restrictions.
There's the problem, though: how do you access MySQL without using their client library (short of some lame shell-script hack)? I guess you could write some loosely-coupled adapter, such as a GPLed stub that links to libmysqlclient.so and that communicates with the main non-GPL application via SOAP or something, and then pray that you're covering yourself legally and that the overhead in the interconnect doesn't kill performance.
Alternatively, you can take the unambiguously clear path of using PostgreSQL's BSD-licensed client and server and avoid the issue altogether.
I think you missed his point. The MySQL client libraries are GPL, so you can't distribute an application that links to them without using a GPL-compatible license. You're free, of course, to write your own non-GPL version of mysqlclient.so but I doubt that's likely to happen.
If you convince yourself that KDE is "Unix for Windows users", then you'll do yourself a grave disservice. I last used Windows on a regular basis in '97 (and only used it then because I worked tech support at a small ISP), but switched from Gnome to KDE a couple of years ago because I liked the extra control it gave me and loved the Unix-like way applications are built from discrete parts.
Gnome's still OK - I certainly wouldn't make fun of someone for using it - but understand that quite a few advanced users prefer KDE for reasons that have nothing to do with Windows.
And since I forgot to mention it earlier, just about any language that uses RPN expressions would have evaluated to "not enough operands" after the "+" sign. You're making the (naive) assumption that all languages have the concept of "precedence". Don't worry; you'll get to that in a couple of semesters.
Exactly. I mean, once you've seen twenty or thirty procedural languages, it's honestly not that hard to learn the syntax of another one. I assume that they actually needed the productivity of a programmer or they wouldn't be trying to hire one, so they've lost at least two years' of output in order to save one month of training (at the most).
And that, my friends, is why the job is still unfilled two years later.
The test was along test of:
and My answer to the second was:I'll go out on a limb and say that even if I didn't know Fortran, I certainly understood the concepts involved and could figure it out pretty quickly. Alas, I didn't get the job (in retrospect, thank God!). Too bad for them; two years later that ad is still running at least once a month.
That's OK. Just as long as everyone keeps using and enjoying OpenOffice, and using Psi to connect to our new Jabber server, and Firefox to use our web applications (FreeBSD/PostgreSQL/Zope), and now Evolution to read the email that gets filtered by our happy little Postfix server before it can choke the Exchange server to death, I'll smile and nod in agreement.
The truth of the matter is that except for one or two in-house apps, everything our employees use is either a port from Unix or interacting with a Unix server. We're really not that far from being able to drop Windows altogether, and Evolution will close the largest part of that gap.
I'm pretty sure Novell has more than one programmer. I could see hiring a Windows person to port the UI while still having someone else work on the backend.
My wife isn't terribly computer savvy (at least, she wouldn't be if she weren't married to a CompSci person), but she's perfectly content with Mac OS X asking for her password before updating system software. It's an immediate red flag that something important is about to happen, and I think she'd be extremely hesitant to type it in response to clicking on a link to a web page.
It's lose, darnit, lose lose LOSE !
Wait a minute, you actually meant to say "loose", didn't you?
Between using "lose/loose" correctly and not writing "This begs the questions:", I'm prompted to ask: what are you doing on Slashdot? We don't take decent grammar lightly around here, bucko.
If you're asking "what legal reason is there?", then the answer is because they decided in their infinite wisdom to GPL the client libraries, which is a more restrictive policy than any of the commercial DBs impose as far as I know.
If you meant "why on Earth would they do that?", then I have no answer. They had to invent a stupid "FOSS License Exception" (see the above link for details) to allow popular non-GPL projects like PHP to offer MySQL support, and have basically removed any chance of commercial software support.
In a nutshell, if you want to use a database in your non-GPL project (whether Free or proprietary) then MySQL is a poor choice. They've already added huge client library restrictions by moving from the LGPL to the GPL, and I don't see any reason to believe that they won't drop the "FOSS License Exception" kludge in the future. Note that I like the GPL - it's a good license and I support its goals - but this seems like a wholly inappropriate place to use it.
The real solution is to beat it through the heads of small (and not-so-small) businessmen everywhere that you get get rich by paying a spammer. When that happens, the problem will disappear.
You had me until then; no self-respecting engineer would ever use those terms.
I've got about 350GB of lossless audio goodness in a set of nice oak bookshelves built into my wall. Considering that the time it takes to get up, get a CD, rip it, and encode it is not much longer than it takes to locate a FLACed album on my fileserver and encode it - that is, the encoding stage is several times longer than the "get up and rip the first track before starting to encode" phase - I think I'll stick with my current system.
Never. Debian packages all ship with compressed text documentation even though it probably only saves a few hundred bytes in many cases. The manpages on most Unix systems are gzipped until you actually read them. Compare a 2KB text file with a several-meg .wav - if it's worthwhile to compress the former, then there will be a benefit to compressing the latter for years to come.
In CompSci terms, a greedy algorithm is often not the optimal solution to a problem - you and I are in complete agreement there. Most of the "bad people" I've known, though, were so convinced of their own inherent and obvious superiority that it simply never occurred to them that the sub-humans around them could ever catch them in their lies or otherwise hold them accountable.
I make daily differential backups (via AMANDA) to a rotating set of 12 tapes. If I accidentally delete /etc/shadow or some other important file, I have nearly two weeks to discover the problem and restore a previous version from tape. Your idea gives you, oh, until about the time that rsync discovers the missing file and dutifully nukes it from your "backup" drive.
What you're doing is certainly better than nothing, but it's not a backup solution by any definition of the term beyond "keeps zero or one copy of the file somewhere else".
Far, far better would be for your script to use dump or tar to create incremental backup files on your USB drive and to rotate them out on a regular basis.
This isn't a popular view these days, but it's always been generally accepted that their are bad people. Not people who are inwardly good but act poorly, but genuinely bad people. One relatively modern name giving to such people is "sociopaths". They have no regard for other people, if they even see other people as fellow human beings at all.
These people have always existed, and to them the idea of whether a certain profitable action is moral is moot, because morality doesn't really have a place in their worldview. As long as their are sociopaths (or Bad People), there will be spam, orphan traders, and personal injury lawyers. Do not try to understand their thought process. First, it's usually amazingly simple ("What course of action will benefit me the most?") and you'll get all tied up in trying to find a hidden meaning in their rather straightforward behavior. Second, you really don't want to go there - seriously.
If you count SPF as "email authentication", which it is on a certain level, then I'd go with the former.