Which big and permanent ramifications are there if he decides to just let go of the code? He was paid to write it already, why try to profit twice from the same work? That's often morally wrong, it certainly is morally wrong when you were paid with public money the in the first place.
There is more in the world then squeezing the last bit of money out of everything.
The point of the excersise is to complete the program before, test the program and debug the program before you compile and run it. These are very usefull skils. I'm constantly amazed by the inability of a lot of programmers to spot bugs in code without a debugger. Writing the program without instantly compiling and running it teaches you to 'run' the program in your head and that will allow you to spot errors before they even happen. That's a skil which will hugely improve the quality of the software you write.
It doesn't have to stop you from running the end result just to see it work though.
But regardsless of the style, he was right about that one. But he wasn't talking about the basic you probably know, but about the first totally line based versions of basic. No functions or subroutines, just "GOTO linenumber", for program flow. Indeed, no such thing as a function you can just call from another part of your code, just GOTO. That's totally unmaintainable and very error prone for anything larger 50 lines of code. But worse, it does promote spagetti code instead of promoting structure. If that way of thinking is the basis for your programming efforts your are indeed bound to fail when trying to write anything significant.
Amen
All the focus on this or that programming language, even in this topic, is totally misplaced. Any decent programmer will learn any decent language in a fair amount of time. I learned more different programming languages while working then during my education. I can list all of these on my resume, but thats not really important. Because you can produce crap in any language anyway and because I will just learn whatever new language you want me to use this time.
It's equally amazing how much programmers are out there without any interest in any sort of theory, architecture or even basic technology. I have quiet a few programming colleges who indeed wouldn't read slashdot and a few more who wouldn't have a clue who this Dijkstra guy is anyway. And they don't care either.
To a lot of people programming is just a kind of puzzle, typing stuff hoping it will work. When it doesn't work you just try random other things until it does appear to work. A lot of people seem to like the unexpected results and random bugs far more then the clean elegant solution.
Just check stuff like Hibernate, bad code, no design whatsoever and loads of bugs. But it has lots of fans anyways.
The point is not that elections should never be close. The issue is that the resulting government should be different when the elections are different. The same president can be chosen with 3 votes difference of with just 3 votes against him. That is a huge difference, the resulting power awarded to someone should reflect that difference.
If 269 votes make such a big difference there is a good reason to change the system. Such a small group of people should not have such a big influence on what happens in a country. That is, when you are serious about being a democracy.
Really, these are all just symptoms of a bigger problem.
That's absolutly true for content filters, but SPF (which is the issue here) is designed to be used during the transfer. That's how it should be used when used at all. SPF is not exactly free of potential issues with legitimate email which makes silent dropping an even bigger issue.
Either way, you should never silently discard an email unless you are 110% sure it's spam. In all other cases it should either be dropped in the spam folder or be properly rejected. Anything else makes email totally unreliable. (And frankly, you shouldn't entrust your email to a company that thinks it ok to silently drop something addressed to you, but that another issue.)
That might be true, but my mailserver might do all kinds of other things. But regardless it won't cause any bounce spam, because it will reject (reject, not bounce) any incoming mail for the gmail domain unless it is from my internal netwerk. There might be bounces, but there is no way for a spammer to generate these bounces unless he is inside my network. That pretty much solves the bounce-spam issue.
That would be true is google would actually first accept the email and then send a bounce message because it doesn't like it after all.
What they should do is reject the email immediately, in which case they don't have to send a bouce email but the mail is properly logged as being rejected. Ofcourse this does mean google will have to do all of their checks before accepting the message which is a bit harder to do but it is the only correct solution for the bounce problem.
Actually, Foo is simultaneously right and wrong regarding the nature of Free Software.
The reason is that it's not "communist-ic" but it is strongly "libertarian" in philosophy.
That is because licenses such as the GPL only bind developers who voluntarily use Free Software as a starting point for their own efforts, and does not inhibit others who choose not to participate.
I don't know which article you just read, but even if you didn't read the article you should know by now that Stallman is all about "proprietary should be stop". If i where up to him to make the rules any non foss license would be made illegal instantly.
