Subversion is built on a filesystem-in-a-database model. Access to a Subversion repository is provided via three methods implemented in libraries:
direct, local access
HTTP access using WebDAV (RFC 2518) and Delta-V (RFC 3523)
custom Subversion network protocol
While there is some theoretical elegance to using WebDAV with Delta-V, in practice I've found that the custom Subversion network protocol is easier to set up and use, and more robust. It can be used either directly for anonymous read-only access, or tunnelled through SSH for read/write access.
I have twelve free software projects in Subversion repositories, and I've been quite happy with it.
In discussions where I've debated the merits of proposals with other engineers, I've only ever heard it said that a proposal had some number of strikes against it. I've never heard anyone say that a proposal had a strike for it.
That's not what I mean. Someone looking at that won't have any clue what it means unless they follow a link or do a search. I was suggesting something that explicitly states that you can copy the software.
The states are often indifferent or incapable of upholding constitutional law.
I'm not convinced that the FBI does any better job of it. It's more a matter of what the courts order. I'm not proposing doing away with federal courts.
If we're going to have federal laws, we need an organization to uphold them.
States routinely do this already. However, I would maintain that we don't need anywhere near the amount of Federal law we already have.
And if it were left to the states fugatives would just run from state to state to avoid local jurisdiction. This is how it used to be
And how it used to be is that the police were allowed to cross jurisdictions in pursuit. If they weren't in hot pursuit, they could notify the other state. If Colorado tells Wyoming that a dangerous criminal that robbed a bank in Colorado and shot three people has entered Wyoming, do you think Wyoming is just going to ignore it?
If there are good reasons for the existence of the FBI, you haven't offered them.
The FBI is an essential and necessary part of the U.S. government.
It is neither essential nor necessary. In fact, it is questionable whether the U.S. Constitution actually gives the federal government the power to have such a police force.
There's no obvious reason why law enforcement can't be left to the states. For that matter, there's no obvious reason why most functions currently performed by the federal government can't be performed by the states instead, and probably at lower cost to the taxpayers. Sending tax dollars to Washington D.C. to pay for things that are done in other parts of the country just burns up a larger fraction of the money in bureaucracy.
they've allready wedged the (C) symbol into ASCII at number 169, and also the USPTO has gotten their (R) in as ASCII number 174...
ASCII (ANSI X3.4-1986) doesn't have characters at code points 169 and 174. ASCII is a 7-bit code, which has character codes from 0 to 127 (decimal). If you want characters for the copyright and registered trademark symbols, you'll have to use some other character code.
I've never heard of the USPTO making any particular effort to get the registered trademark symbol adopted as part of any standard character set.
Open Source/Free Software logo or seal?
on
FBI Anti-Piracy Seal
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Perhaps we should come up with a "Copy all you want, we won't sue!" logo or seal for Open Source and/or Free Software? Since the FBI is trying to get more
public recognition that you're not supposed to make unauthorized copies of proprietary software, maybe there's a corresponding opportunity to make the
benefits of Open Source a little more visible.
The question is about whether a State has the authority to require a State ID to be given on demand. The State DOES have that authority, because it isn't expressly forbidden by Federal law.
The state might have that authority. Or it might not. That will be decided by the Supreme Court. States do not have the authority to do absolutely anything not prohibited by Federal law; the U.S. Constitution limits States as well.
I think a convincing argument can be made that the police demanding an ID for no legitimate reason is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights and the right to privacy. (The Supreme Court has ruled that there is a right to privacy, even though it is not a right specifically enumerated in the Constitution.)
A person should have the right to peaceably and lawfully go about their business without having to present identification.
prominent Apache hacker Roy Fielding claims that it doesn't really matter what the FSF thinks about the matter, because according to the Apache Software Foundation, derived works can just be distributed under the GPL.
It most certainly does matter.
If I want to distribute a derived work made partially from Apache software under the Apache license version 2, and partially from Foobarco's software under the GPL version 2,
the fact that Roy Fielding (or even the Apache Foudnation) is OK with it does NOT solve the problem. Distributing the derived work under the Apache license terms is a violation of the GPL, and Foobarco would have grounds for action.
Re:Not ambitious enough
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
That was it, thanks! "Ring" by Stephen Baxter, which apparently was an expansion of a short story "Lieserl" in his collection "Vacuum Diagrams". I haven't read the short story.
Re:Not ambitious enough
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
Not the one I was thinking of, though it's definitely a great novel.
Not ambitious enough
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I want to burn in the Sun
I want to outlive the sun. Maybe in not exactly the same manner as the protagonist of Charles Sheffield's novel "Tomorrow and Tomorrow", though.
