Is it legal to restrict reviews in this manner? Are such contracts enforceable? If so, in countries with freedom-of-speech laws, can it be got round via reverse-engineering the review? I.e. I write a factual review which is positive and has lots of detail, and my friend reads between the lines and says "it sounds like this film may be a bag of shite"?
BTW, slashdot's new "ban users from posting based on their subnet" filter is really annoying. And very hypocritical, given that they regularly bash Napster for performing similar blanket bans.
A reposession man should no more be happy about layoffs than an undertaker should be happy about an epidemic.
Right - but from the article it sounds like they're getting paid per reposession. Sounds like a perfect way to attract people who delight in others' suffering.
Similarly, states which use volunteers to perform executions are obviously gonna attract sadists to the job.
Hi Brett, howya doing, not read one of your posts for a while.
[some people] have specifically touted open source as a way of attacking companies they do not like [...] even those which, unlike Microsoft, act ethically.
I don't know which companies you're referring to, but if an individual wants to attack a company then I guess that is likely to be because *in their opinion* the company is being unethical. Of course that may not agree with your opinion or mine.
To prevent open source from being used in a predatory and unfair manner against them, companies that develop new technology need to patent it.
I don't think that you've demonstrated that this is the case. The Microsoft vs Quarterdeck example you gave happened in a world in which software patents exist. In any case, if you think that the Microsoft cross-subsidising technique should be illegal, then oughtn't that to be banned by anti-trust laws?
it always takes much less effort and money to develop a knock-off than the original
Ok, but that's true in markets where patents don't have much effect, too - see Alan Cox's recent comments about the baked beans industry. Besides, it takes time to develop a clone, and in the IT industry a short time is very valuable. VMWare has been milking their product for about 3 years now, just as Plex86 is getting good. If the VMWare people have actually been developing for the last 3 years, then they've probably got something else unique now, which will take time to copy... and so on.
few of us with a sense of justice and fairness would say that open source should be allowed to be used as a weapon in a malicious agenda.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that we probably don't all agree on what counts as malicious, I still don't think I neccessarily agree with you. A lot of malicious acts are not illegal, and I think should not be. I think the nasty {pro-choice|pro-life} people should be allowed to air their stupid views on abortion, for example, whether or not I agree with them.
I thought it would be Stallman to respond first [...] But I'm glad Linus beat him to the punch. [...] Linus' writings are always so relaxed, eloquent, and poingent, even when he's basically calling someone an idiot.
Actually, Alan Cox responded before either of them. I think he does a better job of refuting Mundie in general; Linus focuses on a specific part of what Mundie said and is [IMHO] more inflammatory.
Shame the PHBs won't've heard of Alan Cox cos I think he often has things to say which are worth listening to.
Not to detract from the humour value of your post, let me give a simple example of everyday XML usage where schemas are essential for XML.
You've got a database, with a 2 column table. Say "Company name"(char[40]) and "Net profit this year"(int). Ywanna get data to go in this table, in XML format, from another company. That XML's gonna look something like this:
Ok. Now how do you specify that the Company name should be <= 40 characters and the profit should be an integer? A DTD gives no way of doing this, it just says what order the tags can come in. Without XML schema, you're reduced to sending emails saying "Please make the Company name at most 40 chars and please make Profit a signed integer". Which is evil, cos you might have to do that for a 200 table database, and also there's no way of using that email to automatically check that XML file.
OTOH a schema lets you specify exactly what you want in a precise, even fairly simple, machine-readable format.
Now do you believe me that schemas are really important?:-)
From the letter, it sounds like Bruce is arguing this very well. "Hey IBM and HP, you've noticed that OSS is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and you're in the process of stealing a march on your competitors by being the first to make use of this. Well, this nasty software patent thing, as well as having very few net benefits for you people, may soon be used by your competitors to kill that goose. Therefore, you've got a direct and immediate interest in helping to dismantle this system, or protecting the goose from it."
