GNU is absolutely correct, and is _really_ correct in other countries. This is why many large OSS projects have a single copyright holder and require copyright assignments to the copyright holder. Every signifigant contributor of code (for example, code which would be copyrightable on it's own) needs to agree to a global relicensing. What isn't "ethically acceptable" about this?
There are a lot of people who think that children need to be protected from anything that might bother them. This includes anything that implies that the world isn't happy and shiny, as well as more mundane things like sex and drugs.
I guess what you consider fast is important. I'm in the process of moving 100% away from windows, and while some things are much faster (a 2d polygon rendering test was 10x faster than the same test, on the same machine, under Windows), things like moving and resizing windows is much, much slower and more flickery. The resizing and repainting in response to mouse resizing is very slow - it lags well behind the movement. Revealing another window by moving one over another streaks and tears. It's annoying. It's a little better under KDE than Gnome but far worse than Windows under both of them.
It's because Al is parodying the _song_, while JibJab is using the song to parody something else. Parody is only protected from the thing you're parodying. There's a reasonable argument that the song is also being parodied, of course, but it's not open and shut. Well, it wasn't until they found out there's no valid copyright.
Apple changes that HIG anytime they release a new app with Metal that doesn't conform. The "rhyme and reason" was mostly bullshit in the first place anyway. Apple's had it's share of HIG fuckups - just because "Apple does it" doesn't mean it's right.
To clarify: They didn't decide to ban it, they just passed some referendum about requesting that hard drive manufacturers change the terminology. Unlike, say, China. Or India. Who _do_ outright ban stuff they don't like.
It's not fuzzy at all. If you distribute GPL code, it's assumed that you're doing so having read and understood (and therefore will comply with) the terms of the license. If you haven't, then you're in violation of copyright law (period). You can later reject the license all you want - all you have to do is cease any activities covered under the license. Conformance is an ongoing thing, not a "once of".
The oversights you're talking about are exactly the things that the Patriot act is removing, and are exactly the things that privacy advocates are complaining about. And people say "so what, I'm not doing anything illegal".
There's a basic flaw in perception, here. There are a LOT of people out there, including many law enforcement officials I know, that think that the job of the people is to serve the State. They'd never phrase it quite that way, but thats what it comes down to - that you have an obligation to the state. Of course, the original ideal was the opposite - that the state is supposed to serve the people. The web of trust neccesary for the kind of unrestricted powers law enforcement wants is huge - individual officers, beurocrats, politicians.... And of course it's easy to marginalize the people who disagree. Abuses DO happen. That's just a given. Clearly the oversight we have is not sufficent, thats self-evident. Removing existing oversight (as limited as it may be) is hardly the answer.
It's a dirty little secret of marketing that they don't really care about targetted advertising. Oh, they care a little bit, and they pay it lip service. But what they REALLY want, what they'll drool over and sign their soul to Satan to get, is captive audiences. Anyone who has worked with "web marketers" (except Google?) knows exactly what I mean. You want people who generate sales, of course. But it's really hard to link a sale to a specific add. What you want most of all is someone who has to watch your adds. This is why movie theaters are so fucking annoying these days, and why I won't go to them (Fuck you, MPAA, it's not the fucking Internet).
Look at the timestamps on the postives, too. If CNet , after being alerted/this getting publicity/etc doesn't at least strip out the most obvious of bot postings, I'll... well, I won't do anything. But they'll still suck.
The last time I remember this happening, it was with the open-source CD ripper CDex (BSD license). Downloads.com didn't de-list it, but did add a big yellow spyware warning label, and user comments quickly caught up with it. The same thing will probably happen here - even automated astroturfing will only take you so far.
In my experience, sysadmins are really, really lazy. They are much less interested in securing environments than they are in downloading porn and playing unreal tournament. Having a solution where you can simply pass the buck if anything bad happens (Oh, thats Microsofts fault), which will fly because everyone KNOWS that computers are supposed to have problems, is far superior to a "non-standard" (ie, non-Microsoft) solution where they'll be responsible if it breaks.
It's all about accountability, having someone to blame. Some people confuse this with having someone to actually fix problems, that is not a priority. Having someone besides you being responsible for the problem is the priority, a solution for the problem is way down on the list.
