they will find it difficult to recognize that the equipment has failed.
It is, in fact, incredible how much trust people have in computers. I just recently read an editorial in a german computer magazine how they received, thanks to code red, confidential documents from another company, tried to inform them by email about the problem, and were ignored. Finally they called them, and were told that this couldn't be true, the company would be using virus scanning software.
It's easy to just switch bookstores.
If the majority of people continues to applaud at the installation of such system because it "fights criminals", it won't stay that easy. More and more stores will install surveillance systems, until eventually you'll have a hard time getting everything you need without being watched.
SAP has posted three success stories of companies running SAP on Linux: Penguin Computing, Siemes Business Services and InterComponentWare. Unfortunately I can't read them because Acrobat Reader won't work on this stupid computer I'm working at right now, so I don't know how exactly they use Linux.
OK, so you build one satallite for $50,000, that leaves you with $200,000.... how do you build five more $50,000 satallites with $200,000?
You don't. The article says: "Boeing was so skeptical, the company gave the academy $250,000, which Boden and Smith now plan to spread out over five years to give new students a chance to build a satellite each year."
Five years, one satellite each year. Makes five satellites. Slashdot editors just use different mathematics.
Ummm, SourceForge is not an ERP system, won't become one, and the article you quoted doesn't claim that it will. "The impact of SourceForge could be as great as ERP or CRM" doesn't mean that SourceForge is an ERP system, it means that VA Linux believes it might become as important as an ERP system.
And no - no company in their right mind would ever buy a free GPL erp system - these systems are the heart and sould of a business when you implement them - they do all payroll and accounting functions etc and no one would trust a product without a company with cash and controlled development backing it up.
Maybe they would not download the source and compile it themselves, but why would they not use a GPLed ERP system? Do you seriously think SAP's market share would drop to zero if they decide to free SAP R/3? Also, if that were true, then why do people run SAP or their databases on Linux systems? If you "don't trust a free ERP system", then why would you install it on top of Free Software?
I'd agree if you say there is no free enterprise level ERP system available yet, but this doesn't mean there won't be one in the future.
Or, perhaps more effectively: What about senators and representatives? They often quote an awful lot of stuff; surely one might feel some of it is in violation. And of course, the beauty is, there doesn't have to be a violation, just an accusation of one.
That's an interesting idea, but the question here is, will the ISP listen to you? They might fear being sued by the MPAA, but do they also fear you? Due to the DMCA, they are maybe liable for continued copyright infringements when they don't listen to you, but if there is no infringement going on, that's not a problem. I also suppose the ISPs do take a look at who is accused, and don't disconnect "certain persons."
The police have to tell you what you're accused of. The police cannot have you arrested for more than a certain (short) period. If you have an alibi (like this guy claimed), you have a good chance of not being arrested (though maybe you're not allowed to leave the state until they finish their investigations).
And note that the police are trying to investigate what happened. They will not only try to prove you guilty, they will also collect evindence that might prove your innocence. (That's what they're supposed to do, at least).
The MPAA is not interested in proving you innocent - they want to prove you guilty, and may disregard any evidence that suggests they might be wrong. Even worse, it's ok for them to do so. There isn't any law requiring them to be neutral.
One last thing, the police are a public service, controlled by a democratic goverment, while the MPAA is a for-profit organization. You might want to think twice before giving police powers to a for-profit entity.
Wait until the owner of your apartment (if you live in a rented one) won't let you in because someone wrote him a letter accusing you of doing "illegal stuff" in there.
I guess that's also just an incovinience?
Come on, this is a serious issue. Maybe not as serious as making you homeless, but still very serious. Effectively the MPAA has the power to have anyone disconnected from the net whenever they feel like doing so. If they're critizied, they can just disconnect their critics. They can force small companies out of business (disconnect Napster's servers before Napster becomes well-known? No problem.) If a case ever goes to court, the worst that can happen to the MPAA is that they have to pay a small refund for some weeks of service interruption. The worst that can happen to you is that you go into jail because the MPAA had the better lawyers. Which is why most people won't sue, but rather shut up.
