It wouldn't make sense, for example, to them to have a separate government-only road system. I wasn't aware that the private sector oversaw planning and maintenance on public roads. They do the work, but at the governments direction. This is not so with RIM.
Anything the government relies on, it mandates plans and contracts. It doesn't pop on down to home depot or radioshack and buy a kit, it spends tons of money making sure it's (theoretically) what it wants.
anyway, it's all a moot point - the patentmongers are the ones who stipulated all but government - likely to prevent the government from being inconvenienced and realizing what's up.
To your original (your grandparent) reply - who said the doctor was in the same building as me? Who said it was a 'convenient' way of contacting him, it's pretty much the only way. I admit that what I work on isn't actively saving lives, but it is helping to track down patterns so lives can be saved in the future. If a CIA agent needs to pop out for lunch, and still be reliably contacted - then they need to have spec'd reliable communications, not off the shelf "patent-infringing" products.
Proportionally - based off of popularity. Any software that begins getting popular *does* get the attention you speak of, and many (hopefully most) onerous bugs quickly begin to be smashed in it. Not all, no - but the biggest and worst.
Yes, most open source software out there was cooked up by one person, ten people have downloaded it and tried it. None of them looked at the code... and no one was harmed by this fact.
Have I looked at Linux kernel code? Yes. Firefox? Yes. Have I sifted through it all looking for bugs? Of course, I have 25 hours a day to do so, who doesn't?
Honestly though, there are people who have time and knowledge to look for bugs, and if you subscribed to any of the security mailing list you'd see them. The people who find symlink attacks, priviledge escalation, input sanitizing bugs - they didn't just happen to stumble over it because they clicked the 'save' button twice - they were looking over the code.
I'm not posting to any one solution because they all mention this.
If the purchaser is going to share the images with someone else, they're going to. Make it too obviously difficult to do it through the site, and they'll just do it offline. This all depends on how much you trust people and how far you want to go to keep on top of things...
If you want to be smart, and keep on top of things, then you don't want to make it *too* obvious that the link won't continue to work - but you definitely want to tie a unique identifier to it. That way, they can pass the link on to their friends, and you know they're sharing it. Feel free to make it expire - that will prevent said others from actually getting the content - but by leaving that link functional you can actually track who is trying to pass the content around. Make it so after the expiry period, it instead sends a zipfile that has a text file that says "please contact FOO to regain access to these files, they have expired" - that way the link will still "look good". Chances are they won't need to download it but once anyway, but you can always re-enable it for them if they really need it / etc. Heck, make the filename it sends slightly different so they don't accidentally overwrite their old copy - but you want to leave it a.zip so they don't spot that the link is different. Most people will re-test the link before passing it on.
If you make it a login based system, then you're less likely to catch it right off - just make it a simple link they can forward in email. This is all super-paranoid and about catching would-be thieves, hopefully the real world isn't this bad - but that's not my experience.
Protecting these at the distribution level is tricky enough, and it will take time looking over things, but it will at least limit your losses.
I'm sorry - why is the government an exception? If you want to except people, how about *existing customers*. I work at a hospital, and just about every doctor here has a Blackberry. I wouldn't be able to ever get answers on any of my questions if they didn't have them - as these doctors are NEVER in their office long enough to sit down.
I don't see how some government official with more time and money on his/her hands than they know what to do with keeps their Blackberry, when people who are genuinely busy and using the damned thing are going to get shut out in the cold.
Is the government excepted just so they don't have to look at it from a "who's getting hurt by this"? Arguably, the point of the patent is to protect the creator so they can bring the product to market and profit from their research - well, NTP wasn't didn't and wouldn't - and their use of the patent now and under these terms explicitly HURTS consumers and the world in general.
Incidentally - I'm rather against the "patent for patents sake". Patents have a place, but they are all too often abused. There need to be some rules about sitting on your ass when you know infringement is in the works, so you can let it get big and profitable before digging in. I know this RIM:NTP has been going on for a while, but they didn't pipe up until RIM was well underway.