It's not about bragging, per se. It's different markets. MS has been hyping longhorn and avalon for a long time, because there's a lot of new technology and new features in it (as well as new design decisions/concepts), and MS needs developers to get excited about those, and plan apps supporting those, so that developers and apps can push sales of Longhorn. MS has a huge competition problem with itself. Apple can remain silent for longer because they've got a very high guaranteed upgrade market and application developers will follow whether they want to or not. If Apple had a higher market share and a less dedicated userbase, then they'd have a harder time pushing the upgrade cycle and would probably have to spin new releases more.
Fanboyism aside, I can't argue with your general facts - Apple is almost certainly not standing still. If they were, then now they've got a goal and 2 years (and thus 2 OS X versions) to finish it in. And they've got a headstart.
An RDMBS (as opposed to just a database) is actually for manipulating data, not just storing it. Otherwise you'd just use flatfile for everything and implement all the relational logic in your app code. The database can execute stored procs far, far faster than your app code can perform the same functions. Using database side stored procs gives you the exact same advantages as a class library with additional performance and security options. There's no loss. Why not use them?
Well, if you're doing anything of any size (as opposed to something crapped up in PHP), you're going to want a centralized repository of functions and business logic anyway, to ensure the correctness of your DB functions. You could write that as a library in your application code. But since you're going to need it anyway, you may as well do it on the database with stored procs and get the extra layer of security and performance that comes basically for free. The only point I can see to doing it on the application side is that you can use generic (read: lowest common denominator) SQL for everything to maximise your portability. But again, if you're working with anything more than minimal datasets you're going to need the performance boost that comes with db-specific optimizations - in my experience, query overhead dwarfs connection and processing time. If it doesn't, you should probably take a real close look at your app code.
The Java class library gets hyped a lot but it's not really any more functional than the standard Perl and Python libraries. If you're willing to extend "standard library" to mean "commonly used freely available libraries that happen to not ship with the offical package", then Java gets pretty much kicked to the curb.
Personally, I can't imagine why anyone would write in Java. But I've never used J2EE, which is the other thing that gets brought up, and maybe it's really cool. Java may have it's strong points, and I'm sure there's really good Java programmers out there. But if you want to narrow it down to bullet points, Java doesn't offer anything unique. Naturally, at some level there's a personal preference, and maybe the specific combination of features (and lack thereof) in Java appeals to some people. In my case, C++ and Python are my languages of choice (I had a lot of trouble getting into python cause of the silly indentation issue, and I still thing it's a horrible design decision, but now that I've been using it I'm able to overcome that). Java doesn't offer me anything I'm missing.
First off, you really need to read something about the Constitution. I can't blame you that much, cause it's a failing lots of people have. I'll start with the most obvious one: LACK OF AN EXPLICIT DECLARATION IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS DOES NOT MEAN THAT A RIGHT DOES NOT EXIST. The Constitution spells out the powers of state and federal government, not limit! The Bill of Rights is actually redudant (and was considered by some of the founding fathers to be harmful), because it's NOT NECCESARY. It's there as a signpost - "These are rights that we consider especially important". Sadly, people through the years have come to take the existence of the Bill of Rights as some sort of definition of your rights.
The Patriot act, at it's core, was designed to remove many of the limitations on law enforcement. If all you really care about is catching criminals, rather than about personal rights or privacy or any of that other stuff that gets in the way, then where you really want to live is in a police state. We've had those and most people didn't like them very much. The protections were there for a reason. The Patriot act was a bald manipulation of public emotion over 9/11 to pass a bill that had been shot down dozens of times over the last few years and decades. It's certainly true that there's nothing restricting those powers to use against terrorism (which was pointed out at the time the bill passed, and ignored). It's passing was dishonest at best.
Now, as for catching criminals - nothing in the patriot act was needed to "catch" this guy. In fact, a simple C&D from a lawyer directly to him probably would have been sufficent. One to his ISP certainly would have been. Unless there's (a lot) more to this case that we don't know about, like he was using the SG-1 fansite as a cover for child porn or sale of nuclear weapons or something, then the amount of force used against him was totally out of line. If there is more than we know, then we should know it - it should have been on the search warrant and it should be in the court case.
The people are not supposed to be accountable to the government! It is supposed to be the other way around. The police/FBI/CIA/etc are there for YOUR benefit, and they are not supposed to be able to act in secrecy and without public justification.