I'm anything but a filesystem expert, but from what I know, a journaling filesystem doesn't magically protect your files against damage. If power fails while writing to your disk, even journaling filesystems won't be able to complete the write later, the data simply isn't stored anywhere.
What the journaling system can do is have a very short disk check time during reboot, because it doesn't have to scan the complete disk after a crash.
Because of the censorship, they had to hide their messages, using creative images and fables. The people knew instinctively that these messages were important and they craved them.
In Russia, it was hardly possible for the government to control the distribution of those messages. They might occassionally catch someone, but Russia is too big a country to control every citizen 24 hours a day.
In the western world, we now have internet control legislation. European law enforcement tries to pressure the european comission into making it a requirement for ISPs to record all transmission and store them for something like 7 years. We also have camera surveillance. Today, there are ways to control every citizen most of the time.
Then Glasnost came about
Glasnost didn't just "come about." People died fighting the putschist tanks in Moscow when communist leaders revolted against Gorbatchov (sp?). The east german goverment had tanks ready during demonstrations to violently fight them down. Some demonstrations in eastern countries were oppressed violently.
I'd rather fight the DMCA now, before people need to risk life and liberty waiting for Glasnost to come. Then again, people already risk life and liberty protesting against the goverments (take a look at what happened in Genoa just a few weeks ago).
The "similar in spirit to the present version" language offers very little protection to the copyright holder / licensor for two reasons.
The idea of the GPL is not to protect the copyright holder / licesor, the idea is to protect the user. You're right, the relicensing provision gives more protection to the user (who may perform the license change). Well, that's the idea of the GPL.
How the hell is anyone, much less a judge or jury, going to know whether a future version of the GPL or LGPL is "similar in spirit" to the present version?
AFAIK the "spirit" of the GPL is explained in the preamble, as it is the case with many contracts. So a court could check whether the new license violates any of the goals stated in the preamble of the previous version, and if it does, the court would be able to rule that the new license not a new version of the existing (older) license.
Whether it does invite endless litigation, I don't know. But the risk of endless litigation isn't a bad thing, it certainly puts a pressure on the FSF to not change the spirit of the license.
Also note that the license was meant to be used for the FSF's software. So the idea is that they can change their own license. If you don't like that idea, you can rename the license and replace the publisher of new versions with your own name/company. Then if you don't like a new GPL published by the FSF, you just don't publish a new version of your license.
The LGPL does not try to force anyone to use any GNU/whatever naming conventions. The excerpt from the license that is in the release notes is from the LGPL's preamble, it does not require any LGPL project to include GNU in its name, nor does it require Linux vendors to rename their products.
The glibc's release notes unfortunately don't mention what exactly RMS reqeusted, other than "control". "Control" is a very vague term. What kind of unacceptable changes did he ask for?
Also, the "or any later version" provision of the (L)GPL does not allow RMS to "to screw you when it pleases him", because the license explicitly states that "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version."
I consider the release notes FUD until someone can present me some very convincing facts.
Yes and no. You are right, information in the abstract sense is not scarce. But a concrete information is also not scarce, it can be copied at (almost) zero cost, and the copying costs that remain is not due to the scarcity of the information, but due to the scarcity of physical goods (like storage media and communication infrastructure).
What is, in fact, a scarce good, is the creation of information. The music you like, for example, is not scarce, once you have a piece of music, you can copy it as often as you want (provided you have enough physical goods, i.e. storage media). But the creation of that music is a scarce resource, because there is not an infinite number of musicians.
In the abstract, copyright recognizes this scarcity by granting the author certain limited rights.
That's correct. Copyright (in the abstract) recognizes that creators of information are a scarce "resource", and thus gives an economical reward to them for creating information.
The problem with copyright law is that is does so by artificially making the works a scarce resource, though they are not. (I'll have to admit that I can't come up with a better solution.) The additional problem with current copyright law is, as you stated, that it goes too far and favors the copyright owners over the public.
Isn't this also the idea of democracy? To take away "freedoms" from the government, as a means to give more freedom to the citizens?