Yeah that makes sense. You patent the concept of growing fruit, and you immediately get to become the fruit baron of your respective country and own all orchards, groves, etc.
No - you see - if anything, you pay damages, and get to license it. Now, in all likelihood, their licensing will be outright extortion - after all, that is and always has been their sole business plan.
Keep in mind the area of discussion here is a classroom where they're learning a foreign language (English). I doubt very much they're telling their dreams to their teacher.
You're right though, if that's as far as they can get in any conversation anywhere - maybe they need to reanalyze the age group they're talking to after classes. *wink wink*
Or you could just lie straightfaced. He'll have a hard time verifying the contents of your USB pendrive while holding a knife to you or a loved one, and keeping from attracting attention.
Oh yeah, and anyone robbing you at gun/knifepoint doesn't give two shits about the data on the usb drive, they care about how much it'll be worth - which when shit gets nuclear - not much once the batteries start running out.
So what you're essentially saying is that ignorance is bliss. Fair enough, but not a popular meme around these parts. No I was strictly relating this to the real-world example given, as the parent poster used - pointing out that it was not the same at all. My problem with the parent poster was - essentially - you don't need to slip in through the window and leave a note on my coffee table, to warn me about the latch. Here's a crazy idea - tell me the next day, in person - or leave a note outside. We have this material called "glass" on lots of our homes. It's not there because it's a great protector. Obviously anyone CAN get into your home if they want - that's not the point, it's that people don't.
The parent poster was suggesting that we should just pop around into our neighbors to see if anything's wrong, and if there is - feel free to just enter their home and leave a note. This is not socially acceptable or responsible. In the real world, you tell them under reasonable terms - and the same should go for the digital world. You don't need to exploit the latest buffer overflow in FOO to warn someone that they've vulnerable to it.
-- The "nobody got hurt!" was referring to the tearing down of all the perceived comforts our 'civilized society' provides, things like... sleeping well at night despite having glass windows on all sides of your house. Just because you can do something, doesn't make it right.
I thought it was going to be a cone of silence like device, where it could cut down on outside distractions - maybe some white noise generation. A cone of silence type device.
Nope, it's a damned chatterbox. I can't imagine anyone who would want to hear random snippets of themselves while talking on the phone, talk about totally breaking your train of thought.
If you need privacy while speaking in your cubicle, you can just as easily leave your cubicle and use either a cellphone or another phone to have that privacy. If you're really talking about company secrets at work and your coworkers *shouldn't* be overhearing, go petition to your boss to get a real office, because you shouldn't have to be the one to find some crazy solution to what should be a nonissue. If it's personal, then pop out to break and actually deal with it, instead of muffled tones that waste more time than you need to spend, and distract everyone else around you whether they want to listen in or not.
If I woke up one day to realize someone had just popped into my house overnight, without my knowing, I would go fix whatever weak spot they used to get in. Then I would buy weapons. Then I wouldn't sleep at night.
Nobody got hurt!
Re:I don't own TV, yet I watch plenty of TV (live)
on
Serenity Opens Today
·
· Score: 1
"might be willing" ? Nobody's going to twist your arm with that kind of enthusiasm.
All this thread aside - I saw it last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There were parts I disagreed with, parts I understood were there for those who haven't seen the show - but regardless, I was engaged throughout. I'm sorry you don't find you similarly engage.
Yes, I'd say reading is a very different experience, and imo the imagination as well as the ability to stop, set the book down, and dwell on something (or just continue with your life and come back the next evening) before continuing - is what makes it so enjoyable. Well, that and the book itself being good:)
I read this and thought they were bitching about the root servers, ran around looking up information/sources to point out there's no real problem with the current root servers setup, then found out they're whining about goddamned ICANN.
Repeat after me: DNS is *not* the web.
ICANN's not perfect, but if you look at how they operate, you'd be surprised to find out they weren't setup by the UN. They're clearly the product and brainchild of a bunch of bureaucrats. There are huge fees to apply and propose, and then they arbitrarily create new TLDs to sustain the new fees rolling in the following application period. They burn through their government contract cash when all they do is push paper around, and then ask for more like a fat kid with a food fetish.