Gmail is actually amazingly easy to scrape because you don't have to scrape it - it runs kinda like a web service, with javascript sending message packets back and forth to the gmail servers (thats why it's so fast - the JS gets a message packet and updates the on-page view, rather than reloading the entire page). Check out POP Goes the GMail and GMail loader (heck, just google for GMail) for a description. Note that using these is technicaly against the GMail TOS. I'd pay (a reasonable fee) for legitimate, documented access to the GMail api, though.
I had a spymac account and used it briefly until I had a chance to get gmail.
It's a great deal - you get your gig of email, web hosting, POP access to the email, blog, forums, etc, etc. However, the Spymac servers are almost painfully slow and it's webmail interface has nothing on Googles. POP access was barely adequate, with the POP servers being unavailable probably 50% of the time.
Also, I trust Google to stay around as a viable company and keep providing me with my email service for a lot longer than Spymac (no offense to Spymac, of course).
It'd help if the CSS box model wasn't almost totally useless and broken, too. To say nothing of it's support on browsers (ie, minimal and varying between implementations), which makes it even more useless in reality than it is in theory.
There's a really simple solution here. Does the $49 CD come with the source code on it? If not, then Sveasoft is in violation (They aren't providing source to anyone who asks, so it's not clause b, and they aren't distributing unmodified non-commercial binaries, so it's not c).
The subscription also must provide source (it's my understanding that it doesn't, this would be a violation) at the same time you can download the binaries. A subscription is the same as selling on a CD as far as the GPL is concerned, it's all distribution. The subscription just has value-added, in that you can continue getting upgrades.
Theres two issues that I see:
a) Is termination of your subscription considered a restriction under the GPL? Theres no obvious answer and I'm pretty sure it would take a court case to decide.
b) If you have your subscription, and you get the binary, but choose not to download the source at that time, and then you lose your subscription (let it lapse, or whatever). You're still entitled to the source, as far as I can see. Did you waive your right to it forever by not downloading it when you had a chance? It's a little confusing.
All this assumes that Sveasoft distributes source side by side with both it's CD and subscription verions, if they are not then they're in violation just for that.
If you're an english speaker and you don't know the word "rendezvous" then you DESERVE to feel like in idiot. It's not a made up word, or even technical. It's in the dictionary. And not just the OED, it's in every 2 dollar cheapo Merriam-Webster dictionary that you got from a used bookstore in high school and you still keep around. What the hell is wrong with people?
The very nature of an RDBMS is such that you shouldn't have to jump through any application-level hoops to use it to its "fullest capacity".
This is almost totally wrong. The point of an RDBMS is to provide you with an implementation of relation data storage. There's nothing in that about performance or utility. SQL doesn't make any guarantees. It's like expecting the same assembly code to run equally well on a PowerPC and an x86 processor.
I expect to issue SQL statements and that's it. To me, the measure of a DB is how well it does what it does - store and retrieve data, without fucking it all up.
Thats a great ideal, sure. On the other hand, the actual truth of the matter is that you can see (massive) performance increases by not coding to the lowest common denominator and sacrificing your db independence. Even in cases where you decide to code strictly to spec, some techniques work better with some databses than on others. When working with oracle, you'd normally use sub-queries where a SQL server or MySQL database would require temp tables. Etc.
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GNU is absolutely correct, and is _really_ correct in other countries. This is why many large OSS projects have a single copyright holder and require copyright assignments to the copyright holder. Every signifigant contributor of code (for example, code which would be copyrightable on it's own) needs to agree to a global relicensing. What isn't "ethically acceptable" about this?
This list includes banning in public libraries as well as school libraries.
There are a lot of people who think that children need to be protected from anything that might bother them. This includes anything that implies that the world isn't happy and shiny, as well as more mundane things like sex and drugs.
I guess what you consider fast is important. I'm in the process of moving 100% away from windows, and while some things are much faster (a 2d polygon rendering test was 10x faster than the same test, on the same machine, under Windows), things like moving and resizing windows is much, much slower and more flickery. The resizing and repainting in response to mouse resizing is very slow - it lags well behind the movement. Revealing another window by moving one over another streaks and tears. It's annoying. It's a little better under KDE than Gnome but far worse than Windows under both of them.
