They go only for P2P users, right? So if I use Google to give me a list of FTP sites in which directories there are files with MP3 in the name, and then I donwload those files (without knowing what's inside the file), then I am supposingly OK and did not violate any Canadian laws, right?
Thanks God, today you can download tons of various (good and bad) music files using just Google. I don't even know, why people use P2P? Using a simple script you can have easily few gigabytes of music just in few days.
Unfortunately, "maintainability" is a bit of a difficult feature to show off in a programming contest. Although it's a pretty important feature in the Real World(tm).
Unfortunately, "maintainability" is a bit of a difficult feature to show off in the Real World(tm) too where usually managers prefer to dictate their teams to write on Perl, C++ and Java.
By the way, the code written on OCAML or OHaskell is even more readable. Not to mention that both language are specially designed (as many other FPL) to make possible formal math verification and validation that the program does the right thing and it does it right. The feature that barely can be beaten from maintainability prospective.
So it is then not possible to copyright ANY digital work.
Finally you are getting smarter. But just for case if don't understand it yet: all copyrights are bad. The world without copyrights would be much better. Demonstration: compare the quality of copyrighted Windows to copylefted Linux.
America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
And this is exactly what's happened to America after 2001/09/11.
By the way, America was never better than many other countries, like England or Australia. So, guess what?..
Well, on a serious note, the leaked sources of NT and W2K can be used by win-emulator developers to improve their emulators. No need even to copy the code (it may or may not work directly inside that emulator anyway), but when it comes to debugging the developer may look at the original code in order to UNDERSTAND why it works differently.
Besides, there are several obfuscating methods designed to hide the logic of the original code. They can be used to actually copy the code to the emulator (if the copied piece will work there). After that it would be hard to prove anything even in the open source.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but anyway, personally I would not feel guilty having W2K source code and using it to improve WINE. Because I think that the algorithms is a part of the math, which existed always even before humans came here. A programmer just discovers the piece of math and express it using one or another language. The gravity doesn't belong to Newton, the math formula that describes the gravity neither. Only the fact of discovery of gravity math description belongs to Newton, just for references. Only the fact that programmer wrote the code belongs to the programmer (or the employer), not the code itself. Just to refer in the report to the boss why one was so busy all the day. Getting the source code from Microsoft is not stealing - it's learning. There is nothing wrong in learning.
For those who don't know
on
SCOoby Snacks
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· Score: 4, Insightful
SCO UNIX(R) is a Proven, Stable and Reliable Platform - false, back few years many Oracle admins prefered unsupported (by Oracle then) way of running Oracle on Linux than on SCO due to system crashes and badly implemented multitasking. In my personal experience it is proven as unstable and unreliable.
SCO UNIX(R) is backed by a single, experienced vendor - false, we all know that the single vendor means the lack of competition means ignoring the user demands means low quality.
SCO UNIX(R) has a Committed, Well-Defined Roadmap - false, as it is driven by the marketing rather than by the user demands. Linux Roadmap (the list of changes in upcoming 2.7) gives me much more useful prospective that I can rely. SCO roadmap is useless marketing.
SCO UNIX(R) is Secure - false, no proprietary system is more secure than an open source one. The recent case with 6 months of Microsoft hiding the security bug is proving it. The open source community doesn't hide it and fix it right the way. Although, I agree that SCO Unix is more obscure.
SCO UNIX(R) is Legally Unencumbered - false, until all claims are proven in the court. Besides, SCO cannot refer to its own case until it's proven.
If they really care about user's productvity than they should think more about the data-model rather then GUI features.
I've got more productivity on a Linux box with well data-designed database applications using ncurses than with poor data-designed GUI-based apps.
I've been using Palm for 3 or more years and I've stopped it as found its data model too primitive for managing my personal information.
Now I have a database that keep my personal data much better as it is designed to manage categories through ontologies and like that. I sync it with my laptop from my home server, which I also access with ncurses applications through ssh, with GUI in GNOME, and just through Python-based command-line interractive interface.
I found that GUI doesn't realy bring a significant value per se, if you don't need charts. I am thinking to port my application eventually to a Linux PDA if I would have one, but having it on a laptop is ok for now.
