Let's not confuse things here. Apple did not try to get around the GPL. To my understanding, they have released perfectly working code, without missing pieces, and with all the required scripts and other things. As in, you can compile a working program from their code.
The GPL doesn't require anything else, and they aren't doing anything like intentionally obfuscating the code. Of course, finding your way around a large body of code is a daunting task. But making your code easy to understand is not something the GPL requires. Hell, try reading the sources to any large open-source program. You'll be lucky if you find one useful comment every 500 lines of code, much less actual documentation.
The main issue here is cooperation with KDE developers. It is true, they are not cooperating a whole lot. But this has nothing to do with the GPL. Apple probably doesn't care much about KDE (given that KDE is a direct competitor). I don't see the crime in refusing to cooperate with them. The GPL's purpose is to make the source of a program available for inspection and modification, not to make it easy to merge code into other projects.
Yeah, like registering even 1,000 different domains (for, say, $10/year) is a significant expense for a public company. They would spend more than that on toilet paper and urinal cookies.
You must not have done one. In fact, an internship in the field you want to work in is a great help even if you want to start your own business. You'll get some valuable experience and even more valuable contacts, not to mention a much better idea of what the business is really like.
For instance, the guy who created that Asterisk PBX system (and built a moderately successful startup around it) started out as an intern at a telecom company. I really doubt he would have the requisite knowledge if he started out by himself. Here's an article about it: click.
I don't carry a balance on my credit card, I pay the balance when it's due. What I am getting at is that it provides a cushion against surprises. Irresponsible spending will get you in trouble either way, but there are often big variations in spending month-to-month. Credit is quite useful in that case.
Also, you must be lucky, because very few debit cards have warranty coverage or any credit card benefits. I have two debit cards, and neither one offers anything except fraud protection. I do stand corrected; they apparently changed the rules about liability a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, I have heard plenty of debit card horror stories (a scammer draining the bank account in question and incurring lots of NSF charges, etc.). Besides, it's not like the zero liability thing can help you if, say, your mortgage check bounces because a scammer drained your account.
Well, that would be a problem quite often. Let's say, it's the end of the month, you don't have much money left in your checking account, and your car breaks down. You have to pay $800 to get it fixed. If you have a credit card, you put it on it, pay it off in a month or two, and pay little or no interest (if it falls within the grace period). If you have a debit card, you have to wait until your next paycheck. Of course, you could keep tons of money in your checking account to cover various eventualities, but you would be better off putting it in an interest-bearing account.
Not to mention, it's next to impossible to get a bank to reverse a debit card transaction -- if someone gets your card number or if a merchant scams you, you are pretty much SOL.
Trust me: if someone catches you going somewhere you are not supposed to, there will be repercussions. At the very least, this is trespassing. However, this is also known as breaking and entering and burglary.
Just give up already. For the last 15 years or so, the mainstream definition of "hacker" has been equivalent to "cracker". Find a different word, like "programmer" or something.
No, it would be case sensitivity. If I call a variable MyVar, you shouldn't be able to refer to it as MYVAR, because then the convention wouldn't be worth much.
Here's an analogy from the physical world. You walk into an admissions office, see an open door, and find your file in an unlocked file cabinet. Illegal? Maybe, maybe not. Unethical? Definitely. They didn't break any locks, but they went where they weren't supposed to.
Besides, let's not forget who we are talking about. The Harvard and Stanford business schools are some of the most selective institutions in the country. If they can reject you for having an essay slightly more boring than the next guy or a slightly unenthusiastic letter of reference, or some random factor, this definitely appears to be justified.
Apparently, you haven't heard of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to know the exact position AND velocity of an electron, thus making the motion of one unpredictable. There are quite a few sources like this -- radioactive decay, various noise sources. In fact, you could probably have a decent random number generator just by sampling the noise on an unused input on a soundcard (the crappier the soundcard, the better).
I didn't say you should have all three in the program. I said that consistent capitalization (enforced by the compiler) can help quite a bit when reading code.
Having a case-insensitive language also doesn't take away your ability to have those cues either.
Yeah, except other programmers who work on the program will not respect your convention. Someone will probably have his caps lock stuck on, someone will have a broken shift key. Then you have to read code and understand that mybigNum and MYBIGNUM are the same exact thing even though they look nothing like each other.
because that's needlessly confusing
It's not that confusing and there are many circumstances where this is justified. Are you really saying that MYBIGNUM and myBigNum can be confused with one another? It would be more confusing if they referred to the same variable.
