User: Bruce Perens

Re:finally, now i can ask my question w/o being OT

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

If you can understand what he is saying, he is most likely using a CB radio. Hams use SSB or FM for voice and you would not be able to understand him - SSB would sound like a duck (no kidding) and you would not hear FM at all.

Re:Oscar 40 -- makes me feel old

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

Robin, I passed the 20 words-per-minute code test for my Extra class exam, fair and square, from an ARRL VEC (a VEC is a team of volunteer examiners). I just don't think anyone else should have to go through that nonsense.

Thanks

Bruce K6BP

Re:Oscar 40 -- makes me feel old

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

Yes.

Join No-Code International

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

If you object to having a Morse code test for any ham license class, in any country, join No-Code International.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Can we have our spectrum back please?

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

Gee, you want back some of the only radio spectrum that's actually dedicated for people to use directly rather than corporations to charge a toll for everyone else to use? Some of the only radio spectrum that's used for technology education? Some of the only spectrum that's available for nerds like us to experiment and communicate with each other directly? It doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

Bruce

The Launch has Already Happened!

On: Controlling Space Satellites

The satellites are up. What is much nicer is that that the AMSAT Phase 3D Amateur Radio Satellite that was riding the same booster is up, after years of waiting for a ride to space, and separation from the launch vehicle was successful. See the AMSAT web site for more.

Bruce

Re:Have you heard of Ruby?

On: Interviews With The Creators of Vyper and Stackless

Hi AC,

Yes, Perl is an extremely popular language. This is because it solves a problem for a lot of people. You can have all of this dispite the fact that its design leaves something to be desired.

Perl is not the end of language evolution and certainly Larry Wall has never claimed that it was. You really shouldn't have that much difficulty accepting this.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Ruby Rocks. Forget Perl6.

On: Interviews With The Creators of Vyper and Stackless

Thanks for mentioning the FreeBSD ports tree - I went and looked at it, and there are a number of Ruby-related packages in there that have not made it to Debian yet.

I might do some serious web programming with this.

Thanks

Bruce

Have you heard of Ruby?

On: Interviews With The Creators of Vyper and Stackless

The language Ruby is a fully object-oriented interpretive language with good regular expression support. It's inspired by Perl, but a good deal cleaner than Perl IMO. I'm afraid I've always had an esthetic problem with Perl. Unlike Python, Ruby's object model isn't an afterthought. Ruby is dual-licensed under the GPL and an Artistic-like license. What would be the Perl Conference in the U.S. is the Perl and Ruby Conference in Japan. Ruby's released implementation is interpreted, but there is an experimental JIT compiler. Packages for various libraries exist and it's shipped with Debian.

It seems to be a pretty nice language. Nobody here seems to have heard of it. Why? I think it needs a bigger community outside of Japan.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Cracking == legal?

On: European Cybercrime Treaty 1.1

That would still be a crime. But we don't want a new treaty and its implementing national laws to outlaw the tools we use to test if our systems are secure - which happen to be "cracking tools" in themselves.

Thanks

Bruce

Please justify your assumption

On: European Cybercrime Treaty 1.1

You are assuming that we need this treaty and the follow-on implementing law at all to prosecute criminals. I haven't seen that there's any problem prosecuting them now, without a new treaty and new law.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Sprint: - What's a stronger word than "suck"?

On: What's The Best Cell Phone Calling Plan?

I usually use "aspirate" as a stronger word than "suck".

And that applies to Sprint. See my other comment about them.

Bruce

Forget About Sprint

On: What's The Best Cell Phone Calling Plan?

Sprint's network only covers major transportation corridors of major metropolitan areas. You can get out of its network in the area where you live, and then incoming calls won't ring in because they don't have roaming agreements in place. I recently changed planes in Pittsburgh and it didn't even work in the airport there. If you are out of their network you have to use your credit card to roam outgoing, and you can't do anything to make incoming calls work.

Also, watch out for the silver Motorola "Timeport" that Sprint sells through Office Depot and other stores. It is missing 800 MHz digital mode, which the black, non-Sprint version of the same Motorola "StarTAC" digital phone has enabled. So, on the black phone you have the option to do digital roaming and switch to a digital 800 MHz primary carrier, on the silver one you only get analog roaming.