That's not to say he is totally wrong all of the time. But he does tend to be a bit extremist in his views. He is also attacking the wrong person here. To change the way the system works you should change the law. In a democracy that should be easy once the majority agree's it should be changed...
The system will change anywa eventually. The whole system is based on a common agreement on the existence of (several forms of) 'Intelectual Property'. Something which isn't as universal as normal physical property, it exists only be cause we say so. Someday it might just disapear in a puff of logic. Probably once China becomes big enough to really make a difference and simply decides not to care about these stupid western rules.
What drivel. Being able to have detected trespassers removed by law enforcement, and to defend your land allows you to deter the bad folks from acting. The land is yours, not theirs, so it makes no sense to allow them on it in the first place. For example, under a "right to roam", all a thief need do is come onto isolated land and wait for the opportunity to steal fuel or equipment (tractors and harvesters are very expensive). Being near the equipment quite defines the 'use' test. And this argument does not apply when your not near stuff to steal.
Farmers may own thousands of acres, and have many acres un-farmed but in use for other purposes like wildlife conservation or left fallow between farming cycles. The "active use" test is absurd. Oh, come on. When did useing common sense become absurd?
Why should property rights and personal security on ones own ground be thrown away because someone else might like to wander about what isn't theirs? Landownership has it's use in society, but it doesn't need to be absolute and unlimited. In fact, it isn't, there are loads of limits to what you can and cannot do even on your own land.
That still allows access, and potential liability if the trespasser, er, "roamer" gets hurt climbing a fence or falls into a ditch. Why should you be liable for any of that? And even if your are, thats a different problem needing a different solution.
BTW, why should I give anyone who wants it the opportunity to build a still or meth lab on my unused property? They have plenty of room for that on public lands!:) Nice one. The criminals will stay away because it is illegal. Actually, I guess the are far more likely to stay away when you regulaly get visitors.
The right to "roam" may work nicely in the Shire among friendly Hobbit-like people, but the US and much of the world isn't the fucking Shire. You sure are going a long way convincing me most US citizens are total assholes...
My land is bought, paid for, not a group asset, and anyone I don't invite there is unwelcome. Those wanting land are welcome to amount to something and buy it as I did. Otherwise, they are cordially invited to stay out of what _I_ own. The idea that property rights make for un-freedom is literally Communist nonsense and not true in nations that have land reform and a free market. Anyone wanting land in the US is free to buy it at market prices, and there is AMPLE cheap land to be had. Geez, don't worry, nobody is trying to steal your land from you. A right to roam does not in any way limit what you can do with your own land.
The argument for "roaming" really boils down to people wanting things from other people they haven't paid for. Isn't that how the land got to belong to your ancestors in the first place? Anyway, see above, your not losing anything, nobody is out to get anything from you.
Because thiefs and other criminals will obviously never get onto your land when it is illegal. It's only after you allow them onto your land they will steal stuff and kill you...
And nevermind the fact that this right to roam is generally about the part of your land where you don't live (hard to kill you there) and which you don't actively use (hard to steal anything there).
Definately, but there will finally b software that doesn't fall to pieces at the first speedbump.
That, and you will need your briliant programmers to set up the procedures and the tooling etc, because that's the hard part. But hey, thats when you cam actually start talking about 'Software engineering'.
Nokia seems to agree:
Nokia is committed to continue Trolltechs current open source engagements, including
honoring the KDE Free Qt agreement, and we will seek to strengthen our support of KDE
in the future. As a first step Nokia will apply to become a Patron of KDE*. http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/28/136204
Well, if you really want to be anal (Yes, pun intended) about copyright here you should never have send a HD full of copyrighted material to a repairman. That's distribution, which often is the illegal part in a copyright violation, while the repairman is just making a copy for private use which is legal in most cases. Of course all of this is totally irrelevant, IANAL, it will be different depending on the country your in, the *IAA will sue you anyway if you are unlucky enough to live in the USA and when it comes to child-porn copyright really is the least of your worries.
In hindsight I should have talked to him after the class and had him correct his mistake the next week, but hey I was a cocky 18 year old, and he was talking BS. He was a nice guy and was genuinely trying to be helpful. He just wasn't very good. No, you where right to do that, or your fellow students would have been badly misinformed. These trainers are genarally paid well enough, they should cope with that (or perhaps just know what they are talking about). Frankly, if I hired someone to do a training and he messes things up like that I would not have paid him.
