There are some schools in the UK, for example, who teach cretinism, but they're privately funded "faith" schools and still have to adhere to a national curriculum which includes evolutionary theories.
There's only so many places you can publicize projects, though, and if every "small" project did that we'd quickly be overwhelmed. Places like slashdot rarely talk about specific software any more too; unless you do something unique and/or very different in some way, it's likely many places won't run your puff advertizing piece anyway.
The issue isn't to get the project well known: the issue is to find those people for whom the project would be useful/interesting and make the project well known within that small(er) group.
It brings the UK back in line with the rest of Europe; for a while, we were the only place disallowing any form of software patent. We're now back to "software patents if you can show a technical effect", which is enough to block most stuff which gets patented in the US/Japan.
The software patent battle was never properly won in Europe. It was prevented from being made much worse, but we still have software patents of limited sorts.
The same would happen for any other large project where copyright isn't assigned to a single entity. It doesn't mean that you can't enforce / protect the copyright.
I guess the question then becomes, "at what point do Novell (or whoever) decide that doing the spec-writing dance, the bug tracker hustle, etc., is actually a waste of resources?".
While Sun were the primary developers of OOo, and few people were coming on board, it doesn't make sense to try and work outside of their framework for anything non-trivial. At some point, Sun will be much less important, and (more importantly) much less efficient with their current processes - other people could decide to stop bothering, and speed off into the sunset making much bigger changes more quickly, and Sun's OOo quickly becomes irrelevant.
I don't suggest that we're close to that latter scenario at the moment, but we are surely somewhere inbetween, and the level of non-triviality at which it becomes to painful to maintain "outside" must be rising. If Novell, IBM, Google and other friends all reach the point where swimming through the treacle is no longer interesting, it would be difficult to see how Sun could continue their current practices.
I would say find a project which is actively friendly to new contributors. This is something our project (http://www.bongo-project.org/ - mail and calendaring, etc.) tries to be really good at, although obviously you can always improve.
The reason I say that is that to contribute, you inevitably need help at first, and you want to see your work be included in the project. If you pick a project where it's difficult to get involved, or where you contribute patches which end up rotting in the bug tracker, you'll get frustrated and feel your work is for nothing. On the other hand, if you create things and the project accepts them with open arms, you'll feel that you've really achieved something.
If you look at the base on the Chinese diagram, AD == 2 and DC = 2rt(3). Divide by 2, gives you 1 and rt(3). By Pythagoras, AC**2 == 1**2 + rt(3)**2 == 2, therefore AC == 2.
So it's a 1/rt(3)/2 triangle, which is exactly that "30, 60, 90 crap". I actually didn't find a single "unusual" angle in there (aside from the construction in the last question).
It might be less obvious, but the math is basically the same.
The Chinese test is actually very similar to the UK one; it's based on a similar triangle (1/rt3/2 instead of 3/4/5). The trig is virtually identical, they're asking for mostly the same angles, and you don't need that much more knowledge to answer it.
I don't think the comparison is that fair - there are plenty of easy questions in UK exams, but you can't pass by answering them all, you need to do the harder ones too. The Chinese one looks harder, but it's not, mathematically - it just needs a bit more knowledge of terminology, and a much better grasp of spatial reasoning.
From what I saw, RMS has already apologised to the Apache community, and has said that GPLv3 won't bring compatibility - but that an updated Apache license might.
Whether or not Apache are willing to drop their patent terms remains to be seen tho'.
I don't see where he claimed the British spelling is better.
Perhaps his point is just that as it's our native tongue it's bizarre to claim we misspell words. That would imply that American spelling is more correct than ours, which is exactly what you appear to be railing against.
Michael Meeks made a version of this converter available which compiles using mono, see entry 2007-01-29 on http://www.gnome.org/~michael/ .
Realistically, there's no reason it even needs to be in C# - the various bits of wrapper could be rewritten into other languages, and the main work is done by an XSLT. The OpenDocument Fellowship might include a similar tool in future tool sets, translated to be a bit more native.
I don't think so. It says you can sub-license it; that doesn't let you change the conditions of the licence. That's basically how people receive the license to use the software.
In general, no-one except the copyright holder has the ability to set the licensing terms of something. I disagree with the article, though, in that the practical consequences aren't particularly disastrous - complying with the terms of new BSD / MIT / etc. in parallel with those of another license doesn't look too hard to me.