So, I suppose, you consider MYBIGNUM, MyBigNum, and myBigNum to be the same variable? According to many coding conventions, the first would be a constant, the second a function, and the third a variable. Case sensitivity is definitely useful.
Yeah, if you can build a 30m diameter pipe that goes down a few kilometers into the ocean, and the pumps and heat exchangers to go with it, and somehow manage to keep this whole thing operational, you could do it. But you could probably build a solar or wind plant with just as much capacity for 1/100th of the amount of money you'll spend on this.
You are an idiot. Read a fucking thermodynamics book, for fuck's sake. Yes, you get more heat TRANSFER working with a kilogram of water than with a kilogram of lead, as you described. But idiots like you have apparently never heard of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that you CANNOT take heat energy from a single source and completely convert it into work (which is what you are implying there).
Actually, in the ideal case, you can get 40kJ out of the lead and 55kJ out of the water. As you can see, it's not as big a difference as you might think.
Look, I've taken few thermodynamics classes and I know what you are talking about. The theory is fine and dandy. You have lots of energy in that water. The problem is, it's next door to useless because that 15 degree difference is not enough to make a practical power plant (one that can produce enough energy to make its construction worthwhile).
The equation for Carnot cycle efficiency is nu = 1 - Tlow / Thigh [in kelvin]. This is about 5% for a 15 degree temperature difference. After you take inefficiencies into account, this will become maybe 1%. What this boils down to is that you need a enormous, extremely expensive plant to produce laughable amounts of power. On top of that, you get into many technical problems related to pumping seawater. It's corrosive and has lots of nasty wildlife in it (shells, etc.) which quickly clog up your pipes, heat exchanges, and other equipment. In short, this is one technology that is extremely unlikely to ever become practical.
I've read lots about the OTEC stuff. The Hawaii OTEC plant produces about 200kW. This is a tiny amount of electricity for such a huge setup (55 inch pipes going down 3000 feet, etc.). This is barely enough to power one neighborhood.
Equipment cannot completely reclock the signal. It can run it through a PLL, but that still lets through quite a bit of jitter (especially low-frequency jitter). You aren't going to get errors in the data regardless of jitter level because it uses Manchester coding. However, the quality of the clock you extract from the signal is quite important if you are running it to a DAC. That's where jitter starts to be important.
You are wrong on both counts. The temperature difference matters a hell of a lot more than specific heat. You would be lucky if this setup doesn't require energy input, much less produce useful output. Considering that your efficiency will be in the less than 1% neighborhood, you would be much better off going with photovoltaics. Running 6-ft diameter pipes 2000 feet into the ocean is expensive.
As far as climactic change: bullshit. You won't change the temperature of the ocean by even 0.1 degrees this way. All you are doing is mixing the water.
Pick up an introductory thermodynamics textbook. Find the chapter with the Carnot cycle. Calculate the Carnot efficiency of this setup. Calculate how many thousands of gallons you are going to have to pump to produce a single kilowatt (yes, it's that bad). This was actually a homework problem in my thermo class. You end up with some ridiculous numbers, and wonder how the hell these people are getting money handed to them to build something that's about as useful as a perpetual motion machine.
You would be very lucky to get 2% actual efficiency. By the time you take pumping work and stuff like that into account, you are left with something like 0.5% efficiency. The biggest plants out there produce some laughable amount of power, like 100kW (if you are lucky). These are some HUGE, very expensive systems.
Finally, someone with an ounce of sense. Or, how about this (very real) scenario? My university now publishes SPF listings. Therefore, I have to use the university (authenticated) SMTP server to send out email (to avoid getting an SPF fail for that email). However, my new ISP blocks port 25, so I can't use the university's server anymore and they cannot be bothered to port-forward some other port to the SMTP server. I have to use the ISP's mail server and risk getting my email deleted by the recipient as spam.
Betamax wasn't any better than VHS and was much more expensive and offered little content. Back in their day, Apple had a nice GUI, but no applications and a steep price point. I'd say that your examples simply confirm what I am saying: FUD is not the deciding factor here.
Also, I don't know what company you work at, but in most companies there is an intricate procurement process. It's not like they listen to a MS guy's BS session and decide to buy it on the spot. There are usually quite a few cost-benefit analyses and so on. When Linux is truly the best choice, companies use it. The problem is, it's not that great for many applications out there.