By the way, the 'no data url' version of the test (http://hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002-no-data/) seems to work for Opera, it may work for the firefox beta.
Strangely enough my Opera 9.24 on windows @ work failed the test as well with roughly the same error. Even stranger, Opera 9.24 on linux seems to pass the test perfectly.
The problem might be caused by changes to the URL http://www.webstandards.org/404/ which is referenced in the test and seems to not return an actual 404 error code. (That's the one difference between the official test and your mirror.)
So yeah, someone broke, or at least changed the test. Probably accidental.
I'd guess most kiddy porn is still traded by original snail mail, it's a wonderfully usefull thing you know, just stick a DVD in an envelope close it and no one is allowed to look inside it along the way. And you know what, that stuff has for more of an administraton than any IRC network.
I don't. Simply because TI is pushing it.
And Qualcomm, and NVidia, and Broadcom. There is no single company in that aliance whith a good track record when it comes to being really open. I guess Google is the best one on the list, and even they are mostly into 'opensource' to because they make a lot off money based thanks to the open-source software they use. It's not like they are giving that much back.
Yeah, it may be a succes comercially, but it's not going to do much for open-source. Take a look at the 'source' released by google, it only the just they really had to release because of the license. But all the interesting bits are left out. If you think you can use this to make it run on your own phone, think again. It's just a diffent lock in, getting locked in to google may be an improvement for people in the USA who are used to being locked in by there provider, but it is far from 'open'.
But hey, i'd be happy to be proven wrong on this, but until someone manages to compile the full android stack and run it on a real non-android phone it's vaporware to me. There is OpenMoko and Qtopia which are both actually open and in a further stage of development. And there is Maemo and a whole bunch of other open embeded platforms, why would google start it's own if it isn't because they want control and not openness?
I think we have to realize that a surveillance society is an inevitable consequence of surveillance capability. If anything, history should show us that when groups of people are granted powers over other groups, they tend to abuse them (see the "Stanford Prison Experiment" for psychological evidence). Thus... it is necesary to replace the people in power regularly, to spead power across more persons and across several groups of people, to grant the population of a country a certain amount of control over what people with power can and cannot, do and to enforce proper sactioning of those who abuse there powers. It's a nice system, they call it democracy.
The US seems a good candidate to try this, just drop the whole president thing, create a system with more than two parties of which none can have a full majority and fix the access to information e.g. no 'sealed orders' and
proper independant journalism. Who knows, it might work.
Unfortunately, I think the damage to Firefox's reputation is already done. There are many people who have had negative experiences with Firefox who keep on harping about the "memory leaks" and I don't see how Mozilla devs can change this public perception. Let's see if I can burn some karma here...
It's not that hard to fix, they should simply drop the current code and use WebKit instead. And then convince the world they really did change something to the engine this time, instead of just changing the name, or the UI, or the pug-in system. But they indeed lost a lot of my trust when they wrapper a new UI around an existing engine, called it firefox instead of mozilla and claimed it became really fast. Especially because they did it not all that long after MS dis the same thing with Windows XP.
Really, Firefox is progress only if your previous browser was IE, of course this goes for a lot a people, hence it's succes. But if you are used to Opera, Konqueror or Safari it's a step back on most aspects, especially speed and standards compliance. I will try Firefox 3 when it's done, but it has quite a but of catching up to do and I doubt they will make it. Besides that, it is a pointless exercise in extending the life of an old codebase, if the same amount of energy and money invested in Gecko would have been spend on writing a totally new engine they would have had a far better browser by now. Netscape did not open-source the thing because it was so very good, but because it had became a real PITA.
Slashdot Mirror
Which big and permanent ramifications are there if he decides to just let go of the code? He was paid to write it already, why try to profit twice from the same work? That's often morally wrong, it certainly is morally wrong when you were paid with public money the in the first place.
There is more in the world then squeezing the last bit of money out of everything.
The point of the excersise is to complete the program before, test the program and debug the program before you compile and run it. These are very usefull skils. I'm constantly amazed by the inability of a lot of programmers to spot bugs in code without a debugger. Writing the program without instantly compiling and running it teaches you to 'run' the program in your head and that will allow you to spot errors before they even happen. That's a skil which will hugely improve the quality of the software you write.