Isn't this, in fact, the idea of any society? To take away from individual persons the freedom to do whatever they want (like owning slaves, killing people, raping women etc.), and force them to act according to laws, as a means to give more freedom to the public as a whole?
The difference between facism and democracy is not the existence of laws, it is who creates them, and it is if the individual restrictions of freedom are applied equally to all citizens.
It is my property, I can and will choose a license that fits MY needs as a developer.
No. It is the public's property. By publishing (think about the meaning of the word), you made your work a property of the public. In exchange, the public grants you a time limited monopoly on the use of your work. That's called copyright.
If you want your work to stay yours, don't publish it.
I gotta keep food on my table SOMEHOW!
Yes, but it not a natural law that you can do so by execising your copyright monopoly rights. You can keep food on your table by selling drugs or something, but it's not legal. Why is exercising temporary monopoly power legal? Well, because most people believe it is good for innovation and thus benefits the public (while selling drugs does not).
You can be pro copyright or anti copyright, I don't care (in fact, I am pro copyright, though I think current copyright goes too far), but your argumentation is flawed. Copyright is not a natural law, it is an economic decision.
Ummm, almost everything in OpenGL is the same for different cards, and for different platforms. This is a huge advantage of OpenGL.
However, when a graphic chip company creates a new functionality, it usually creates its own OpenGL extension. But this will evetually (if it succeeds, that is) become a standard extension (i.e. ARB extension) and later become part of the OpenGL standard. Many games don't even use some of these features, because the market share of the hardware supporting them isn't large enough yet. (Though gamers are fast to upgrade their hardware.)
Also, don't forget that you have to write hardware-specific code even with DirectX, because you really don't want DirectX to use the software rendering for you. You'll have to check if a certain feature is hardware supported, and you usually need a slightly different algorithm in case it's not.
I think the main reason for DirectX's success is that most games are Windows only anyway, and that DirectX is more than Direct3D. If you write a Windows game, you'll have to use DirectInput, DirectSound etc. anyway, because it's the only standard API offering input, sound etc. functionality for games on the Windows platform. But if you have to use DirectX anyway, why not use all of it?
Yet another reason might be the object-orientation hype that's going on. Obejct orientation is marketed as an extra feature, not as a design choice. (Whether the design choice is justified I don't know, I'm not a 3D developer, though I've played around with OpenGL a bit.)
Yeah, I also find this annoying. Especially on topics like this, where I would like to quickly identify those replies made by the/. crew, but also in other discussions I think it's bad when you can't see if the original poster replied to for example a poster who had a different opinion or asked for a clarification.
Based on "license_quick_ref.html", originally written by Zooko in 2001 and posted to "http://zooko.com/license_quick_ref.html".
written in 2001 by Zooko; You may copy and use this document in unmodified form. Alternatively, you may copy and use this document in modified form, provided that you remove this line (that begins: 'written in 2001 by Zooko...') and retain the line above (that begins: 'Based on "license_quick_ref.html"...').
No, destroying copyrighted works is not illegal. Maybe if you use a special chalk (you might need to invent that, though) that shows some crappy image normally and another image when soap is applied, then the soap might qualify as a circumvention device.
Oh, and don't forget to patent that Content Scrambling Soap!
It's not harder, but worse. It might be slower (depends on compiler/interpreter optimization quality), because an additional loop variable is needed and the loop must be executed.
for($x=1;$x==20;$x++) { print "-" }
are actully twenty print statements (or, if you use a temporary $line variable, there will be twenty string concatenation operations), while the compiler/interpreter can almost certainly optimize
print "-" * 20
to a single string constant and a single print statement.
The second code is also much easier to read, IMHO.
It can actually be useful when you want to align things and need to insert a certain number of spaces. Say you have one word at the start of a line, and a second word that should appear at column 40. With "string math", you can do something like this (this should be valid Python, I think):
Note that I have never used Ruby yet, but I do think there are some uses for string math (though for the above example one might prefer to use output alignment functions).
Slashdot Mirror
It is, in fact, incredible how much trust people have in computers. I just recently read an editorial in a german computer magazine how they received, thanks to code red, confidential documents from another company, tried to inform them by email about the problem, and were ignored. Finally they called them, and were told that this couldn't be true, the company would be using virus scanning software.