If the UN really wants to take control, I say fine - fuck it, stop our government wasting some money on this albatross.
ICANN "In 2000, ICANN introduced seven new gTLDs:.aero,.biz,.coop,.info,.museum,.name, and.pro. The ICANN community is currently exploring possibilities to add additional gTLDs."... amazing. what will they* think of next? * (and by they, I mean the people who dropped the huge fee to apply for those gTLDs, as ICANN doesn't think them up only approve them)
All they ever did was introduce competition by having multiple registrars, and that's not exactly some amazing idea, it's something that was *long* overdue.
I only (really) purchased CDs for about 3 years - during highschool. I only have about 60 cds, and I believe myself to be below the norm. Everyone I've met since then is well above this number, at least by a factor of 2-3. They are not 'music geeks'.
I know lots of people who have religiously ripped all their CDs, and have to pick and choose what music to put on their ipods, because there isn't space on their 20gb or their 40gb. I'm finding anyone over 20 (arbitrary age chosen) seems to have this problem. If you think they're music geeks just because they have an ipod and want their music, you're wrong, they just finally have the chance to have all (most) of their music available, and want to take advantage of it.
All that aside - you don't *have* to full your ipod up today. You might (gasp!) want to have it around for a few years. You can also use it as a portable hard drive (though everyone I know with an ipod mentions that idea before they get it and never does it, who carrys a cable?).
50 CDs average? No way.
(also: incidentally, audiobooks [audible.com] can range anywhere from 65 to 360 megs (average maybe 170) - and an audible subscription nabs you 2/month, so at 3 months/gig, you and a SO can fill your ipod faster than you're prepared for.)
Wait, a *possible* criminal will say "eh, screw it, there's a hospital nearby" and shoot someone they otherwise wouldn't have? If people thought about the consequences of their actions, a lot fewer guns would be fired - so that's simply not the case.
Similarly, people won't feel more likely to stroll down the street in the high crime area advertising their possessions because "well, there's that nice hospital close by to save my life in case I get shot."
I'm sorry - even if the hospital is out to make a buck, unless they're also dealing guns or something - I don't see how they're affecting the crime rate. They might even reduce it by bringing in some legitimate jobs.
The pawn shop, yeah - the ammo could easily be construed as a facilitator. The guns, unless they're skipping background checks - still yes, but not nearly as much so (convenience doesn't enter into it *that* much since you just need the one gun).
What were we talking about again? eDonkey doesn't kill people, guns do.
people chose MySQL for a couple reasons: 1) because PHP started working with it early 2) because it was pretty simple to install and get running, esp. re.debs /.rpms 3) because it is and was a lot looser with what you threw at it, and people were just looking for a dumb database. 4) [no way this list is complete or 100% accurate]
no - this isn't a troll. Read the php-db mailing list sometime, most everyone on it is using MySQL - and every new persons question is something along the lines of "Why does my insert statement fail when I give it this string "This isn't working!" - can you guess the answer? search the archives - hell, browse them, it's the start of every other thread.
A lot of the quick and dirty database apps that get churned out constantly are written in php and mysql (there are plenty of good well thought out products written for these as well) - because both allow nice fast rapid development, and MySQL returns very few errors. If you toss a null at a column that doesn't allow it, it'll just default it out to 0 or a blank string. In an application that doesn't require loads of careful checking, and had to be done yesterday, it was a blessing.
I'll be interested to see if people don't keep the last MySQL 4.1 around for eternity, because they can do such sloppiness safely. It's for "performance". Yeah.
Re: the palm treo 650 / 700 - interesting comparison...
oqo: switching from transmeta processors to (intel / amd) treo: switching from palm OS to windows (pocket pc / mobile / whatever it is)
personally, I'm thinking I might grab an unbranded 650 once they're fairly cheap. Palm OS was always quite nice, and the treo seems like a good product - just need to look into build quality - and whether there are any contenders with similar / better products if/when I go to buy.