He's showing them why it's in their interests to help us. Thanks a lot Bruce, and keep up the good work!
Don't you mean the speech will say '(GPL == bad ) is true' ??
Hmmm? "GPL == bad" is an expression that evaluates to True[*]. "(GPL == bad) is true" is an expression that evaluates to True. And also "((GPL == bad) is true) is true)" etc..
[*]: In a C-like language which has a boolean type, this statement would be correct. C itself doesn't actually have a boolean type so this is a slight simplification.
Apple did Unix a favour [...] They have brought Unix to the MASSES!
I'd just ask you to sit back for a moment and examine this statement. In what way has Unix been 'brought' to the masses? Normal OSX users are using a GUI which is abstracted far, far away from the Darwin core. Since they're not using any bits of the system that really make it Unix, why should anyone care? They're not using a network-transparent GUI, nor a system which runs useful daemons, nor are they using the componentisation, string manipulation tools, plaintext configuration tools nor any of the rest of it. It's about as meaningful for the average user as if their toaster ran Unix internally. Sure, you might get the ability to run some Unix programs. Cygwin will give you that.
Sit down and ask yourself why you release source code. If it isn't to further progress and innovation then you are a hypocrite.
Some people release free software because they want to reduce the amount that others have to rely on non-free software. It can be argued that OSX has done nothing for that cause.
In the UK, the first two rules already exist, hence there is only one 1 letter domain (x.co.uk), and a few 2 letter domains (bt.co.uk, f9.co.uk) that were allocated before Nominet came in to manage the namespace.
Also, how many anomalous names are there? www.bl.uk is one - are there more? (There's stuff like www.parliament.uk and www.police.uk which are presumably post-Nominet and deliberate, but I guess that bl.uk is a relic... ?
(BTW, this new anti-troll device is really annoying. It blocks posts from subnets where there has been a lot of down-moderated activity in the last 24 hours. So if you have the same ISP as a lot of trolls, then you can't post (unless you log into university machines:-) I really hope they refine the bloody thing ASAP - it seems silly to block posts from people whose karma is high. Off-topic, I know, but I guess there's hundreds of people who want to say this but can't.)
C can [be compiled down to native machine code] because it's a simple abstraction from assembler. C++ can be distilled to C code. How would you do this with Perl, for example, where you may not know what kind of data you'll be dealing with until runtime.
Here's a question: Is there a theoretical CompSci way of making a distinction between compilable and non-compilable languages like this? I tried to think of one but it proved harder than I expected. For example, I could make a "perl compiler" that creates an executable which is simply perl.exe followed by the actual script. Sure, this "shouldn't" count, but I can't see a rigourous way of making the definition stick.
IANA Musician, but I seem to remember from my ancient days of playing violin that C-sharp is equivalent to D-flat.
That's true, unless you're playing very pedantically; at any rate it's true enough to make it funny:-) Interestingly enough, "C#" is abbreviated as "dos" in Catalan, as in do-sharp, according to the docs for my local copy of Lilypond. (If you've ever had to watch The Sound Of Music you'll know what "do" represents:-).
From the site (to be precise, http://users.shore.net/~ndm/java/mmexplorer/mmset. html):
You will need a browser that supports the "font face" HTML command and has access to the Symbol font. [...] The formula "j R j" should show up as "phi arrow phi". If you see "jRj" or if you see some kind of dark diamond between two phi's then you will not be able to view these pages properly.
This is a particularly bad way of displaying mathematical formulae, because the meaning of the text depends in a very messy way on the layout (i.e., what font it is in). It shouldn't be the case that just looking at a formula in a different font renders it completely meaningless.
The pleasant way to use mathematical symbols online is using Unicode. The unicode character set, which is supported by all common web browsers including Netscape 4, contains all the symbols a mathematician could want (indeed, arguably, all the symbols anyone could want), such as GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI, RIGHTWARDS ARROW, DIAMOND OPERATOR, LEFT NORMAL FACTOR SEMIDIRECT PRODUCT etc..