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Let's not confuse things here. Apple did not try to get around the GPL. To my understanding, they have released perfectly working code, without missing pieces, and with all the required scripts and other things. As in, you can compile a working program from their code.
The GPL doesn't require anything else, and they aren't doing anything like intentionally obfuscating the code. Of course, finding your way around a large body of code is a daunting task. But making your code easy to understand is not something the GPL requires. Hell, try reading the sources to any large open-source program. You'll be lucky if you find one useful comment every 500 lines of code, much less actual documentation.
The main issue here is cooperation with KDE developers. It is true, they are not cooperating a whole lot. But this has nothing to do with the GPL. Apple probably doesn't care much about KDE (given that KDE is a direct competitor). I don't see the crime in refusing to cooperate with them. The GPL's purpose is to make the source of a program available for inspection and modification, not to make it easy to merge code into other projects.
yhbt
Yeah, like registering even 1,000 different domains (for, say, $10/year) is a significant expense for a public company. They would spend more than that on toilet paper and urinal cookies.
You must not have done one. In fact, an internship in the field you want to work in is a great help even if you want to start your own business. You'll get some valuable experience and even more valuable contacts, not to mention a much better idea of what the business is really like.
For instance, the guy who created that Asterisk PBX system (and built a moderately successful startup around it) started out as an intern at a telecom company. I really doubt he would have the requisite knowledge if he started out by himself. Here's an article about it: click.
I don't carry a balance on my credit card, I pay the balance when it's due. What I am getting at is that it provides a cushion against surprises. Irresponsible spending will get you in trouble either way, but there are often big variations in spending month-to-month. Credit is quite useful in that case.
Also, you must be lucky, because very few debit cards have warranty coverage or any credit card benefits. I have two debit cards, and neither one offers anything except fraud protection. I do stand corrected; they apparently changed the rules about liability a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, I have heard plenty of debit card horror stories (a scammer draining the bank account in question and incurring lots of NSF charges, etc.). Besides, it's not like the zero liability thing can help you if, say, your mortgage check bounces because a scammer drained your account.
Well, that would be a problem quite often. Let's say, it's the end of the month, you don't have much money left in your checking account, and your car breaks down. You have to pay $800 to get it fixed. If you have a credit card, you put it on it, pay it off in a month or two, and pay little or no interest (if it falls within the grace period). If you have a debit card, you have to wait until your next paycheck. Of course, you could keep tons of money in your checking account to cover various eventualities, but you would be better off putting it in an interest-bearing account.
Not to mention, it's next to impossible to get a bank to reverse a debit card transaction -- if someone gets your card number or if a merchant scams you, you are pretty much SOL.
Trust me: if someone catches you going somewhere you are not supposed to, there will be repercussions. At the very least, this is trespassing. However, this is also known as breaking and entering and burglary.
Just give up already. For the last 15 years or so, the mainstream definition of "hacker" has been equivalent to "cracker". Find a different word, like "programmer" or something.
No, it would be case sensitivity. If I call a variable MyVar, you shouldn't be able to refer to it as MYVAR, because then the convention wouldn't be worth much.
Here's an analogy from the physical world. You walk into an admissions office, see an open door, and find your file in an unlocked file cabinet. Illegal? Maybe, maybe not. Unethical? Definitely. They didn't break any locks, but they went where they weren't supposed to.
Besides, let's not forget who we are talking about. The Harvard and Stanford business schools are some of the most selective institutions in the country. If they can reject you for having an essay slightly more boring than the next guy or a slightly unenthusiastic letter of reference, or some random factor, this definitely appears to be justified.
Apparently, you haven't heard of quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to know the exact position AND velocity of an electron, thus making the motion of one unpredictable. There are quite a few sources like this -- radioactive decay, various noise sources. In fact, you could probably have a decent random number generator just by sampling the noise on an unused input on a soundcard (the crappier the soundcard, the better).
I didn't say you should have all three in the program. I said that consistent capitalization (enforced by the compiler) can help quite a bit when reading code.
Having a case-insensitive language also doesn't take away your ability to have those cues either.
Yeah, except other programmers who work on the program will not respect your convention. Someone will probably have his caps lock stuck on, someone will have a broken shift key. Then you have to read code and understand that mybigNum and MYBIGNUM are the same exact thing even though they look nothing like each other.
because that's needlessly confusing
It's not that confusing and there are many circumstances where this is justified. Are you really saying that MYBIGNUM and myBigNum can be confused with one another? It would be more confusing if they referred to the same variable.