Your argument has a weak point - there's no reason why you couldn't instead embed a BSD licensed DBMS in a GPL application. It wasn't going GPL that 'empowered' these developers. BSD licensing has no restrictions other than a credit line.
I'm not saying the rest of your points aren't valid - but saying that MySQL is where it is today because it was GPL just doesn't fit. I think it's where it is today because it started out dead simple, and people latched onto that - just like PHP.
And anyway, Apple gives them a chance to increase the cost of songs - it's called an "album only" song. Have 12 tracks, 10 of them suck? Make the two good ones of them album only and sell the album for $15.
But wait, people might not buy any of that music at all that way!... tough shit. Nothing forces people to buy the music. Let the market decide success like it should.
Incidentally, I bought my ipod for audiobooks (audible.com) - so music was not my motivator. Do I have music on it now? Yes - did I buy the music because of the ipod? Actually, yes - some of it. So, why doesn't Apple get a cut of that? Oh that's right, sanity.
Debian does abide by Mozillas trademark policy. The problem, was that Mozillas policy was to not expect Linux distributors to be covered by the general trademark policy, http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/00834 7.html - but Debians policy is that everything should be freely redistributal and modified - thus Debians Mozilla package couldn't have a non-general trademark policy and still abide by Debians guidelines.
All that aside, I believe what they settled on that they needed to do was make sure all references said "Debian Firefox" or equivalent - instead of "Mozilla Firefox" - just so it's clear that it's not the core version straight from Mozilla. The intention was to remove the Mozilla name from sight - which in the long run seems somewhat perplexing for brand recognition, but to each their own in the pursuit to protect themselves.
I don't think Opera was making much money with their free desktop browser anyway.
Their main profits are from embedded devices (PDAs and the like) that buy licenses to use their browser, because it's fast and small and has good support of all the desired features these days.
Course, I haven't seen a recent version of Netfront - they may be losing ground to them, or they may still be way ahead...
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't make sense, for example, to them to have a separate government-only road system.
I wasn't aware that the private sector oversaw planning and maintenance on public roads. They do the work, but at the governments direction. This is not so with RIM.
Anything the government relies on, it mandates plans and contracts. It doesn't pop on down to home depot or radioshack and buy a kit, it spends tons of money making sure it's (theoretically) what it wants.
anyway, it's all a moot point - the patentmongers are the ones who stipulated all but government - likely to prevent the government from being inconvenienced and realizing what's up.
To your original (your grandparent) reply - who said the doctor was in the same building as me? Who said it was a 'convenient' way of contacting him, it's pretty much the only way. I admit that what I work on isn't actively saving lives, but it is helping to track down patterns so lives can be saved in the future. If a CIA agent needs to pop out for lunch, and still be reliably contacted - then they need to have spec'd reliable communications, not off the shelf "patent-infringing" products.
Proportionally - based off of popularity. Any software that begins getting popular *does* get the attention you speak of, and many (hopefully most) onerous bugs quickly begin to be smashed in it. Not all, no - but the biggest and worst.
Yes, most open source software out there was cooked up by one person, ten people have downloaded it and tried it. None of them looked at the code... and no one was harmed by this fact.
Have I looked at Linux kernel code? Yes. Firefox? Yes. Have I sifted through it all looking for bugs? Of course, I have 25 hours a day to do so, who doesn't?
Honestly though, there are people who have time and knowledge to look for bugs, and if you subscribed to any of the security mailing list you'd see them. The people who find symlink attacks, priviledge escalation, input sanitizing bugs - they didn't just happen to stumble over it because they clicked the 'save' button twice - they were looking over the code.
I'm not posting to any one solution because they all mention this.
.zip so they don't spot that the link is different. Most people will re-test the link before passing it on.
If the purchaser is going to share the images with someone else, they're going to. Make it too obviously difficult to do it through the site, and they'll just do it offline. This all depends on how much you trust people and how far you want to go to keep on top of things...