If the majority of people continues to applaud at the installation of such system because it "fights criminals", it won't stay that easy. More and more stores will install surveillance systems, until eventually you'll have a hard time getting everything you need without being watched.
SAP has posted three success stories of companies running SAP on Linux: Penguin Computing, Siemes Business Services and InterComponentWare. Unfortunately I can't read them because Acrobat Reader won't work on this stupid computer I'm working at right now, so I don't know how exactly they use Linux.
You can find the links to the documents at http://www.sap.com/linux/.
OK, so you build one satallite for $50,000, that leaves you with $200,000.... how do you build five more $50,000 satallites with $200,000?
You don't. The article says: "Boeing was so skeptical, the company gave the academy $250,000, which Boden and Smith now plan to spread out over five years to give new students a chance to build a satellite each year."
Five years, one satellite each year. Makes five satellites. Slashdot editors just use different mathematics.
Ummm, SourceForge is not an ERP system, won't become one, and the article you quoted doesn't claim that it will. "The impact of SourceForge could be as great as ERP or CRM" doesn't mean that SourceForge is an ERP system, it means that VA Linux believes it might become as important as an ERP system.
Maybe they would not download the source and compile it themselves, but why would they not use a GPLed ERP system? Do you seriously think SAP's market share would drop to zero if they decide to free SAP R/3? Also, if that were true, then why do people run SAP or their databases on Linux systems? If you "don't trust a free ERP system", then why would you install it on top of Free Software?
I'd agree if you say there is no free enterprise level ERP system available yet, but this doesn't mean there won't be one in the future.
Or, perhaps more effectively: What about senators and representatives? They often quote an awful lot of stuff; surely one might feel some of it is in violation. And of course, the beauty is, there doesn't have to be a violation, just an accusation of one.
That's an interesting idea, but the question here is, will the ISP listen to you? They might fear being sued by the MPAA, but do they also fear you? Due to the DMCA, they are maybe liable for continued copyright infringements when they don't listen to you, but if there is no infringement going on, that's not a problem. I also suppose the ISPs do take a look at who is accused, and don't disconnect "certain persons."
It's an interesting idea, though.
The police have to tell you what you're accused of. The police cannot have you arrested for more than a certain (short) period. If you have an alibi (like this guy claimed), you have a good chance of not being arrested (though maybe you're not allowed to leave the state until they finish their investigations).
And note that the police are trying to investigate what happened. They will not only try to prove you guilty, they will also collect evindence that might prove your innocence. (That's what they're supposed to do, at least).
The MPAA is not interested in proving you innocent - they want to prove you guilty, and may disregard any evidence that suggests they might be wrong. Even worse, it's ok for them to do so. There isn't any law requiring them to be neutral.
One last thing, the police are a public service, controlled by a democratic goverment, while the MPAA is a for-profit organization. You might want to think twice before giving police powers to a for-profit entity.
Wait until the owner of your apartment (if you live in a rented one) won't let you in because someone wrote him a letter accusing you of doing "illegal stuff" in there.
I guess that's also just an incovinience?
Come on, this is a serious issue. Maybe not as serious as making you homeless, but still very serious. Effectively the MPAA has the power to have anyone disconnected from the net whenever they feel like doing so. If they're critizied, they can just disconnect their critics. They can force small companies out of business (disconnect Napster's servers before Napster becomes well-known? No problem.) If a case ever goes to court, the worst that can happen to the MPAA is that they have to pay a small refund for some weeks of service interruption. The worst that can happen to you is that you go into jail because the MPAA had the better lawyers. Which is why most people won't sue, but rather shut up.
I'm anything but a filesystem expert, but from what I know, a journaling filesystem doesn't magically protect your files against damage. If power fails while writing to your disk, even journaling filesystems won't be able to complete the write later, the data simply isn't stored anywhere.
What the journaling system can do is have a very short disk check time during reboot, because it doesn't have to scan the complete disk after a crash.
Because of the censorship, they had to hide their messages, using creative images and fables. The people knew instinctively that these messages were important and they craved them.