So, I suppose, you consider MYBIGNUM, MyBigNum, and myBigNum to be the same variable? According to many coding conventions, the first would be a constant, the second a function, and the third a variable. Case sensitivity is definitely useful.
Yeah, if you can build a 30m diameter pipe that goes down a few kilometers into the ocean, and the pumps and heat exchangers to go with it, and somehow manage to keep this whole thing operational, you could do it. But you could probably build a solar or wind plant with just as much capacity for 1/100th of the amount of money you'll spend on this.
You are an idiot. Read a fucking thermodynamics book, for fuck's sake. Yes, you get more heat TRANSFER working with a kilogram of water than with a kilogram of lead, as you described. But idiots like you have apparently never heard of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that you CANNOT take heat energy from a single source and completely convert it into work (which is what you are implying there).
Actually, in the ideal case, you can get 40kJ out of the lead and 55kJ out of the water. As you can see, it's not as big a difference as you might think.
Look, I've taken few thermodynamics classes and I know what you are talking about. The theory is fine and dandy. You have lots of energy in that water. The problem is, it's next door to useless because that 15 degree difference is not enough to make a practical power plant (one that can produce enough energy to make its construction worthwhile).
The equation for Carnot cycle efficiency is nu = 1 - Tlow / Thigh [in kelvin]. This is about 5% for a 15 degree temperature difference. After you take inefficiencies into account, this will become maybe 1%. What this boils down to is that you need a enormous, extremely expensive plant to produce laughable amounts of power. On top of that, you get into many technical problems related to pumping seawater. It's corrosive and has lots of nasty wildlife in it (shells, etc.) which quickly clog up your pipes, heat exchanges, and other equipment. In short, this is one technology that is extremely unlikely to ever become practical.
I've read lots about the OTEC stuff. The Hawaii OTEC plant produces about 200kW. This is a tiny amount of electricity for such a huge setup (55 inch pipes going down 3000 feet, etc.). This is barely enough to power one neighborhood.
Equipment cannot completely reclock the signal. It can run it through a PLL, but that still lets through quite a bit of jitter (especially low-frequency jitter). You aren't going to get errors in the data regardless of jitter level because it uses Manchester coding. However, the quality of the clock you extract from the signal is quite important if you are running it to a DAC. That's where jitter starts to be important.
Maybe if fucktards like you could read, they wouldn't be posting stupid comments. I already said that they don't have any other ports opened.
You are wrong on both counts. The temperature difference matters a hell of a lot more than specific heat. You would be lucky if this setup doesn't require energy input, much less produce useful output. Considering that your efficiency will be in the less than 1% neighborhood, you would be much better off going with photovoltaics. Running 6-ft diameter pipes 2000 feet into the ocean is expensive.
As far as climactic change: bullshit.
You won't change the temperature of the ocean by even 0.1 degrees this way. All you are doing is mixing the water.
Pick up an introductory thermodynamics textbook. Find the chapter with the Carnot cycle. Calculate the Carnot efficiency of this setup. Calculate how many thousands of gallons you are going to have to pump to produce a single kilowatt (yes, it's that bad). This was actually a homework problem in my thermo class. You end up with some ridiculous numbers, and wonder how the hell these people are getting money handed to them to build something that's about as useful as a perpetual motion machine.
You would be very lucky to get 2% actual efficiency. By the time you take pumping work and stuff like that into account, you are left with something like 0.5% efficiency. The biggest plants out there produce some laughable amount of power, like 100kW (if you are lucky). These are some HUGE, very expensive systems.
Finally, someone with an ounce of sense. Or, how about this (very real) scenario? My university now publishes SPF listings. Therefore, I have to use the university (authenticated) SMTP server to send out email (to avoid getting an SPF fail for that email). However, my new ISP blocks port 25, so I can't use the university's server anymore and they cannot be bothered to port-forward some other port to the SMTP server. I have to use the ISP's mail server and risk getting my email deleted by the recipient as spam.
Betamax wasn't any better than VHS and was much more expensive and offered little content. Back in their day, Apple had a nice GUI, but no applications and a steep price point. I'd say that your examples simply confirm what I am saying: FUD is not the deciding factor here.
Also, I don't know what company you work at, but in most companies there is an intricate procurement process. It's not like they listen to a MS guy's BS session and decide to buy it on the spot. There are usually quite a few cost-benefit analyses and so on. When Linux is truly the best choice, companies use it. The problem is, it's not that great for many applications out there.