If you want to be smart, and keep on top of things, then you don't want to make it *too* obvious that the link won't continue to work - but you definitely want to tie a unique identifier to it. That way, they can pass the link on to their friends, and you know they're sharing it. Feel free to make it expire - that will prevent said others from actually getting the content - but by leaving that link functional you can actually track who is trying to pass the content around. Make it so after the expiry period, it instead sends a zipfile that has a text file that says "please contact FOO to regain access to these files, they have expired" - that way the link will still "look good". Chances are they won't need to download it but once anyway, but you can always re-enable it for them if they really need it / etc. Heck, make the filename it sends slightly different so they don't accidentally overwrite their old copy - but you want to leave it a
If you make it a login based system, then you're less likely to catch it right off - just make it a simple link they can forward in email. This is all super-paranoid and about catching would-be thieves, hopefully the real world isn't this bad - but that's not my experience.
Protecting these at the distribution level is tricky enough, and it will take time looking over things, but it will at least limit your losses.
I'm sorry - why is the government an exception? If you want to except people, how about *existing customers*. I work at a hospital, and just about every doctor here has a Blackberry. I wouldn't be able to ever get answers on any of my questions if they didn't have them - as these doctors are NEVER in their office long enough to sit down.
I don't see how some government official with more time and money on his/her hands than they know what to do with keeps their Blackberry, when people who are genuinely busy and using the damned thing are going to get shut out in the cold.
Is the government excepted just so they don't have to look at it from a "who's getting hurt by this"? Arguably, the point of the patent is to protect the creator so they can bring the product to market and profit from their research - well, NTP wasn't didn't and wouldn't - and their use of the patent now and under these terms explicitly HURTS consumers and the world in general.
Incidentally - I'm rather against the "patent for patents sake". Patents have a place, but they are all too often abused. There need to be some rules about sitting on your ass when you know infringement is in the works, so you can let it get big and profitable before digging in. I know this RIM:NTP has been going on for a while, but they didn't pipe up until RIM was well underway.
Yeah that makes sense. You patent the concept of growing fruit, and you immediately get to become the fruit baron of your respective country and own all orchards, groves, etc.
No - you see - if anything, you pay damages, and get to license it. Now, in all likelihood, their licensing will be outright extortion - after all, that is and always has been their sole business plan.
Damn the man.
Keep in mind the area of discussion here is a classroom where they're learning a foreign language (English). I doubt very much they're telling their dreams to their teacher.
You're right though, if that's as far as they can get in any conversation anywhere - maybe they need to reanalyze the age group they're talking to after classes. *wink wink*
Or you could just lie straightfaced. He'll have a hard time verifying the contents of your USB pendrive while holding a knife to you or a loved one, and keeping from attracting attention.
Oh yeah, and anyone robbing you at gun/knifepoint doesn't give two shits about the data on the usb drive, they care about how much it'll be worth - which when shit gets nuclear - not much once the batteries start running out.
So what you're essentially saying is that ignorance is bliss. Fair enough, but not a popular meme around these parts.
No I was strictly relating this to the real-world example given, as the parent poster used - pointing out that it was not the same at all. My problem with the parent poster was - essentially - you don't need to slip in through the window and leave a note on my coffee table, to warn me about the latch. Here's a crazy idea - tell me the next day, in person - or leave a note outside. We have this material called "glass" on lots of our homes. It's not there because it's a great protector. Obviously anyone CAN get into your home if they want - that's not the point, it's that people don't.
The parent poster was suggesting that we should just pop around into our neighbors to see if anything's wrong, and if there is - feel free to just enter their home and leave a note. This is not socially acceptable or responsible. In the real world, you tell them under reasonable terms - and the same should go for the digital world. You don't need to exploit the latest buffer overflow in FOO to warn someone that they've vulnerable to it.
--
The "nobody got hurt!" was referring to the tearing down of all the perceived comforts our 'civilized society' provides, things like... sleeping well at night despite having glass windows on all sides of your house. Just because you can do something, doesn't make it right.
No - increase headaches.
I thought it was going to be a cone of silence like device, where it could cut down on outside distractions - maybe some white noise generation. A cone of silence type device.
Nope, it's a damned chatterbox. I can't imagine anyone who would want to hear random snippets of themselves while talking on the phone, talk about totally breaking your train of thought.