If a browser doesn't have a particular symbol, the user will see a mark that shows that a character is missing. What they won't see is characters which are semantically different, like "R" instead of RIGHTWARDS ARROW. If the user saves the page as a text file, the maths symbols will still be present and retain their meaning.
For more complicated mathematical expressions, the way to go is MathML. However, since most browsers other than Mozilla can't support this yet, though you may be able to get plug-ins. Nevertheless, anything has to be better than encoding semantic information through font choice.
All these ($%@;\) make perl unreadable and undistinguischable to line-noice.
So chucking all your scalars, hashes, arrays and subroutines into the same namespace is somehow wiser than learning a simple mnemonic like $calar, @rray and %ssociative_array?
I see there's an argument for doing it but I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it sound.
yes, pretty much all modern languages are coming with huge libraries, java, python and ruby of course is doing the same.
CPAN's a bit different - it's not a load of libraries which come bundled with perl. It's a gigabyte-sized online archive of perl modules (classes etc.). This mean's it's filled with far more weird and wonderful junk than you would ever want to bundle as a default library. For example, Mac::Apps::MacPGP. Or HTML::Embperl. Or Apache::GzipChain. Or Parse::RecDescent. Or Statistics::MaxEntropy. You get the idea; tonnes of stuff for all sorts of different jobs, of varying quality, ranging from the indispensible to the utterly useless.
Once you get into the habit of using it, it saves you a lot of time reinventing stuff. Why write your own postcode/zip-code/phone-number/ISBN validator when someone else has done it already? Why sit around trying to kludge your own XML searching when there's XML::XPath and XML::XQL?
Why exactly are BIND and Sendmail known for holes?
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· Score: 2
I know their reputation, but I have never looked at the source and so I don't know why (or whether) they deserve that reputation. Anyone care to elucidate? (If possible, with a better explanation than "they're written in C". So's Apache, and it's not known for being riddled with holes (I'm sure there's been some, but its reputation isn't like BIND's or Sendmail's)).
Re:BIND is the problem, not Linux
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· Score: 1
if I were your boss I'd fire you for not switching.
That automatic rule would be harsh bordering on unfair dismissal, surely? I can think of perfectly reasonable times to run BIND, - if nothing else, it'd be ok behind a firewall.
Re:Not an option for some of us
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· Score: 1
I don't have the time (or the energy!) to check bugtraq once a day. Sigh - what we need is a sysadmin who'll take care of our linux machines
For debian users, you can get security updates by adding the following line to/etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://security.debian.org/ potato/updates main contrib non-free
Assuming you're using a *named*, stable distribution ("potato" rather than "stable"), you could also put a script in/etc/cron.daily to do something like "apt-get -q update; apt-get -q -y upgrade" (but yshould log the output). That way you get automatic security updates once a day.
Re:Anyone know the french version?
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· Score: 1
It goes "Dans le jungle, terrible jungle, le lion est mort ce soir".
That is "... the lion is dead tonight"
Makes more sense really, celebrating that it's died, rather than that it's sleeping. Otherwise the singing would probably wake it up...
Where did you find this? All the gutenberg stuff is all very well, but id like to get some stuff that was written a little more recently!!
George Orwell died on January 21, 1950. Paragraph 12 of the UK's Copyright Act 1998 states that "Copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work expires at the end of the period of 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies".
Slashdot Mirror
Is it legal to restrict reviews in this manner? Are such contracts enforceable? If so, in countries with freedom-of-speech laws, can it be got round via reverse-engineering the review? I.e. I write a factual review which is positive and has lots of detail, and my friend reads between the lines and says "it sounds like this film may be a bag of shite"?
BTW, slashdot's new "ban users from posting based on their subnet" filter is really annoying. And very hypocritical, given that they regularly bash Napster for performing similar blanket bans.