I would use PDA again, if it would access to the information I have in my personal knowledge manager. And I am sure - GUI is really unnecessary, ncurses is more than enough.
If you don't know what ncurses is: it is a library making GUI-like UI on the screen from text-only (but still color) elements (inlcuding so-called ANSI pseudo-graphics). It can interface with mouse devises if presented. It has a very high level language called "dialog" for scripting new dialogs with ncurses from shell-like scripts. Also it can be used with Python and other scripting languages. It's very compact in terms of bandwidth - when it works through ssh it's fast.
I guess birds are not flying in the sky anymore and falling down to the ground.
Now they have renamed FireBird to FireFox (I hope they won't rename it again to FireMouse or FireWorm).
What's next? Easy - they are gonna rename ThunderBird to ThunderFox soon too. Well, after its stability will be fixed as well.
By the way, I wonder why Mozilla Calendar is neither a fox or a bird? Its even not a Caledarzilla, like Chatzilla. Personally, I loved all thoze Zillas, and at some point I even expected they would break the suite to Browzilla and Mailzilla, but they have decided to fly with birds. Not for long though.
Disclaimer: IANAA too. I was thinking to land in America, but after 9/11 I've left that weird country. It's not that other governments do not create any deceptions or delusions - they just do it not so loud. It also good to know that my taxes do not kill so many people.
Thanks to my American science education, I had never heard of this feat. I asked around (friends and coworkers) and nobody else I've talked to has heard of them either.
Thanks to my Soviet science education I've just recently learnd about American people stepping on Moon 3 decades ago. Perhaps.
Now the question is: what is propaganda and what are facts?
Even now I belive that 3 decades ago it was much easier and safier to deploy the rover through the Earth radiation belts than humans. And speaking about safity, it was never a strong point in American space industry.
Well, I hope we'll see about humans crossing those deadly belts in upcoming 3 decades. Or will we?
While in many cases, like various config files, XML looks very promising, we should not ignore the fact that "plain" XML is not a solution. "Plain" XML is one that can be definined through DTD, but any more comprehensive schema cannot define it.
I always use at least XML-Schema. But also, I whenever I see that semantic of files has to be defined as well - I go with RDF.
The main reason is the same as with XML instead of old-style config files: you don't want data logic to be hardcoded into your application unless it's in application requirements.
One of the best examples is GUI configuration in Mozilla. The framework "knows" how to display GUI elements, while RDF "knows" what to display. If you would try to do it with XML without RDF, very soon your framework would "know" too much of WHAT to display - but that is was not in the framework requirements, therfore it must "outsourced" to RDF.
Goverments are controlled by their national constitutions, which are nation-wide and reflect very badly most of modern internation affairs. So moving ICANN functions to goverments is wrong.
Instead, they should move government functions to ICANN. Seriously. Internet is international and thus it has to be controlled by international organization.
UN is not good for it - it's created 50 years ago to react on conflicts, not for operational day-to-day management. Internet requires operation control and thus it has to be controlled by the organization with operaton management capabilities.
Ironically or not, but I am using Gnome for about 5 years, and all that time I am using bash in CLI as well as (X)Emacs dired mode for all file relate operations I need. I need Gnome only for it's pannels with menus, launchers and applets. What Nautilus? Why is it important? I don't know... I don't use Nautilus and I don't know why should I use it.
At the beginning Microsoft did not generate revenue. No pure software company did. It was IBM, a hardware vendor, who helped Microsoft to come up. So they did for Oracle (at eraly days of v5). So, yes, hardware vendors are now getting online music to work. But that only until people stop afraiding to download music. After that: a big part of RIAA revenue will go online (with RIAA participation or without). Then Online music will be self-efficient enough to live without hardware vendors.
Check Gentoo forums: last summer there was a project letting Gentoo Portage to run on Cygwin. And it worked! Too bad there is no people with resources (time for support and bandwidth for downloads) behind to continue it.
nuclear propolsion, anyone?
on
NASA's Own X Prize?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I cannot belive that all proposals are still based on ignition-based burning fuels. Anyone with nuclear reaction based prolosion? On a long-run I think that propolsion engines based nuclear reaction would be much cheaper.