Or maybe burning in the sun wouldn't be so bad. There was another novel whose author and title I can't recall at the moment, in which one of the characters was a human transformed into an entity that could in fact survive in the sun. She discovered that there were intelligent creatures living there that were taking actions apparently designed to shorten the sun's life.
Yes, but the documents I created with applications running on Yggdrasil in 1994 still work correctly with Fedora today. I've had very poor results using Office XP to deal with Office 95 files. Often they're broken.
Microsoft pays lip service to backward compatibility, but naturally they actually want you to buy an upgrade, so they don't have any motivation to make the compatibility too good.
Closed source software, because of its very closedness, will inevitably lead to security concerns. This makes adoption of closed source software by governments particularly worrisome. When you rely on proprietary products, you often get the shaft, and that, in my opinion, is exactly what governments are on track to get if they fail to switch to open source software.
How can we possibly send astronauts to the moon and Mars? We've decided that a mission to service the Hubble is too dangerous, yet going to the moon or Mars is more dangerous yet.
Seriously though, stuff like this really bothers me. While having a few of these on a continent probably won't do anything too disastrous, what will the unintended consequences be if they start becoming popular?
Eric
[The subject line is a reference to the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, in which the U.S. government publicly announces the existence of the said machine, and all the wonderful benefits it will have, when in fact it is a weapon which can only cause destruction within the U.S.]
So why isn't this "Java 3"? There are more significant enhancements between Java 2 1.4.0 and this new 1.5.0 than there were between Java and Java 2 (1.1.8 and 1.2, if memory serves).
Of course, IMNSHO the whole "Java 2" name was just marketing run amuck. I don't see how it's done anything but cause confusion. If marketing absolutely insisted on having a "Java 2", engineering should have bumped the version number to 2.0.
I'm not a fan of marketing determining version or release numbers, nor version number inflation, but changing a marketing product name to include something that looks like a version number without having it match the actual engineering version number is obviously bad.
So if the public domain textbooks exist, the next logical question is why they are not being used as official course materials? At the K-12 level it would save school districts (and thus taxpayers) a lot of money. And at the college level, it would save students money.
MIT seems to actually understand that their value proposition involves much more than the raw course materials, and that it will not hurt them to actually give course materials away, thus their
OpenCourseWare program. This has more potential for improving education than almost any other initiative I've heard of.
With the extension acts, not much has gone out of copyright in a very very long time.
Yes, and thanks to the bad Supreme Court decision in the Eldred case, it's quite possible that no copyrights will expire in our lifetimes.
But my point was that many textbooks from the early 20th century, and even the late 19th century, should still be perfectly good. For instance, plane geometry hasn't changed much in the last century, at least in terms of high school cirriculum.
At the very least, these old text books could be used as the basis for an "open source" textbook effort.
Maybe not in rapidly changing high-tech fields, but surely English and Calculus textbooks that are out of copyright would still be useful?
I suppose the text book publishers would try quite hard to prevent these from being used. "Oh, your school district is going to use the public-domain trigonometry textbook? Well, I'm afraid we can't give you the usual 12% discount on your purchase of organic chemistry textbooks."
Richard Feynman wrote in his autobiography "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" a story about his participation in textbook selection in California high schools, in which the publisher got the committee to approve a book before the content was even available to review.
but the article goes on to mention 'the ability for restaurants and other businesses to send a solicitation by text message to a cell phone when its owner wanders within range of those merchants.' Oh, wonderful, cellular popups..."
Yet another attempt to use a "push" media model where "pull" would be much better. Instead of having my phone contantly wanting my attention when it learns about restaurants, I would much prefer a feature where I could ask the phone "what restaurants are nearby".
In particular, I don't want the restaurants (or other stores) to even know I'm nearby until I ask the phone to poll for that information.
Slashdot Mirror
- direct, local access
- HTTP access using WebDAV (RFC 2518) and Delta-V (RFC 3523)
- custom Subversion network protocol
While there is some theoretical elegance to using WebDAV with Delta-V, in practice I've found that the custom Subversion network protocol is easier to set up and use, and more robust. It can be used either directly for anonymous read-only access, or tunnelled through SSH for read/write access.I have twelve free software projects in Subversion repositories, and I've been quite happy with it.
In discussions where I've debated the merits of proposals with other engineers, I've only ever heard it said that a proposal had some number of strikes against it. I've never heard anyone say that a proposal had a strike for it.
That's not what I mean. Someone looking at that won't have any clue what it means unless they follow a link or do a search. I was suggesting something that explicitly states that you can copy the software.