In Russia, it was hardly possible for the government to control the distribution of those messages. They might occassionally catch someone, but Russia is too big a country to control every citizen 24 hours a day.
In the western world, we now have internet control legislation. European law enforcement tries to pressure the european comission into making it a requirement for ISPs to record all transmission and store them for something like 7 years. We also have camera surveillance. Today, there are ways to control every citizen most of the time.
Then Glasnost came about
Glasnost didn't just "come about." People died fighting the putschist tanks in Moscow when communist leaders revolted against Gorbatchov (sp?). The east german goverment had tanks ready during demonstrations to violently fight them down. Some demonstrations in eastern countries were oppressed violently.
I'd rather fight the DMCA now, before people need to risk life and liberty waiting for Glasnost to come. Then again, people already risk life and liberty protesting against the goverments (take a look at what happened in Genoa just a few weeks ago).
The "similar in spirit to the present version" language offers very little protection to the copyright holder / licensor for two reasons.
The idea of the GPL is not to protect the copyright holder / licesor, the idea is to protect the user. You're right, the relicensing provision gives more protection to the user (who may perform the license change). Well, that's the idea of the GPL.
How the hell is anyone, much less a judge or jury, going to know whether a future version of the GPL or LGPL is "similar in spirit" to the present version?
AFAIK the "spirit" of the GPL is explained in the preamble, as it is the case with many contracts. So a court could check whether the new license violates any of the goals stated in the preamble of the previous version, and if it does, the court would be able to rule that the new license not a new version of the existing (older) license.
Whether it does invite endless litigation, I don't know. But the risk of endless litigation isn't a bad thing, it certainly puts a pressure on the FSF to not change the spirit of the license.
Also note that the license was meant to be used for the FSF's software. So the idea is that they can change their own license. If you don't like that idea, you can rename the license and replace the publisher of new versions with your own name/company. Then if you don't like a new GPL published by the FSF, you just don't publish a new version of your license.
The LGPL does not try to force anyone to use any GNU/whatever naming conventions. The excerpt from the license that is in the release notes is from the LGPL's preamble, it does not require any LGPL project to include GNU in its name, nor does it require Linux vendors to rename their products.
The glibc's release notes unfortunately don't mention what exactly RMS reqeusted, other than "control". "Control" is a very vague term. What kind of unacceptable changes did he ask for?
Also, the "or any later version" provision of the (L)GPL does not allow RMS to "to screw you when it pleases him", because the license explicitly states that "Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version."
I consider the release notes FUD until someone can present me some very convincing facts.
Yes and no. You are right, information in the abstract sense is not scarce. But a concrete information is also not scarce, it can be copied at (almost) zero cost, and the copying costs that remain is not due to the scarcity of the information, but due to the scarcity of physical goods (like storage media and communication infrastructure).
What is, in fact, a scarce good, is the creation of information. The music you like, for example, is not scarce, once you have a piece of music, you can copy it as often as you want (provided you have enough physical goods, i.e. storage media). But the creation of that music is a scarce resource, because there is not an infinite number of musicians.
In the abstract, copyright recognizes this scarcity by granting the author certain limited rights.
That's correct. Copyright (in the abstract) recognizes that creators of information are a scarce "resource", and thus gives an economical reward to them for creating information.
The problem with copyright law is that is does so by artificially making the works a scarce resource, though they are not. (I'll have to admit that I can't come up with a better solution.) The additional problem with current copyright law is, as you stated, that it goes too far and favors the copyright owners over the public.
Isn't this also the idea of democracy? To take away "freedoms" from the government, as a means to give more freedom to the citizens?
Isn't this, in fact, the idea of any society? To take away from individual persons the freedom to do whatever they want (like owning slaves, killing people, raping women etc.), and force them to act according to laws, as a means to give more freedom to the public as a whole?
The difference between facism and democracy is not the existence of laws, it is who creates them, and it is if the individual restrictions of freedom are applied equally to all citizens.
It is my property, I can and will choose a license that fits MY needs as a developer.
No. It is the public's property. By publishing (think about the meaning of the word), you made your work a property of the public. In exchange, the public grants you a time limited monopoly on the use of your work. That's called copyright.