It's because Al is parodying the _song_, while JibJab is using the song to parody something else. Parody is only protected from the thing you're parodying. There's a reasonable argument that the song is also being parodied, of course, but it's not open and shut. Well, it wasn't until they found out there's no valid copyright.
Apple changes that HIG anytime they release a new app with Metal that doesn't conform. The "rhyme and reason" was mostly bullshit in the first place anyway. Apple's had it's share of HIG fuckups - just because "Apple does it" doesn't mean it's right.
To clarify: They didn't decide to ban it, they just passed some referendum about requesting that hard drive manufacturers change the terminology. Unlike, say, China. Or India. Who _do_ outright ban stuff they don't like.
It's not fuzzy at all. If you distribute GPL code, it's assumed that you're doing so having read and understood (and therefore will comply with) the terms of the license. If you haven't, then you're in violation of copyright law (period). You can later reject the license all you want - all you have to do is cease any activities covered under the license. Conformance is an ongoing thing, not a "once of".
There's a basic flaw in perception, here. There are a LOT of people out there, including many law enforcement officials I know, that think that the job of the people is to serve the State. They'd never phrase it quite that way, but thats what it comes down to - that you have an obligation to the state. Of course, the original ideal was the opposite - that the state is supposed to serve the people. The web of trust neccesary for the kind of unrestricted powers law enforcement wants is huge - individual officers, beurocrats, politicians.... And of course it's easy to marginalize the people who disagree. Abuses DO happen. That's just a given. Clearly the oversight we have is not sufficent, thats self-evident. Removing existing oversight (as limited as it may be) is hardly the answer.
It's a dirty little secret of marketing that they don't really care about targetted advertising. Oh, they care a little bit, and they pay it lip service. But what they REALLY want, what they'll drool over and sign their soul to Satan to get, is captive audiences. Anyone who has worked with "web marketers" (except Google?) knows exactly what I mean. You want people who generate sales, of course. But it's really hard to link a sale to a specific add. What you want most of all is someone who has to watch your adds. This is why movie theaters are so fucking annoying these days, and why I won't go to them (Fuck you, MPAA, it's not the fucking Internet).
Look at the timestamps on the postives, too. If CNet , after being alerted/this getting publicity/etc doesn't at least strip out the most obvious of bot postings, I'll... well, I won't do anything. But they'll still suck.
The last time I remember this happening, it was with the open-source CD ripper CDex (BSD license). Downloads.com didn't de-list it, but did add a big yellow spyware warning label, and user comments quickly caught up with it. The same thing will probably happen here - even automated astroturfing will only take you so far.
It's all about accountability, having someone to blame. Some people confuse this with having someone to actually fix problems, that is not a priority. Having someone besides you being responsible for the problem is the priority, a solution for the problem is way down on the list.
Fanboyism aside, I can't argue with your general facts - Apple is almost certainly not standing still. If they were, then now they've got a goal and 2 years (and thus 2 OS X versions) to finish it in. And they've got a headstart.
An RDMBS (as opposed to just a database) is actually for manipulating data, not just storing it. Otherwise you'd just use flatfile for everything and implement all the relational logic in your app code. The database can execute stored procs far, far faster than your app code can perform the same functions. Using database side stored procs gives you the exact same advantages as a class library with additional performance and security options. There's no loss. Why not use them?
Well, if you're doing anything of any size (as opposed to something crapped up in PHP), you're going to want a centralized repository of functions and business logic anyway, to ensure the correctness of your DB functions. You could write that as a library in your application code. But since you're going to need it anyway, you may as well do it on the database with stored procs and get the extra layer of security and performance that comes basically for free. The only point I can see to doing it on the application side is that you can use generic (read: lowest common denominator) SQL for everything to maximise your portability. But again, if you're working with anything more than minimal datasets you're going to need the performance boost that comes with db-specific optimizations - in my experience, query overhead dwarfs connection and processing time. If it doesn't, you should probably take a real close look at your app code.
Personally, I can't imagine why anyone would write in Java. But I've never used J2EE, which is the other thing that gets brought up, and maybe it's really cool. Java may have it's strong points, and I'm sure there's really good Java programmers out there. But if you want to narrow it down to bullet points, Java doesn't offer anything unique. Naturally, at some level there's a personal preference, and maybe the specific combination of features (and lack thereof) in Java appeals to some people. In my case, C++ and Python are my languages of choice (I had a lot of trouble getting into python cause of the silly indentation issue, and I still thing it's a horrible design decision, but now that I've been using it I'm able to overcome that). Java doesn't offer me anything I'm missing.