If there are good reasons for the existence of the FBI, you haven't offered them.
There's no obvious reason why law enforcement can't be left to the states. For that matter, there's no obvious reason why most functions currently performed by the federal government can't be performed by the states instead, and probably at lower cost to the taxpayers. Sending tax dollars to Washington D.C. to pay for things that are done in other parts of the country just burns up a larger fraction of the money in bureaucracy.
I've never heard of the USPTO making any particular effort to get the registered trademark symbol adopted as part of any standard character set.
Perhaps we should come up with a "Copy all you want, we won't sue!" logo or seal for Open Source and/or Free Software? Since the FBI is trying to get more public recognition that you're not supposed to make unauthorized copies of proprietary software, maybe there's a corresponding opportunity to make the benefits of Open Source a little more visible.
I think a convincing argument can be made that the police demanding an ID for no legitimate reason is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights and the right to privacy. (The Supreme Court has ruled that there is a right to privacy, even though it is not a right specifically enumerated in the Constitution.)
A person should have the right to peaceably and lawfully go about their business without having to present identification.
If I want to distribute a derived work made partially from Apache software under the Apache license version 2, and partially from Foobarco's software under the GPL version 2, the fact that Roy Fielding (or even the Apache Foudnation) is OK with it does NOT solve the problem. Distributing the derived work under the Apache license terms is a violation of the GPL, and Foobarco would have grounds for action.
That was it, thanks! "Ring" by Stephen Baxter, which apparently was an expansion of a short story "Lieserl" in his collection "Vacuum Diagrams". I haven't read the short story.
Not the one I was thinking of, though it's definitely a great novel.
Or maybe burning in the sun wouldn't be so bad. There was another novel whose author and title I can't recall at the moment, in which one of the characters was a human transformed into an entity that could in fact survive in the sun. She discovered that there were intelligent creatures living there that were taking actions apparently designed to shorten the sun's life.
Microsoft pays lip service to backward compatibility, but naturally they actually want you to buy an upgrade, so they don't have any motivation to make the compatibility too good.
Closed source software, because of its very closedness, will inevitably lead to security concerns. This makes adoption of closed source software by governments particularly worrisome. When you rely on proprietary products, you often get the shaft, and that, in my opinion, is exactly what governments are on track to get if they fail to switch to open source software.
How can we possibly send astronauts to the moon and Mars? We've decided that a mission to service the Hubble is too dangerous, yet going to the moon or Mars is more dangerous yet.
Eric
[The subject line is a reference to the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, in which the U.S. government publicly announces the existence of the said machine, and all the wonderful benefits it will have, when in fact it is a weapon which can only cause destruction within the U.S.]
I shouldn't be too hard on them; they do follow that stetement by suggesting the use of SSL and VPN.
Of course, IMNSHO the whole "Java 2" name was just marketing run amuck. I don't see how it's done anything but cause confusion. If marketing absolutely insisted on having a "Java 2", engineering should have bumped the version number to 2.0.
I'm not a fan of marketing determining version or release numbers, nor version number inflation, but changing a marketing product name to include something that looks like a version number without having it match the actual engineering version number is obviously bad.
So if the public domain textbooks exist, the next logical question is why they are not being used as official course materials? At the K-12 level it would save school districts (and thus taxpayers) a lot of money. And at the college level, it would save students money.
MIT seems to actually understand that their value proposition involves much more than the raw course materials, and that it will not hurt them to actually give course materials away, thus their OpenCourseWare program. This has more potential for improving education than almost any other initiative I've heard of.
But my point was that many textbooks from the early 20th century, and even the late 19th century, should still be perfectly good. For instance, plane geometry hasn't changed much in the last century, at least in terms of high school cirriculum.
At the very least, these old text books could be used as the basis for an "open source" textbook effort.
I suppose the text book publishers would try quite hard to prevent these from being used. "Oh, your school district is going to use the public-domain trigonometry textbook? Well, I'm afraid we can't give you the usual 12% discount on your purchase of organic chemistry textbooks."
Richard Feynman wrote in his autobiography "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" a story about his participation in textbook selection in California high schools, in which the publisher got the committee to approve a book before the content was even available to review.
"Surely..." also gives one example of the serious problems with content he found in most textbooks.
What do Java, Ant, and Swing have to do with surveying which Linux distribution is run by web servers? I'm baffled.
I've long thought that television was both the best and worst invention of the twentieth century.
In particular, I don't want the restaurants (or other stores) to even know I'm nearby until I ask the phone to poll for that information.