It doesn't have to stop you from running the end result just to see it work though.
*grin* Arrogance is measured in nano Dijkstras
But regardsless of the style, he was right about that one. But he wasn't talking about the basic you probably know, but about the first totally line based versions of basic. No functions or subroutines, just "GOTO linenumber", for program flow. Indeed, no such thing as a function you can just call from another part of your code, just GOTO. That's totally unmaintainable and very error prone for anything larger 50 lines of code. But worse, it does promote spagetti code instead of promoting structure. If that way of thinking is the basis for your programming efforts your are indeed bound to fail when trying to write anything significant.
It may not be entirly irrepairable though...
Amen
All the focus on this or that programming language, even in this topic, is totally misplaced. Any decent programmer will learn any decent language in a fair amount of time. I learned more different programming languages while working then during my education. I can list all of these on my resume, but thats not really important. Because you can produce crap in any language anyway and because I will just learn whatever new language you want me to use this time.
It's equally amazing how much programmers are out there without any interest in any sort of theory, architecture or even basic technology. I have quiet a few programming colleges who indeed wouldn't read slashdot and a few more who wouldn't have a clue who this Dijkstra guy is anyway. And they don't care either.
To a lot of people programming is just a kind of puzzle, typing stuff hoping it will work. When it doesn't work you just try random other things until it does appear to work. A lot of people seem to like the unexpected results and random bugs far more then the clean elegant solution.
Just check stuff like Hibernate, bad code, no design whatsoever and loads of bugs. But it has lots of fans anyways.
The point is not that elections should never be close. The issue is that the resulting government should be different when the elections are different. The same president can be chosen with 3 votes difference of with just 3 votes against him. That is a huge difference, the resulting power awarded to someone should reflect that difference.
If 269 votes make such a big difference there is a good reason to change the system. Such a small group of people should not have such a big influence on what happens in a country. That is, when you are serious about being a democracy. Really, these are all just symptoms of a bigger problem.
That's absolutly true for content filters, but SPF (which is the issue here) is designed to be used during the transfer. That's how it should be used when used at all. SPF is not exactly free of potential issues with legitimate email which makes silent dropping an even bigger issue.
Either way, you should never silently discard an email unless you are 110% sure it's spam. In all other cases it should either be dropped in the spam folder or be properly rejected. Anything else makes email totally unreliable. (And frankly, you shouldn't entrust your email to a company that thinks it ok to silently drop something addressed to you, but that another issue.)
That might be true, but my mailserver might do all kinds of other things. But regardless it won't cause any bounce spam, because it will reject (reject, not bounce) any incoming mail for the gmail domain unless it is from my internal netwerk. There might be bounces, but there is no way for a spammer to generate these bounces unless he is inside my network. That pretty much solves the bounce-spam issue.
That would be true is google would actually first accept the email and then send a bounce message because it doesn't like it after all.
What they should do is reject the email immediately, in which case they don't have to send a bouce email but the mail is properly logged as being rejected. Ofcourse this does mean google will have to do all of their checks before accepting the message which is a bit harder to do but it is the only correct solution for the bounce problem.
Actually, Foo is simultaneously right and wrong regarding the nature of Free Software.
The reason is that it's not "communist-ic" but it is strongly "libertarian" in philosophy.
That is because licenses such as the GPL only bind developers who voluntarily use Free Software as a starting point for their own efforts, and does not inhibit others who choose not to participate.
I don't know which article you just read, but even if you didn't read the article you should know by now that Stallman is all about "proprietary should be stop". If i where up to him to make the rules any non foss license would be made illegal instantly. That's not to say he is totally wrong all of the time. But he does tend to be a bit extremist in his views. He is also attacking the wrong person here. To change the way the system works you should change the law. In a democracy that should be easy once the majority agree's it should be changed... The system will change anywa eventually. The whole system is based on a common agreement on the existence of (several forms of) 'Intelectual Property'. Something which isn't as universal as normal physical property, it exists only be cause we say so. Someday it might just disapear in a puff of logic. Probably once China becomes big enough to really make a difference and simply decides not to care about these stupid western rules.