If you want your work to stay yours, don't publish it.
I gotta keep food on my table SOMEHOW!
Yes, but it not a natural law that you can do so by execising your copyright monopoly rights. You can keep food on your table by selling drugs or something, but it's not legal. Why is exercising temporary monopoly power legal? Well, because most people believe it is good for innovation and thus benefits the public (while selling drugs does not).
You can be pro copyright or anti copyright, I don't care (in fact, I am pro copyright, though I think current copyright goes too far), but your argumentation is flawed. Copyright is not a natural law, it is an economic decision.
Ummm, almost everything in OpenGL is the same for different cards, and for different platforms. This is a huge advantage of OpenGL.
However, when a graphic chip company creates a new functionality, it usually creates its own OpenGL extension. But this will evetually (if it succeeds, that is) become a standard extension (i.e. ARB extension) and later become part of the OpenGL standard. Many games don't even use some of these features, because the market share of the hardware supporting them isn't large enough yet. (Though gamers are fast to upgrade their hardware.)
Also, don't forget that you have to write hardware-specific code even with DirectX, because you really don't want DirectX to use the software rendering for you. You'll have to check if a certain feature is hardware supported, and you usually need a slightly different algorithm in case it's not.
I think the main reason for DirectX's success is that most games are Windows only anyway, and that DirectX is more than Direct3D. If you write a Windows game, you'll have to use DirectInput, DirectSound etc. anyway, because it's the only standard API offering input, sound etc. functionality for games on the Windows platform. But if you have to use DirectX anyway, why not use all of it?
Yet another reason might be the object-orientation hype that's going on. Obejct orientation is marketed as an extra feature, not as a design choice. (Whether the design choice is justified I don't know, I'm not a 3D developer, though I've played around with OpenGL a bit.)
Yeah, I also find this annoying. Especially on topics like this, where I would like to quickly identify those replies made by the /. crew, but also in other discussions I think it's bad when you can't see if the original poster replied to for example a poster who had a different opinion or asked for a clarification.
http://slashcode.com/docs/CHANGES
The new hardware is mostly in place
Yes, but did you connect it?
Duh. Scroll down or something.
Based on "license_quick_ref.html", originally written by Zooko in 2001 and posted to "http://zooko.com/license_quick_ref.html".
written in 2001 by Zooko; You may copy and use this document in unmodified form. Alternatively, you may copy and use this document in modified form, provided that you remove this line (that begins: 'written in 2001 by Zooko...') and retain the line above (that begins: 'Based on "license_quick_ref.html"...').
No, destroying copyrighted works is not illegal. Maybe if you use a special chalk (you might need to invent that, though) that shows some crappy image normally and another image when soap is applied, then the soap might qualify as a circumvention device.
Oh, and don't forget to patent that Content Scrambling Soap!
It's not harder, but worse. It might be slower (depends on compiler/interpreter optimization quality), because an additional loop variable is needed and the loop must be executed.
for($x=1;$x==20;$x++) { print "-" }
are actully twenty print statements (or, if you use a temporary $line variable, there will be twenty string concatenation operations), while the compiler/interpreter can almost certainly optimize
print "-" * 20
to a single string constant and a single print statement.
The second code is also much easier to read, IMHO.
It can actually be useful when you want to align things and need to insert a certain number of spaces. Say you have one word at the start of a line, and a second word that should appear at column 40. With "string math", you can do something like this (this should be valid Python, I think):
spaces = ' ' * (40 - len(first_word))
print first_word + spaces + second_word
Note that I have never used Ruby yet, but I do think there are some uses for string math (though for the above example one might prefer to use output alignment functions).
There is atmospheric distortion too. Let's get rid of all that air as well :-)
Don't worry, George W. Bush is taking care of this already.
What are you working on at Blizzard? Do you get paid for continuing your work on SDL, or do you have to do that in your spare time?
"On Tuesday the server went down for about 12 hours because the AA batteries in it died and I had to go out and buy new ones."
Well, with fresh batteries, the server will certainly be able to handle the /. effect.