I love how you spin that, "they cannot force me to give up my *private keys*!!"
Let's look at it the other way. Should people be able to put restrictions on the users of free software, which effectively prevents them from taking advantage of the rights that the license gives them?
If you like the Apache 2.0, that's cool. If you like the GPL 2.0, that's also cool. What's uncool is taking software someone else wrote under something like the GPL v3, and removing the rights that the author has provided to end-users. That's like someone taking software under Apache 2.0, but not giving the end-users the patent grant, so that they are unable to defend themselves to patent claims.
While it's pretty early in the process still, it seems a bit unfair to characterise it as "Stallman vs. Torvalds". IIRC, Newsforge tried to contact others who were unhappy with the licence and couldn't find any - the only criticism has been offered by HP saying that the changes on patents still weren't enough for them or something, but that they were happy with the process.
It sounds like a mountain of a story being made out of a molehill of comments.
Well, I seriously doubt that they were telling these people to go out, sleep around and try to get pozzed up - that would be mildly unethical, I would think.
I would suggest they probably tried introducing HIV into a blood sample of the patient, and tried to see how successful HIV was in reproducing. If it can reproduce well in "normal" blood, but badly in the blood of the patient, that's a reasonable indication that they're immune.
I used to be with Plusnet a few years ago (about the time they kept installing new "fat pipes" and "redbacks"), and they were awful then. The service was horrible and their web setup was laughable. That said, they're not the worst out there, which says something...
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In general, they don't.
There are some schools in the UK, for example, who teach cretinism, but they're privately funded "faith" schools and still have to adhere to a national curriculum which includes evolutionary theories.
The ODF spec. specifically allows extensions. OOo automatically drops them, though.
Interesting that they're not implementing the extremely-similar ISO-endorsed 1.0 version.
There's only so many places you can publicize projects, though, and if every "small" project did that we'd quickly be overwhelmed. Places like slashdot rarely talk about specific software any more too; unless you do something unique and/or very different in some way, it's likely many places won't run your puff advertizing piece anyway.
The issue isn't to get the project well known: the issue is to find those people for whom the project would be useful/interesting and make the project well known within that small(er) group.
It's not really that bad.
It brings the UK back in line with the rest of Europe; for a while, we were the only place disallowing any form of software patent. We're now back to "software patents if you can show a technical effect", which is enough to block most stuff which gets patented in the US/Japan.
The software patent battle was never properly won in Europe. It was prevented from being made much worse, but we still have software patents of limited sorts.
Haralde Welte was able to get a court decision on infringement of Linux without having to round up EVERYONE who contributed to Linux:
http://www.gpl-violations.org/news/20061110-dlink-judgement_frankfurt_en.html
The same would happen for any other large project where copyright isn't assigned to a single entity. It doesn't mean that you can't enforce / protect the copyright.
I guess the question then becomes, "at what point do Novell (or whoever) decide that doing the spec-writing dance, the bug tracker hustle, etc., is actually a waste of resources?".
While Sun were the primary developers of OOo, and few people were coming on board, it doesn't make sense to try and work outside of their framework for anything non-trivial. At some point, Sun will be much less important, and (more importantly) much less efficient with their current processes - other people could decide to stop bothering, and speed off into the sunset making much bigger changes more quickly, and Sun's OOo quickly becomes irrelevant.
I don't suggest that we're close to that latter scenario at the moment, but we are surely somewhere inbetween, and the level of non-triviality at which it becomes to painful to maintain "outside" must be rising. If Novell, IBM, Google and other friends all reach the point where swimming through the treacle is no longer interesting, it would be difficult to see how Sun could continue their current practices.
We're saving the noise and partying for 1.0 ;)
No need to fork Zimbra, we have a light weight alternative in Bongo (http://www.bongo-project.org/) that we'd love to have more people help out with.
As well as Bongo, there is also Citadel doing similar things, Kolab doing completely different things, and a couple of web-only groupware systems.
Zimbra's by no means the only game in town.
First link should probably be to http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=214112 .
The content is a complete rip-off of:
http://www.clevo.com.tw/products/M540V.asp
They say that they manufacture in Sweden, but that's a Taiwanese firm. Definitely stinky, and I wouldn't buy one.
I would say find a project which is actively friendly to new contributors. This is something our project (http://www.bongo-project.org/ - mail and calendaring, etc.) tries to be really good at, although obviously you can always improve.