The 900 model isn't really sold out it's not arrived at the distributors yet so it's not currently available.
The 900Mhz version is available from resellers in the EU.
Because thiefs and other criminals will obviously never get onto your land when it is illegal. It's only after you allow them onto your land they will steal stuff and kill you...
And nevermind the fact that this right to roam is generally about the part of your land where you don't live (hard to kill you there) and which you don't actively use (hard to steal anything there).
Definately, but there will finally b software that doesn't fall to pieces at the first speedbump.
That, and you will need your briliant programmers to set up the procedures and the tooling etc, because that's the hard part. But hey, thats when you cam actually start talking about 'Software engineering'.
Ok, so copy paste isn't at all that easy... This is the url that should have been in there: http://trolltech.com/28012008/28012008-opensourceletter
Well, if you really want to be anal (Yes, pun intended) about copyright here you should never have send a HD full of copyrighted material to a repairman. That's distribution, which often is the illegal part in a copyright violation, while the repairman is just making a copy for private use which is legal in most cases. Of course all of this is totally irrelevant, IANAL, it will be different depending on the country your in, the *IAA will sue you anyway if you are unlucky enough to live in the USA and when it comes to child-porn copyright really is the least of your worries.
By the way, the 'no data url' version of the test (http://hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002-no-data/) seems to work for Opera, it may work for the firefox beta.
Strangely enough my Opera 9.24 on windows @ work failed the test as well with roughly the same error. Even stranger, Opera 9.24 on linux seems to pass the test perfectly.
The problem might be caused by changes to the URL http://www.webstandards.org/404/ which is referenced in the test and seems to not return an actual 404 error code. (That's the one difference between the official test and your mirror.)
So yeah, someone broke, or at least changed the test. Probably accidental.
I'd guess most kiddy porn is still traded by original snail mail, it's a wonderfully usefull thing you know, just stick a DVD in an envelope close it and no one is allowed to look inside it along the way. And you know what, that stuff has for more of an administraton than any IRC network.
Get real.
I don't. Simply because TI is pushing it.
And Qualcomm, and NVidia, and Broadcom. There is no single company in that aliance whith a good track record when it comes to being really open. I guess Google is the best one on the list, and even they are mostly into 'opensource' to because they make a lot off money based thanks to the open-source software they use. It's not like they are giving that much back.
Yeah, it may be a succes comercially, but it's not going to do much for open-source. Take a look at the 'source' released by google, it only the just they really had to release because of the license. But all the interesting bits are left out. If you think you can use this to make it run on your own phone, think again. It's just a diffent lock in, getting locked in to google may be an improvement for people in the USA who are used to being locked in by there provider, but it is far from 'open'.
But hey, i'd be happy to be proven wrong on this, but until someone manages to compile the full android stack and run it on a real non-android phone it's vaporware to me. There is OpenMoko and Qtopia which are both actually open and in a further stage of development. And there is Maemo and a whole bunch of other open embeded platforms, why would google start it's own if it isn't because they want control and not openness?
The US seems a good candidate to try this, just drop the whole president thing, create a system with more than two parties of which none can have a full majority and fix the access to information e.g. no 'sealed orders' and proper independant journalism. Who knows, it might work.
It's not that hard to fix, they should simply drop the current code and use WebKit instead. And then convince the world they really did change something to the engine this time, instead of just changing the name, or the UI, or the pug-in system. But they indeed lost a lot of my trust when they wrapper a new UI around an existing engine, called it firefox instead of mozilla and claimed it became really fast. Especially because they did it not all that long after MS dis the same thing with Windows XP.
Really, Firefox is progress only if your previous browser was IE, of course this goes for a lot a people, hence it's succes. But if you are used to Opera, Konqueror or Safari it's a step back on most aspects, especially speed and standards compliance. I will try Firefox 3 when it's done, but it has quite a but of catching up to do and I doubt they will make it. Besides that, it is a pointless exercise in extending the life of an old codebase, if the same amount of energy and money invested in Gecko would have been spend on writing a totally new engine they would have had a far better browser by now. Netscape did not open-source the thing because it was so very good, but because it had became a real PITA.