He's a Ph.D. student in accounting; she's a Ph.D. student in molecular biology.
They find love while struggling to publish an interdisciplenary paper in an obscure journal about unexpected correlations between asset valuation in 1934-era companies and the production of azurophilic lysosome granules.
What seems to be lost in this debate is respect for the original author's intentions...
Say I write a piece of code and want to put a "permissive" license on it. I basically have two choices:
Use the BSD license
Use the LGPL license
LGPL 2.1 clause 3 says that you can basically decide to replace the LGPL with the GPL at any time. LGPL 3.0 clause 2 effectively says the same thing. Or, in other words, choosing the LGPL explicitly gives users the freedom to relicense under the GPL
By choosing to use a BSD license, an author is basically saying "I don't want this to end up GPL'ed - If I did, I would have used the LGPL instead of the BSD license."
It all comes back to the fundamental difference between the BSD and GPL camps - does freedom include the right to close the source?
For better or worse, I feel that people should respect the intentions of the original author.
I can use the same.Xdefaults file I've been using for 15 years
Screen real estate not wasted by using menu bars
xterm is descriptive: it's an X Terminal; konsole is just a wierd mispelling of 'console.' And technically it's not even a console, because you can have multiple ones running and they don't all get console output from syslog.
I'd like to be an elitist Unix Purist, but in reality I'm just a Unix Luddite. But because I'm been perceived a Purist, I guess I should act the part for the rest of this message...
C'mon, XWindows was developed to run exactly two applications: xterm and xclock. Everything else is feature bloat.
And how come I got modded flamebait? Isn't it still cool to have the "If you're not smart enough to rebuild your kernel with 'cat > vmlinuz' then you dont deserve to use Linux" mindset anymore?
What has/. come to these days, when "bloat for the sake of usability to non-technical people" is praised? I bet you're all eagerly anticipating the release of Microsoft Word 2009!
A/. reader and a businessman go to a garage sale, where they discover a copy of Action Comics #1 priced for 35 cents.
The slashdot reader launches into a diatrabe about how it's wrong that he can't photocopy and sell the copy because, man, information wants to be free. He then launches into arguments railing against how capitalism has assigned a value to the comic other than its value for recycled paper, and for good measure complains about his city's recycling program and how few people take advantage of it.
While he's busy making cracks about how "In Soviet Russia, comics read you!" to the poor housewife, who is fearing for her life and is trying to hide under the table, he completely misses the fact that the comic is no longer there; the businessman bought it, resold it, and is driving by in his new Ferrari.
Verizon didn't search for the patent. Someone else found it and discovered they could make money by buying it cheap. It's the market in action; what's the problem here?
And why exactly is this filed under "your rights online?"
Davies and other senior staff are feeling the strain of the heavy workload imposed by the show, nine months a year of 16-hour days
I guess with all their collective experience in TV production that they expected, like, two four-hour days a week, right?
Dang shame, as it's a TV formula that can handle the complete replacement of its cast and yet stay interesting... David Tennant is the 10th actor to hold the title role. Unfortunately, it may not be able to handle the replacement of its crew.
On one hand, I'm v. sad to hear this, as it's a pretty good show nowadays. I can understand wanting to leave at the top rather than the bottom (Sylvester MacCoy anyone?); but it's definately could run a few more years before becomming tired.
Actually, the higher end Epson inks, which are generally used in their printers that cost over $500, when used with certain Epson papers, are guaranteed for 100 years.
If you've ever sat down and leafed through your great-great granparent's photo albums from the early 1900's, you know what a timeless treasure it is. That's why I'd never skimp on paying for ink and paper.
For those who aren't familiar with the lifetimes of pictures, here's a brief overview, from best to worst:
Black and white platinum prints: hundreds of years
Traditional black and white (chemical) prints: 100+ years
Epson ultrachrome or K3 inks, certain epson papers: 100 years
Colour film (chemical, C41) prints: 30 years.
El cheapo Inkjet: Roll the dice, but probably less than 30 years; perhaps as low as five.
Public Domain: You want anyone to use your code free of restrictions. Nobody knows what you wear or what you eat. Your code is for simple binary trees and is published in University textbooks.