Right - but from the article it sounds like they're getting paid per reposession. Sounds like a perfect way to attract people who delight in others' suffering.
Similarly, states which use volunteers to perform executions are obviously gonna attract sadists to the job.
Hi Brett, howya doing, not read one of your posts for a while.
I don't know which companies you're referring to, but if an individual wants to attack a company then I guess that is likely to be because *in their opinion* the company is being unethical. Of course that may not agree with your opinion or mine.
I don't think that you've demonstrated that this is the case. The Microsoft vs Quarterdeck example you gave happened in a world in which software patents exist. In any case, if you think that the Microsoft cross-subsidising technique should be illegal, then oughtn't that to be banned by anti-trust laws?
Ok, but that's true in markets where patents don't have much effect, too - see Alan Cox's recent comments about the baked beans industry. Besides, it takes time to develop a clone, and in the IT industry a short time is very valuable. VMWare has been milking their product for about 3 years now, just as Plex86 is getting good. If the VMWare people have actually been developing for the last 3 years, then they've probably got something else unique now, which will take time to copy ... and so on.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that we probably don't all agree on what counts as malicious, I still don't think I neccessarily agree with you. A lot of malicious acts are not illegal, and I think should not be. I think the nasty {pro-choice|pro-life} people should be allowed to air their stupid views on abortion, for example, whether or not I agree with them.
Actually, Alan Cox responded before either of them. I think he does a better job of refuting Mundie in general; Linus focuses on a specific part of what Mundie said and is [IMHO] more inflammatory.
Shame the PHBs won't've heard of Alan Cox cos I think he often has things to say which are worth listening to.
Isn't Aqua Norwegian?
Not to detract from the humour value of your post, let me give a simple example of everyday XML usage where schemas are essential for XML.
You've got a database, with a 2 column table. Say "Company name"(char[40]) and "Net profit this year"(int). Ywanna get data to go in this table, in XML format, from another company. That XML's gonna look something like this:
Ok. Now how do you specify that the Company name should be <= 40 characters and the profit should be an integer? A DTD gives no way of doing this, it just says what order the tags can come in. Without XML schema, you're reduced to sending emails saying "Please make the Company name at most 40 chars and please make Profit a signed integer". Which is evil, cos you might have to do that for a 200 table database, and also there's no way of using that email to automatically check that XML file.
OTOH a schema lets you specify exactly what you want in a precise, even fairly simple, machine-readable format.
Now do you believe me that schemas are really important? :-)
From the letter, it sounds like Bruce is arguing this very well. "Hey IBM and HP, you've noticed that OSS is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and you're in the process of stealing a march on your competitors by being the first to make use of this. Well, this nasty software patent thing, as well as having very few net benefits for you people, may soon be used by your competitors to kill that goose. Therefore, you've got a direct and immediate interest in helping to dismantle this system, or protecting the goose from it."
He's showing them why it's in their interests to help us. Thanks a lot Bruce, and keep up the good work!
Hmmm? "GPL == bad" is an expression that evaluates to True[*]. "(GPL == bad) is true" is an expression that evaluates to True. And also "((GPL == bad) is true) is true)" etc..
[*]: In a C-like language which has a boolean type, this statement would be correct. C itself doesn't actually have a boolean type so this is a slight simplification.
It's not quite true that the UK *government* recognised Sealand. A particular court (i.e. part of the UK *judiciary*) implicitly did so.
Also, how many anomalous names are there? www.bl.uk is one - are there more? (There's stuff like www.parliament.uk and www.police.uk which are presumably post-Nominet and deliberate, but I guess that bl.uk is a relic ... ?
(BTW, this new anti-troll device is really annoying. It blocks posts from subnets where there has been a lot of down-moderated activity in the last 24 hours. So if you have the same ISP as a lot of trolls, then you can't post (unless you log into university machines :-) I really hope they refine the bloody thing ASAP - it seems silly to block posts from people whose karma is high. Off-topic, I know, but I guess there's hundreds of people who want to say this but can't.)