As safity goes, two or three reactors crashed to the ocean within a decade should not make any big difference with what we already have there. And I think nuclear reactor based engines should be much safer as there is no risk of self-ignition based explosion like we have on a regular basis with Shuttle boosters and similar ones. You cannot stop ignition in modern engine once it's started. If anything goes wrong the reactor can be stopped immidiately (as well as the water or waterver liquid vaporation process) and the whole thing can land safily on a parashute.
Did I say that nuclear engines will be multiple times usable? Ok, Now I've said that. And that's a big plus to make the whole orbital business cheaper.
USPTO is a goverment organization and their clerks do not care if USPTO will ern or lose money.
What would really help if the clerk, who signed up the patent aht later found invalid, would lose the job and the right to have any goverment job anymore. Then and only then, when clerks will pay their life career, they will start to think about consequences of their decisions. Right not they do not care and sign everything.
In few words: clerks must be responsible personally for their mistakes.
P.S. Very often, in other areas too, I think about this in a more general sense: personal responsibility of goverment clerks by risking the whole governmental career is the only way to motivate goverment clerks to make right decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Should I rename one of our servers to c12582912?
Thanks God, today you can download tons of various (good and bad) music files using just Google. I don't even know, why people use P2P? Using a simple script you can have easily few gigabytes of music just in few days.
But is it safe?
Is it the reason it took forever to develop it? 3X was promised last summer, but it's still in its "early stage". E17 is being developed faster.
Unfortunately, "maintainability" is a bit of a difficult feature to show off in the Real World(tm) too where usually managers prefer to dictate their teams to write on Perl, C++ and Java.
By the way, the code written on OCAML or OHaskell is even more readable. Not to mention that both language are specially designed (as many other FPL) to make possible formal math verification and validation that the program does the right thing and it does it right. The feature that barely can be beaten from maintainability prospective.
8-bit? It's supposed to be 64-bit as I can tell reading the name c64. Otherwise, why is it c64?
GPL exists as a response to copyrights, but it depends on copylefts, which is quite opposite to copyrights.
Actually I am doing it for living last 18 years. And I don't mind if all my code will be open-sourced. But my employers do.
Finally you are getting smarter. But just for case if don't understand it yet: all copyrights are bad. The world without copyrights would be much better. Demonstration: compare the quality of copyrighted Windows to copylefted Linux.
America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
And this is exactly what's happened to America after 2001/09/11.
By the way, America was never better than many other countries, like England or Australia. So, guess what?..
Besides, there are several obfuscating methods designed to hide the logic of the original code. They can be used to actually copy the code to the emulator (if the copied piece will work there). After that it would be hard to prove anything even in the open source.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but anyway, personally I would not feel guilty having W2K source code and using it to improve WINE. Because I think that the algorithms is a part of the math, which existed always even before humans came here. A programmer just discovers the piece of math and express it using one or another language. The gravity doesn't belong to Newton, the math formula that describes the gravity neither. Only the fact of discovery of gravity math description belongs to Newton, just for references. Only the fact that programmer wrote the code belongs to the programmer (or the employer), not the code itself. Just to refer in the report to the boss why one was so busy all the day. Getting the source code from Microsoft is not stealing - it's learning. There is nothing wrong in learning.
If they really care about user's productvity than they should think more about the data-model rather then GUI features.
I've got more productivity on a Linux box with well data-designed database applications using ncurses than with poor data-designed GUI-based apps.
I've been using Palm for 3 or more years and I've stopped it as found its data model too primitive for managing my personal information.
Now I have a database that keep my personal data much better as it is designed to manage categories through ontologies and like that. I sync it with my laptop from my home server, which I also access with ncurses applications through ssh, with GUI in GNOME, and just through Python-based command-line interractive interface.
I found that GUI doesn't realy bring a significant value per se, if you don't need charts. I am thinking to port my application eventually to a Linux PDA if I would have one, but having it on a laptop is ok for now.
I would use PDA again, if it would access to the information I have in my personal knowledge manager. And I am sure - GUI is really unnecessary, ncurses is more than enough.
If you don't know what ncurses is: it is a library making GUI-like UI on the screen from text-only (but still color) elements (inlcuding so-called ANSI pseudo-graphics). It can interface with mouse devises if presented. It has a very high level language called "dialog" for scripting new dialogs with ncurses from shell-like scripts. Also it can be used with Python and other scripting languages. It's very compact in terms of bandwidth - when it works through ssh it's fast.