BSD: You want anyone to use your code, but not to blame you for it. You have medium hair and a T-shirt. Someone paid you less than minimum wage to write the code, and you use the money to eat at McDonalds. Your code is the TCP/IP protocol and is widely adopted and ubiqutous. Linux people think you're dead.
GPL: You wish everyone would use your code and share their modifications with the world. The only people who end up using it are Linux fanboys. You have long hair and a poncho. You spurn money and instead grow potatoes on your commune. Your code is the fourth non-completed conversion of an IBM PC game from the 1990s listed on sourceforge.
LGPL: You wish you could use the BSD licence, but are afraid the other people on the commune will throw potatoes at you.
Any other Licence: You either fail to realize that all other licences are basically the same as the BSD or GPL licence, or you contribute code to a project that has the same problem. You wear whatever everyone else wears and eat pasta because you heard it was "trendy." Your code calculates the phase of the moon on any past day using the Julian calendar because you can never remember the rules for converting from the Gregorian calendar.
... They would like the legislation to exempt anyone who owns a copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret from restrictions against pretexting.
Since copyright is attached at the moment of creation, anyone who has ever written a letter, blog post, or even a comment on slashdot owns a copyright.
In other words, "everyone should be exempt from this legislation, except possibly pets."
I'm not. The world is a harsh place, and people are the harshest animal of them all. Sorry to break your bubble.
Please tell me that you know what an ecosystem is.
I do. It's the web of cross-species interactions that we humans have minimalized or eliminated in our food crops and fauna.
Please tell me you don't truly believe that everything would be hunky-dory for us if there were only 4 species of mammals on earth.
It wouldn't be as nice as now, but we'd survive. We're getting along fine without the Dodo, the Sea Monk, the Passenger Pidgeon, the Columbian Grebe, or the Trilobite.
And please correct those idiots who modded this post "insightful" instead of "funny."
Not my place to do so. You can meta-moderate them.
The only animals that matter are the cow, the pig, and the chicken. They'll never go extinct from environmental factors because we humans have taken over their care and feeding (and eating.)
There may be a moral argument for keeping a species from extinction, but there's usually a financial argument for killing just one more. Every time a poacher kills an Elephant, his family gets to eat, or he gets to buy a new car. There will always be people for which finance trumps morals. The rain forests aren't being cleared because people hate trees, it's because they need more room for cows, pigs, and chickens.
Personally, I'm sad to see another species go extinct, but in reality, it will have no impact on my life that there are no more white dolphins in China.
I'm doing my part by working on a project where I'm copying every single MySpace page onto stone tablets.
When future archeologists dig them up and see "LOL Bobby Ray Sucks!" and "D00d 1 pwnz3r3d U!!1!", they'll understand that our civilization didn't just decline; our only choice was to destroy ourselves because we were so lame.
The problem is the word: "Agile." It's a loaded word that means different things.
In terms of "Agile Software Development," it means able to react to customer changes "quickly" and without discarding a large ammount of work. Now "quickly" is another loaded word. In the example article, "quickly" basically seems to mean "after the end of a 2-week development cycle, and before the next one."
Now, in TFA, they're asked to do something that may cause a customer to purchase. This request comes in during a 2-week cycle.
The proper "Agile Software Development" response is "We'll tell you if we can do it in 2 weeks." The criticism is "that's not very agile." Or, "two-week-agile" vs. "right-now-agile."
There are several possible reactions to this request:
You have to wait 2 weeks for it.
The programmer(s) has to work overtime
We have to postpone X in our currently scheduled work
"Screw you, you can't disturb our process."
Which one you choose depends on multiple factors; two factors are "What is the net revenue impact of this change" and "What is the marginal increase in the probability of the sale?"
If Marginal.Pr[sale] * units > abs (revenue impact lost due to throwing dev cycle), the do it. If not, make them wait two weeks.
Of course, finding values to plug into those equasions is not easy. Believe it or not, management is difficult.
My PERSONAL solution to this, assuming the sale is worth it, is to see if the customer will accept "feature available within 30 days after sale, or you get a 25% refund." Puts pressure on the customer to commit, and gives you time to develop it.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming this fall, on NBC!