Thanks

Bruce

Copyleft probably won't protect a DTD

On: On The CopyLeft Of DTDs

It's nice to copyleft your DTD, and it makes it possible for others to use it and to make programs that are compatible with your data storage format. It will probably encourage others to make their tools Free Software. That might make your program more popular, because it has all of these nice accessories that you didn't have to develop.

On the other hand, don't expect the copyleft to protect your DTD. If anyone wants to use the data format in a proprietary application, well, they might not be able to use your DTD directly, but they can clone it and the result would probably not be considered a derivative work.

There are a few rights that we want to protect for the good of Free Software. We don't want API copyrights to be enforcible. We want to have the right to reverse-engineer for purposes of compatibility. We don't want to have a Microsoft come along and say "You can't make word processors that are Word-compatible, the file-format is copyrighted". Asserting the copyleft on a file format isn't compatible with this. However, a DTD isn't a file format, just its description. Thus, go ahead and copyleft your DTD, but be aware of the limitations.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:This book is Not Free Software

On: "KDE 2.0 Development" Is Online (And OPL)

No problem. It could be a good book and a very useful one even though it's not Free Software. But I'm getting to hate the way the Open Publication License is used, it seems deceptive. In big letters, "This Book is Under the Open Publication License" and then in 5-point type "but you can't sell printed copies" and sometimes even "and you can't make substantive modifications".

The OPL is actually 4 different licenses, depending on the options you select. They should all have different names instead of being lumped under "The Open Publication License" in the singular.

I wonder if the volunteer translators for this book have considered that Howard K. Sams Publishing will hold a monopoly on printed copies of their work. They could consider it a fair trade, which is fine as long as they know about it.

Thanks

Bruce

This book is Not Free Software

On: "KDE 2.0 Development" Is Online (And OPL)

The Open Publication License has two options, either of which makes the license not free. In this case the publisher has taken the "Can't distribute as a printed book without permission" option.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Are there some people here in a snit, or what?

On: Open Source Programming On The UK PSX2

No, it's all of those diaper changes and getting chunks hurled at me regularly. And with all that the little type is so cute. I've had some major Darwinian programming cut in.

Bruce

Are there some people here in a snit, or what?

On: Open Source Programming On The UK PSX2

I wonder if Michael and Timothy went to a bar, this evening, met two incredible women, who put them down hard. Their stories this evening seem, well, a bit bitter and negative.

Bruce

Re:Not much of a sneak preview.

On: NewsForge 'Previews' GPL3

Yes. The reporter was stretching a bit. I was hard pressed to generate a good quote for him.

Bruce

Re:The future of Free Software.

On: NewsForge 'Previews' GPL3

Actually, most countries are signatory to a copyright treaty called the Berne Copyright Convention. The ones that aren't, are indeed more difficult as far as enforcement is concerned.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Linking, Communication, and Licenses

On: NewsForge 'Previews' GPL3

Obviously, we need to close the ASP loophole without making the usual client-server paradigm invalid. Otherwise, nobody will use the license.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:ASP loophole

On: NewsForge 'Previews' GPL3

If the program is yours, it's generally obvious. If you have a good idea that it's yours, you start by writing letters asking for your license to be honored. If that doesn't work, you can bring suit and see the source code in the discovery process.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:What if the new GPL is invalid?

On: NewsForge 'Previews' GPL3

Licenses have severability clauses to deal with this. If one part is declared invalid, the rest of the license remains valid. It's very unlikely that an entire license would be declared invalid and that such a thing would not be appealed and overturned in appeal.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Any questions about the ASP and linking issues?

On: NewsForge 'Previews' GPL3

This is a really good point. You don't want this to be used to abuse, as in "this 20,000 line script is a config file and I don't have to disclose it", but you don't want to force people to disclose their /etc/shadow file, either. I've not dealt with this issue before.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Any questions about the ASP and linking issues?

On: NewsForge 'Previews' GPL3

The Qt license is the GPL now. The QPL 2.0 license, which I think is what you are talking about, is also available if you don't like the GPL.

To take improvements back - means something along the lines of Qt license.

I wasn't able to make any sense of that. Can you restate it, please?

Thanks

Bruce