The reason I say that is that to contribute, you inevitably need help at first, and you want to see your work be included in the project. If you pick a project where it's difficult to get involved, or where you contribute patches which end up rotting in the bug tracker, you'll get frustrated and feel your work is for nothing. On the other hand, if you create things and the project accepts them with open arms, you'll feel that you've really achieved something.
If you look at the base on the Chinese diagram, AD == 2 and DC = 2rt(3). Divide by 2, gives you 1 and rt(3). By Pythagoras, AC**2 == 1**2 + rt(3)**2 == 2, therefore AC == 2.
So it's a 1/rt(3)/2 triangle, which is exactly that "30, 60, 90 crap". I actually didn't find a single "unusual" angle in there (aside from the construction in the last question).
It might be less obvious, but the math is basically the same.
The Chinese test is actually very similar to the UK one; it's based on a similar triangle (1/rt3/2 instead of 3/4/5). The trig is virtually identical, they're asking for mostly the same angles, and you don't need that much more knowledge to answer it.
I don't think the comparison is that fair - there are plenty of easy questions in UK exams, but you can't pass by answering them all, you need to do the harder ones too. The Chinese one looks harder, but it's not, mathematically - it just needs a bit more knowledge of terminology, and a much better grasp of spatial reasoning.
From what I saw, RMS has already apologised to the Apache community, and has said that GPLv3 won't bring compatibility - but that an updated Apache license might.
Whether or not Apache are willing to drop their patent terms remains to be seen tho'.
I don't see where he claimed the British spelling is better.
Perhaps his point is just that as it's our native tongue it's bizarre to claim we misspell words. That would imply that American spelling is more correct than ours, which is exactly what you appear to be railing against.
Michael Meeks made a version of this converter available which compiles using mono, see entry 2007-01-29 on http://www.gnome.org/~michael/ .
Realistically, there's no reason it even needs to be in C# - the various bits of wrapper could be rewritten into other languages, and the main work is done by an XSLT. The OpenDocument Fellowship might include a similar tool in future tool sets, translated to be a bit more native.
Although the link is incredibly informative, here's more info about Thunar.
I don't think so. It says you can sub-license it; that doesn't let you change the conditions of the licence. That's basically how people receive the license to use the software.
In general, no-one except the copyright holder has the ability to set the licensing terms of something. I disagree with the article, though, in that the practical consequences aren't particularly disastrous - complying with the terms of new BSD / MIT / etc. in parallel with those of another license doesn't look too hard to me.
Both "effect" and "affect" can be used as both verb and noun.
Understanding their proper usage is a lot harder than saying "effect is a doing word!".
They should have asked David 'Calamity' James. He knows all about computer games.
Submitter couldn't be bothered to do the research, but there is a paper written by this guy about the concept.
I love how you spin that, "they cannot force me to give up my *private keys*!!"
Let's look at it the other way. Should people be able to put restrictions on the users of free software, which effectively prevents them from taking advantage of the rights that the license gives them?
If you like the Apache 2.0, that's cool. If you like the GPL 2.0, that's also cool. What's uncool is taking software someone else wrote under something like the GPL v3, and removing the rights that the author has provided to end-users. That's like someone taking software under Apache 2.0, but not giving the end-users the patent grant, so that they are unable to defend themselves to patent claims.
While it's pretty early in the process still, it seems a bit unfair to characterise it as "Stallman vs. Torvalds". IIRC, Newsforge tried to contact others who were unhappy with the licence and couldn't find any - the only criticism has been offered by HP saying that the changes on patents still weren't enough for them or something, but that they were happy with the process.
It sounds like a mountain of a story being made out of a molehill of comments.
Well, I seriously doubt that they were telling these people to go out, sleep around and try to get pozzed up - that would be mildly unethical, I would think.
I would suggest they probably tried introducing HIV into a blood sample of the patient, and tried to see how successful HIV was in reproducing. If it can reproduce well in "normal" blood, but badly in the blood of the patient, that's a reasonable indication that they're immune.
You'd think it was a conspiracy, but no, they're just incompetent.
Only the other week they emailed their Force9 customers their customer database, for all to see.
I used to be with Plusnet a few years ago (about the time they kept installing new "fat pipes" and "redbacks"), and they were awful then. The service was horrible and their web setup was laughable. That said, they're not the worst out there, which says something...