He's a Ph.D. student in accounting; she's a Ph.D. student in molecular biology.
They find love while struggling to publish an interdisciplenary paper in an obscure journal about unexpected correlations between asset valuation in 1934-era companies and the production of azurophilic lysosome granules.
Are you surprised?
If I remember correctly, their reunion tour about 10 years ago was titled "We want your money."
What seems to be lost in this debate is respect for the original author's intentions...
Say I write a piece of code and want to put a "permissive" license on it. I basically have two choices:
LGPL 2.1 clause 3 says that you can basically decide to replace the LGPL with the GPL at any time. LGPL 3.0 clause 2 effectively says the same thing. Or, in other words, choosing the LGPL explicitly gives users the freedom to relicense under the GPL
By choosing to use a BSD license, an author is basically saying "I don't want this to end up GPL'ed - If I did, I would have used the LGPL instead of the BSD license."
It all comes back to the fundamental difference between the BSD and GPL camps - does freedom include the right to close the source?
For better or worse, I feel that people should respect the intentions of the original author.
There are no other metrics that matter.
Reasons why xterm is superior to konsole
I'd like to be an elitist Unix Purist, but in reality I'm just a Unix Luddite. But because I'm been perceived a Purist, I guess I should act the part for the rest of this message...
I didn't see the simplest improvement in konsole listed:
rm konsole && cp xterm konsole
If you go to mapwow.com, you'll notice that there's a new zone north of Eastern Plaguelands, and an island has popped up west of Darkshore.
Perhaps the real title is World of Warcraft: Our Continents have Cancerous Growths.
No, email has become an essential function for informing me how I can use {herbal, synthetic, generic} products to expand my {penis, breasts, volume}.
I tried this new system...
I chose a Patent and said "Patents are evil."
They replied -1, Irrelevant.
A /. reader and a businessman go to a garage sale, where they discover a copy of Action Comics #1 priced for 35 cents.
The slashdot reader launches into a diatrabe about how it's wrong that he can't photocopy and sell the copy because, man, information wants to be free. He then launches into arguments railing against how capitalism has assigned a value to the comic other than its value for recycled paper, and for good measure complains about his city's recycling program and how few people take advantage of it.
While he's busy making cracks about how "In Soviet Russia, comics read you!" to the poor housewife, who is fearing for her life and is trying to hide under the table, he completely misses the fact that the comic is no longer there; the businessman bought it, resold it, and is driving by in his new Ferrari.
Verizon didn't search for the patent. Someone else found it and discovered they could make money by buying it cheap. It's the market in action; what's the problem here?
And why exactly is this filed under "your rights online?"
I guess with all their collective experience in TV production that they expected, like, two four-hour days a week, right?
Dang shame, as it's a TV formula that can handle the complete replacement of its cast and yet stay interesting... David Tennant is the 10th actor to hold the title role. Unfortunately, it may not be able to handle the replacement of its crew.
On one hand, I'm v. sad to hear this, as it's a pretty good show nowadays. I can understand wanting to leave at the top rather than the bottom (Sylvester MacCoy anyone?); but it's definately could run a few more years before becomming tired.
Epson sold a special ink that lasted 100 years
Actually, the higher end Epson inks, which are generally used in their printers that cost over $500, when used with certain Epson papers, are guaranteed for 100 years.
If you've ever sat down and leafed through your great-great granparent's photo albums from the early 1900's, you know what a timeless treasure it is. That's why I'd never skimp on paying for ink and paper.
For those who aren't familiar with the lifetimes of pictures, here's a brief overview, from best to worst:
Funner version:
Public Domain: You want anyone to use your code free of restrictions. Nobody knows what you wear or what you eat. Your code is for simple binary trees and is published in University textbooks.
BSD: You want anyone to use your code, but not to blame you for it. You have medium hair and a T-shirt. Someone paid you less than minimum wage to write the code, and you use the money to eat at McDonalds. Your code is the TCP/IP protocol and is widely adopted and ubiqutous. Linux people think you're dead.
GPL: You wish everyone would use your code and share their modifications with the world. The only people who end up using it are Linux fanboys. You have long hair and a poncho. You spurn money and instead grow potatoes on your commune. Your code is the fourth non-completed conversion of an IBM PC game from the 1990s listed on sourceforge.