If you need privacy while speaking in your cubicle, you can just as easily leave your cubicle and use either a cellphone or another phone to have that privacy. If you're really talking about company secrets at work and your coworkers *shouldn't* be overhearing, go petition to your boss to get a real office, because you shouldn't have to be the one to find some crazy solution to what should be a nonissue. If it's personal, then pop out to break and actually deal with it, instead of muffled tones that waste more time than you need to spend, and distract everyone else around you whether they want to listen in or not.
I'm fairly anti voilence.
If I woke up one day to realize someone had just popped into my house overnight, without my knowing, I would go fix whatever weak spot they used to get in. Then I would buy weapons. Then I wouldn't sleep at night.
Nobody got hurt!
"might be willing" ?
:)
Nobody's going to twist your arm with that kind of enthusiasm.
All this thread aside - I saw it last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There were parts I disagreed with, parts I understood were there for those who haven't seen the show - but regardless, I was engaged throughout. I'm sorry you don't find you similarly engage.
Yes, I'd say reading is a very different experience, and imo the imagination as well as the ability to stop, set the book down, and dwell on something (or just continue with your life and come back the next evening) before continuing - is what makes it so enjoyable. Well, that and the book itself being good
I read this and thought they were bitching about the root servers, ran around looking up information/sources to point out there's no real problem with the current root servers setup, then found out they're whining about goddamned ICANN.
.aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro. The ICANN community is currently exploring possibilities to add additional gTLDs." ... amazing. what will they* think of next?
Repeat after me:
DNS is *not* the web.
ICANN's not perfect, but if you look at how they operate, you'd be surprised to find out they weren't setup by the UN. They're clearly the product and brainchild of a bunch of bureaucrats. There are huge fees to apply and propose, and then they arbitrarily create new TLDs to sustain the new fees rolling in the following application period. They burn through their government contract cash when all they do is push paper around, and then ask for more like a fat kid with a food fetish.
If the UN really wants to take control, I say fine - fuck it, stop our government wasting some money on this albatross.
ICANN
"In 2000, ICANN introduced seven new gTLDs:
* (and by they, I mean the people who dropped the huge fee to apply for those gTLDs, as ICANN doesn't think them up only approve them)
All they ever did was introduce competition by having multiple registrars, and that's not exactly some amazing idea, it's something that was *long* overdue.
Interesting contraceptive method!
Interesting point, but are they scaled?
Let's look at some Population rankings
USA
- Population: 295,734,134
Japan
- Population: 127,417,244
Switzerland
- Population: 7,489,370
Canada
- Population: 32,805,041
Good lord, Japan really *is* packed to the brim.
I call bullshit.
I only (really) purchased CDs for about 3 years - during highschool. I only have about 60 cds, and I believe myself to be below the norm. Everyone I've met since then is well above this number, at least by a factor of 2-3. They are not 'music geeks'.
I know lots of people who have religiously ripped all their CDs, and have to pick and choose what music to put on their ipods, because there isn't space on their 20gb or their 40gb. I'm finding anyone over 20 (arbitrary age chosen) seems to have this problem. If you think they're music geeks just because they have an ipod and want their music, you're wrong, they just finally have the chance to have all (most) of their music available, and want to take advantage of it.
All that aside - you don't *have* to full your ipod up today. You might (gasp!) want to have it around for a few years. You can also use it as a portable hard drive (though everyone I know with an ipod mentions that idea before they get it and never does it, who carrys a cable?).
50 CDs average? No way.
(also: incidentally, audiobooks [audible.com] can range anywhere from 65 to 360 megs (average maybe 170) - and an audible subscription nabs you 2/month, so at 3 months/gig, you and a SO can fill your ipod faster than you're prepared for.)
Wait, a *possible* criminal will say "eh, screw it, there's a hospital nearby" and shoot someone they otherwise wouldn't have? If people thought about the consequences of their actions, a lot fewer guns would be fired - so that's simply not the case.
Similarly, people won't feel more likely to stroll down the street in the high crime area advertising their possessions because "well, there's that nice hospital close by to save my life in case I get shot."