Where is the command prompt?
Now they have renamed FireBird to FireFox (I hope they won't rename it again to FireMouse or FireWorm).
What's next? Easy - they are gonna rename ThunderBird to ThunderFox soon too. Well, after its stability will be fixed as well.
By the way, I wonder why Mozilla Calendar is neither a fox or a bird? Its even not a Caledarzilla, like Chatzilla. Personally, I loved all thoze Zillas, and at some point I even expected they would break the suite to Browzilla and Mailzilla, but they have decided to fly with birds. Not for long though.
Disclaimer: IANAA too. I was thinking to land in America, but after 9/11 I've left that weird country. It's not that other governments do not create any deceptions or delusions - they just do it not so loud. It also good to know that my taxes do not kill so many people.
another page on the bad astronomy links to the trueth about Moon. By the way, "pravda" on russian means "trueth".
Are you serious about men landed to Moon? I thought it was propaganda too...
Thanks to my Soviet science education I've just recently learnd about American people stepping on Moon 3 decades ago. Perhaps.
Now the question is: what is propaganda and what are facts?
Even now I belive that 3 decades ago it was much easier and safier to deploy the rover through the Earth radiation belts than humans. And speaking about safity, it was never a strong point in American space industry.
Well, I hope we'll see about humans crossing those deadly belts in upcoming 3 decades. Or will we?
I always use at least XML-Schema. But also, I whenever I see that semantic of files has to be defined as well - I go with RDF.
The main reason is the same as with XML instead of old-style config files: you don't want data logic to be hardcoded into your application unless it's in application requirements.
One of the best examples is GUI configuration in Mozilla. The framework "knows" how to display GUI elements, while RDF "knows" what to display. If you would try to do it with XML without RDF, very soon your framework would "know" too much of WHAT to display - but that is was not in the framework requirements, therfore it must "outsourced" to RDF.
Instead, they should move government functions to ICANN. Seriously. Internet is international and thus it has to be controlled by international organization.
UN is not good for it - it's created 50 years ago to react on conflicts, not for operational day-to-day management. Internet requires operation control and thus it has to be controlled by the organization with operaton management capabilities.
Ironically or not, but I am using Gnome for about 5 years, and all that time I am using bash in CLI as well as (X)Emacs dired mode for all file relate operations I need. I need Gnome only for it's pannels with menus, launchers and applets. What Nautilus? Why is it important? I don't know ... I don't use Nautilus and I don't know why should I use it.
At the beginning Microsoft did not generate revenue. No pure software company did. It was IBM, a hardware vendor, who helped Microsoft to come up. So they did for Oracle (at eraly days of v5). So, yes, hardware vendors are now getting online music to work. But that only until people stop afraiding to download music. After that: a big part of RIAA revenue will go online (with RIAA participation or without). Then Online music will be self-efficient enough to live without hardware vendors.
Check Gentoo forums: last summer there was a project letting Gentoo Portage to run on Cygwin. And it worked! Too bad there is no people with resources (time for support and bandwidth for downloads) behind to continue it.
As safity goes, two or three reactors crashed to the ocean within a decade should not make any big difference with what we already have there. And I think nuclear reactor based engines should be much safer as there is no risk of self-ignition based explosion like we have on a regular basis with Shuttle boosters and similar ones. You cannot stop ignition in modern engine once it's started. If anything goes wrong the reactor can be stopped immidiately (as well as the water or waterver liquid vaporation process) and the whole thing can land safily on a parashute.
Did I say that nuclear engines will be multiple times usable? Ok, Now I've said that. And that's a big plus to make the whole orbital business cheaper.
What would really help if the clerk, who signed up the patent aht later found invalid, would lose the job and the right to have any goverment job anymore. Then and only then, when clerks will pay their life career, they will start to think about consequences of their decisions. Right not they do not care and sign everything.
In few words: clerks must be responsible personally for their mistakes.
P.S. Very often, in other areas too, I think about this in a more general sense: personal responsibility of goverment clerks by risking the whole governmental career is the only way to motivate goverment clerks to make right decisions.
They'll do it through SCO.