LGPL: You wish you could use the BSD licence, but are afraid the other people on the commune will throw potatoes at you.
Any other Licence: You either fail to realize that all other licences are basically the same as the BSD or GPL licence, or you contribute code to a project that has the same problem. You wear whatever everyone else wears and eat pasta because you heard it was "trendy." Your code calculates the phase of the moon on any past day using the Julian calendar because you can never remember the rules for converting from the Gregorian calendar.
Since copyright is attached at the moment of creation, anyone who has ever written a letter, blog post, or even a comment on slashdot owns a copyright.
In other words, "everyone should be exempt from this legislation, except possibly pets."
As compared to all the warriors who has leveled themselves and still doesn't know how to hold aggro?
Bad warrior! No heal for you!
Uh, we don't really have guns up here in Canada ;)
We could try throwing poutine at them...
Simpler version of previous post:
On a PVP server, a bunch of 70 Horde hanging around Scarlet Monastary.
Grandpa Simpson's car sucks.
40 rods to the hogshead is 0.02 miles per gallon
That's 10 feet 6 inches per gallon!. Must be a SUV.
Extremely slow Soviet ICBM hits US one month after launch and over ten years after breakup of the Soviet Union.
Film at 11
PLEASE tell me that you're kidding.
I'm not. The world is a harsh place, and people are the harshest animal of them all. Sorry to break your bubble.
Please tell me that you know what an ecosystem is.
I do. It's the web of cross-species interactions that we humans have minimalized or eliminated in our food crops and fauna.
Please tell me you don't truly believe that everything would be hunky-dory for us if there were only 4 species of mammals on earth.
It wouldn't be as nice as now, but we'd survive. We're getting along fine without the Dodo, the Sea Monk, the Passenger Pidgeon, the Columbian Grebe, or the Trilobite.
And please correct those idiots who modded this post "insightful" instead of "funny."
Not my place to do so. You can meta-moderate them.
The only animals that matter are the cow, the pig, and the chicken. They'll never go extinct from environmental factors because we humans have taken over their care and feeding (and eating.)
There may be a moral argument for keeping a species from extinction, but there's usually a financial argument for killing just one more. Every time a poacher kills an Elephant, his family gets to eat, or he gets to buy a new car. There will always be people for which finance trumps morals. The rain forests aren't being cleared because people hate trees, it's because they need more room for cows, pigs, and chickens.
Personally, I'm sad to see another species go extinct, but in reality, it will have no impact on my life that there are no more white dolphins in China.
You must be in California. I'm in Canada.
Today, sunrise was at 8:05, and sunset will be at 4:40. I'm sure my boss will love this excuse for a shorter workday.
I'm doing my part by working on a project where I'm copying every single MySpace page onto stone tablets.
When future archeologists dig them up and see "LOL Bobby Ray Sucks!" and "D00d 1 pwnz3r3d U!!1!", they'll understand that our civilization didn't just decline; our only choice was to destroy ourselves because we were so lame.
The problem is the word: "Agile." It's a loaded word that means different things.
In terms of "Agile Software Development," it means able to react to customer changes "quickly" and without discarding a large ammount of work. Now "quickly" is another loaded word. In the example article, "quickly" basically seems to mean "after the end of a 2-week development cycle, and before the next one."
Now, in TFA, they're asked to do something that may cause a customer to purchase. This request comes in during a 2-week cycle.
The proper "Agile Software Development" response is "We'll tell you if we can do it in 2 weeks." The criticism is "that's not very agile." Or, "two-week-agile" vs. "right-now-agile."
There are several possible reactions to this request:
Which one you choose depends on multiple factors; two factors are "What is the net revenue impact of this change" and "What is the marginal increase in the probability of the sale?"
If Marginal.Pr[sale] * units > abs (revenue impact lost due to throwing dev cycle), the do it. If not, make them wait two weeks.
Of course, finding values to plug into those equasions is not easy. Believe it or not, management is difficult.
My PERSONAL solution to this, assuming the sale is worth it, is to see if the customer will accept "feature available within 30 days after sale, or you get a 25% refund." Puts pressure on the customer to commit, and gives you time to develop it.