The Patriot act, at it's core, was designed to remove many of the limitations on law enforcement. If all you really care about is catching criminals, rather than about personal rights or privacy or any of that other stuff that gets in the way, then where you really want to live is in a police state. We've had those and most people didn't like them very much. The protections were there for a reason. The Patriot act was a bald manipulation of public emotion over 9/11 to pass a bill that had been shot down dozens of times over the last few years and decades. It's certainly true that there's nothing restricting those powers to use against terrorism (which was pointed out at the time the bill passed, and ignored). It's passing was dishonest at best.
Now, as for catching criminals - nothing in the patriot act was needed to "catch" this guy. In fact, a simple C&D from a lawyer directly to him probably would have been sufficent. One to his ISP certainly would have been. Unless there's (a lot) more to this case that we don't know about, like he was using the SG-1 fansite as a cover for child porn or sale of nuclear weapons or something, then the amount of force used against him was totally out of line. If there is more than we know, then we should know it - it should have been on the search warrant and it should be in the court case.
The people are not supposed to be accountable to the government! It is supposed to be the other way around. The police/FBI/CIA/etc are there for YOUR benefit, and they are not supposed to be able to act in secrecy and without public justification.
Gmail is actually amazingly easy to scrape because you don't have to scrape it - it runs kinda like a web service, with javascript sending message packets back and forth to the gmail servers (thats why it's so fast - the JS gets a message packet and updates the on-page view, rather than reloading the entire page). Check out POP Goes the GMail and GMail loader (heck, just google for GMail) for a description. Note that using these is technicaly against the GMail TOS. I'd pay (a reasonable fee) for legitimate, documented access to the GMail api, though.
It's a great deal - you get your gig of email, web hosting, POP access to the email, blog, forums, etc, etc. However, the Spymac servers are almost painfully slow and it's webmail interface has nothing on Googles. POP access was barely adequate, with the POP servers being unavailable probably 50% of the time.
Also, I trust Google to stay around as a viable company and keep providing me with my email service for a lot longer than Spymac (no offense to Spymac, of course).
It'd help if the CSS box model wasn't almost totally useless and broken, too. To say nothing of it's support on browsers (ie, minimal and varying between implementations), which makes it even more useless in reality than it is in theory.
The subscription also must provide source (it's my understanding that it doesn't, this would be a violation) at the same time you can download the binaries. A subscription is the same as selling on a CD as far as the GPL is concerned, it's all distribution. The subscription just has value-added, in that you can continue getting upgrades.
Theres two issues that I see:
a) Is termination of your subscription considered a restriction under the GPL? Theres no obvious answer and I'm pretty sure it would take a court case to decide.
b) If you have your subscription, and you get the binary, but choose not to download the source at that time, and then you lose your subscription (let it lapse, or whatever). You're still entitled to the source, as far as I can see. Did you waive your right to it forever by not downloading it when you had a chance? It's a little confusing.
All this assumes that Sveasoft distributes source side by side with both it's CD and subscription verions, if they are not then they're in violation just for that.
If you're an english speaker and you don't know the word "rendezvous" then you DESERVE to feel like in idiot. It's not a made up word, or even technical. It's in the dictionary. And not just the OED, it's in every 2 dollar cheapo Merriam-Webster dictionary that you got from a used bookstore in high school and you still keep around. What the hell is wrong with people?
Windows is not sequential, as the parent claims, but is less random than other operating systems. Page includes cool graphs of the "randomness".
This is almost totally wrong. The point of an RDBMS is to provide you with an implementation of relation data storage. There's nothing in that about performance or utility. SQL doesn't make any guarantees. It's like expecting the same assembly code to run equally well on a PowerPC and an x86 processor. I expect to issue SQL statements and that's it. To me, the measure of a DB is how well it does what it does - store and retrieve data, without fucking it all up.
Thats a great ideal, sure. On the other hand, the actual truth of the matter is that you can see (massive) performance increases by not coding to the lowest common denominator and sacrificing your db independence. Even in cases where you decide to code strictly to spec, some techniques work better with some databses than on others. When working with oracle, you'd normally use sub-queries where a SQL server or MySQL database would require temp tables. Etc.