I'm sorry - even if the hospital is out to make a buck, unless they're also dealing guns or something - I don't see how they're affecting the crime rate. They might even reduce it by bringing in some legitimate jobs.
The pawn shop, yeah - the ammo could easily be construed as a facilitator. The guns, unless they're skipping background checks - still yes, but not nearly as much so (convenience doesn't enter into it *that* much since you just need the one gun).
What were we talking about again? eDonkey doesn't kill people, guns do.
people chose MySQL for a couple reasons: .debs / .rpms
1) because PHP started working with it early
2) because it was pretty simple to install and get running, esp. re
3) because it is and was a lot looser with what you threw at it, and people were just looking for a dumb database.
4) [no way this list is complete or 100% accurate]
no - this isn't a troll. Read the php-db mailing list sometime, most everyone on it is using MySQL - and every new persons question is something along the lines of "Why does my insert statement fail when I give it this string "This isn't working!" - can you guess the answer? search the archives - hell, browse them, it's the start of every other thread.
A lot of the quick and dirty database apps that get churned out constantly are written in php and mysql (there are plenty of good well thought out products written for these as well) - because both allow nice fast rapid development, and MySQL returns very few errors. If you toss a null at a column that doesn't allow it, it'll just default it out to 0 or a blank string. In an application that doesn't require loads of careful checking, and had to be done yesterday, it was a blessing.
I'll be interested to see if people don't keep the last MySQL 4.1 around for eternity, because they can do such sloppiness safely. It's for "performance". Yeah.
Re: the palm treo 650 / 700 - interesting comparison...
oqo: switching from transmeta processors to (intel / amd)
treo: switching from palm OS to windows (pocket pc / mobile / whatever it is)
personally, I'm thinking I might grab an unbranded 650 once they're fairly cheap. Palm OS was always quite nice, and the treo seems like a good product - just need to look into build quality - and whether there are any contenders with similar / better products if/when I go to buy.
Your argument has a weak point - there's no reason why you couldn't instead embed a BSD licensed DBMS in a GPL application. It wasn't going GPL that 'empowered' these developers. BSD licensing has no restrictions other than a credit line.
I'm not saying the rest of your points aren't valid - but saying that MySQL is where it is today because it was GPL just doesn't fit. I think it's where it is today because it started out dead simple, and people latched onto that - just like PHP.
And anyway, Apple gives them a chance to increase the cost of songs - it's called an "album only" song. Have 12 tracks, 10 of them suck? Make the two good ones of them album only and sell the album for $15.
... tough shit. Nothing forces people to buy the music. Let the market decide success like it should.
But wait, people might not buy any of that music at all that way!
Incidentally, I bought my ipod for audiobooks (audible.com) - so music was not my motivator. Do I have music on it now? Yes - did I buy the music because of the ipod? Actually, yes - some of it. So, why doesn't Apple get a cut of that? Oh that's right, sanity.
Debian does abide by Mozillas trademark policy. The problem, was that Mozillas policy was to not expect Linux distributors to be covered by the general trademark policy, http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/00834 7.html - but Debians policy is that everything should be freely redistributal and modified - thus Debians Mozilla package couldn't have a non-general trademark policy and still abide by Debians guidelines.
All that aside, I believe what they settled on that they needed to do was make sure all references said "Debian Firefox" or equivalent - instead of "Mozilla Firefox" - just so it's clear that it's not the core version straight from Mozilla. The intention was to remove the Mozilla name from sight - which in the long run seems somewhat perplexing for brand recognition, but to each their own in the pursuit to protect themselves.
grab Ghostzilla if you need discretion.
This post gave me such fond memories of my college days.
Not all that techno crap, the freedom. *sniff*
I don't think Opera was making much money with their free desktop browser anyway.
Their main profits are from embedded devices (PDAs and the like) that buy licenses to use their browser, because it's fast and small and has good support of all the desired features these days.
Course, I haven't seen a recent version of Netfront - they may be losing ground to them, or they may still be way ahead...