Here's a question: Is there a theoretical CompSci way of making a distinction between compilable and non-compilable languages like this? I tried to think of one but it proved harder than I expected. For example, I could make a "perl compiler" that creates an executable which is simply perl.exe followed by the actual script. Sure, this "shouldn't" count, but I can't see a rigourous way of making the definition stick.
That's true, unless you're playing very pedantically; at any rate it's true enough to make it funny :-) Interestingly enough, "C#" is abbreviated as "dos" in Catalan, as in do-sharp, according to the docs for my local copy of Lilypond. (If you've ever had to watch The Sound Of Music you'll know what "do" represents :-).
From the site (to be precise, http://users.shore.net/~ndm/java/mmexplorer/mmset. html):
This is a particularly bad way of displaying mathematical formulae, because the meaning of the text depends in a very messy way on the layout (i.e., what font it is in). It shouldn't be the case that just looking at a formula in a different font renders it completely meaningless.
The pleasant way to use mathematical symbols online is using Unicode. The unicode character set, which is supported by all common web browsers including Netscape 4, contains all the symbols a mathematician could want (indeed, arguably, all the symbols anyone could want), such as GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI, RIGHTWARDS ARROW, DIAMOND OPERATOR, LEFT NORMAL FACTOR SEMIDIRECT PRODUCT etc..
If a browser doesn't have a particular symbol, the user will see a mark that shows that a character is missing. What they won't see is characters which are semantically different, like "R" instead of RIGHTWARDS ARROW. If the user saves the page as a text file, the maths symbols will still be present and retain their meaning.
For more complicated mathematical expressions, the way to go is MathML. However, since most browsers other than Mozilla can't support this yet, though you may be able to get plug-ins. Nevertheless, anything has to be better than encoding semantic information through font choice.
So chucking all your scalars, hashes, arrays and subroutines into the same namespace is somehow wiser than learning a simple mnemonic like $calar, @rray and %ssociative_array?
I see there's an argument for doing it but I don't think it's as clear-cut as you make it sound.
CPAN's a bit different - it's not a load of libraries which come bundled with perl. It's a gigabyte-sized online archive of perl modules (classes etc.). This mean's it's filled with far more weird and wonderful junk than you would ever want to bundle as a default library. For example, Mac::Apps::MacPGP. Or HTML::Embperl. Or Apache::GzipChain. Or Parse::RecDescent. Or Statistics::MaxEntropy. You get the idea; tonnes of stuff for all sorts of different jobs, of varying quality, ranging from the indispensible to the utterly useless.
Once you get into the habit of using it, it saves you a lot of time reinventing stuff. Why write your own postcode/zip-code/phone-number/ISBN validator when someone else has done it already? Why sit around trying to kludge your own XML searching when there's XML::XPath and XML::XQL?
I know their reputation, but I have never looked at the source and so I don't know why (or whether) they deserve that reputation. Anyone care to elucidate? (If possible, with a better explanation than "they're written in C". So's Apache, and it's not known for being riddled with holes (I'm sure there's been some, but its reputation isn't like BIND's or Sendmail's)).
deb http://security.debian.org/ potato/updates main contrib non-free
Assuming you're using a *named*, stable distribution ("potato" rather than "stable"), you could also put a script inIt goes "Dans le jungle, terrible jungle, le lion est mort ce soir".
That is "... the lion is dead tonight"
Makes more sense really, celebrating that it's died, rather than that it's sleeping. Otherwise the singing would probably wake it up ...
George Orwell died on January 21, 1950. Paragraph 12 of the UK's Copyright Act 1998 states that "Copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work expires at the end of the period of 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies".
Doesn't that mean that 1984 is out of copyright?
Well, to get the mod 2 bit out of the block, you could write:
for (grep { $_ % 2 == 0 }, @array) { blah }