The GPL isn't dangerous at all. You simply don't use GPL'ed code if you can't abide by the license, wether by choice or legal constraints.
If it's a matter of not understanding the license fully and running the risk of unknowingly violating it; again, you should not be using GPL'ed code.
It's really too bad if using it would have saved you a lot of time and effort, but that's how it is. Further, if you can't complete your software program without this GPL'ed code then perhaps you're working on the wrong project.
Somehow I doubt you can remember entire libraries in detail. If you write your own getopt workalike without referencing getopt during the process, you have nothing to worry about. You've done a clean-room re-implimentation. Chances are you'll want things done your way anyway, adding and dropping things... so the end result would be far different from getopt itself.
If you cheat and get nailed for "borrowing" a code block, you get what you deserve.
If you don't have the skills neccessary write code to parse CLI arguments, you're in the wrong line of work.:-P
I should add that photosensitivity doesn't require whole cells, and that movement probably came before animal-type cells. Go into the light!;)
Simple minerals that react to light are found in many microbes. The evolution of photosensitivity could have been as simple as microbes coming into contact with photosensitive minerals and picking up/absorbing them.
Those that develop their own beneficial reactions to these minerals interacting with light would have a higher chance of survival. ie: seek out light it can now sense in order to fuel metabolism.
Eventually you have cells that actively construct photosensitive organelles in order to survive.
Photosynthisis. If you can find the light, you survive. Plants that subsist on photosynthisis are photosensitive for a reason.
Of course, once you've got photosensitivity, what's to stop you from keeping any and all beneficial additions or alterations to it?
In an environment where these plant organisms exist and flourish, just getting some sunlight could become troublesome... Then some of the organisms develop the capacity to consume other organisms for energy. This turns out to be a great way to survive without having to compete for someplace to sunbathe, though it is rather haphazard since you have to wait for food to float your way before you starve. Some of these organisms that develop cellia or even some form of appendages would be able to survive even more easily, as they can now wander around until they bump into food.
But what about those photosensitive cells that haven't been serving any useful purpose since some of the organisms evolved into simple animals? Develop them further and begin detecting the presence of food, which they can then move to and consume.
Repeat and refine through colour detection, segmented eyestakls, compound eyes and the spheres found in almost all high-order animals today. They're damn useful and began development very early (most plants and many microbes are photosensitive), so it isn't really surprising that they exist in so many forms throughout the species.
I'm sure mutations can and do get stored up and then manifest as either highly beneficial or lethally disasterous. I doubt that's the case for the bombadier beetle, though. It has numerous cousins that use the same chemical mixture to a lesser extent.
The fact is, mixing the chemicals does not instantly result in an exploding beetle. Hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide mix to form a very foul brown liquid. Some of the bombadier's cousins like to store the stuff in seperate sacs that will mix when they're eaten by a predator. That predator then gets a very unpalatable surprise instead of the tasty beetle it thought it had caught. Even very slow learners will soon learn not to eat these beetles.
Dr. Gish (the creationist in the beetle article) saves the spray tubes for the last mutation, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There are other beetles that will mix and squirt this noxious brown mixture at would-be predators through similar mechanisms. Their goal is to merely warn a predator about the taste awaiting them, not scald them. While even more effective than waiting to be eaten to impart the foul taste, it might not deter some starving/dumb predators. This could be what brought the bombadier about.
The bombadier beetle's deviation from its cousins encompasses higher concentrations (not sure about this one- the concentrations could be the same as their cousins) of the chemicals and the addition of a catalyst that causes them to react quickly, producing the energy needed fast enough to superheat the spray.
No doubt some strains of the beetle tried it and got it wrong, which is precisely why they aren't here today. The same thing goes for the beetle's aim. Bombadier beetles with bad aim tend not to live to reproduce. It should be noted that the non-scalding variety of spraying beetles do not miss, either.
Unless you're actively losing genes from the genome and it's literally shrinking, you're only changing information and not losing it.
Chromosome counts already suggest that the genome has a tendency to GROW as it evolves. Ophioglossum (Ferns that have been around since before the dinosaurs) have more chromosomes than we do. A LOT more. 1260 chromosomes (that's four digits). Hell, King Crabs are also a lot older than us and have 208. We have all of 48. Rats have 42, which could suggest that they evolved more or less alongside us. It might explain why they flourish everywhere we do.;)
On a side note, Tobacco has exactly 48 chromosomes.:-P
That slant was added by the person who submitted the story. The slashdot editors post those submissions verbatim and often tack on their own commentary to the end of them, outside the quotes. They don't seem to actually edit anything...
Coding for windows doesn't automatically make you part of a windows community, much the same way that not being a coder doesn't preclude you from being a part of the Linux community. num_coders != num_community
I would also classify.asp authors as web developers and not coders. Coding requires different skill sets and dedication that web design/scripting does not. I do both, and web design is like taking a vacation for me.
What's with this "you guys" stuff? I'm in no way associated with the slashdot editors or the people who submit the stories (submissions which are quoted verbatim by said editors, I might add). FUD sucks, no matter the source. That includes your assumed knowledge of developer community sizes, too.
The one performing the service gets to decide under what terms the service is offered. Same goes for everything else you listed.
That's a sad state of affairs... The one performing the service and the one receiving the service are supposed to negotiate the terms under which the service is performed. This is how you do business. Pity nobody remembers this.
Aside from the whole leverage/stranglehold thing, they wouldn't be giving away anywhere near 1 billion dollars if they had their way.
They'd be giving away 1 billion worth of microsoft products. Which is to say, a 25-cent CD for every 200 dollars or so. They would be essentially chopping off three zeroes from that "fine". Add to this the fact that under this plan of microsoft's, the schools would eventually have to start subscribing to continue using the software. They'd actually be profiting from this "punishment" financially as well as with market share.
Is it any wonder they were eager to push the proposal?
Re:Microsoft has had 7 years of warning.
on
Shattering Windows
·
· Score: 1
Altering default behaviour does you no good. You can close many exploit vectors, sure... but applications can't ignore or override the WM_TIMER message. Welcome back to square one.
If you want to secure against these exploits, nothing running as another user must interact with the desktop, visible or not. Any and all microsoft tools or services that do this must be corrected (by MS), and you must not install anything that will "runas" unless you're absolutely certain it won't ever touch the desktop with those privileges.
Nah, the barcode scanner was invented by an engineer turned business owner from California. I can't recall his first name, but the last is Baglio. He doesn't read slashdot, at least as far as his son Vic has told me.
There's no reason for the scanner to stop working without any light. A lot of red ambient lighting might interfere, though... But all the same, I would expect it to be less effective underwater. You don't get refraction since there are no transitions but you do get more scatter of the beam from the density of the water as opposed to air. Well, that's not entirely true... You'll have refractions anyway since the beam has to pass from a sealed emitter, through glass/plastic and finally into water, but these should be predictable and compensated for. An underwater scanner would need to be much more sensitive and have a far more refined laser. This is prohibitively expensive as compared to a cheap webcam with some software.
And then there's the matter of getting close enough to scan properly...
They've got laws up there that punish companies and politicians severely if they get into bed together, so to speak. Funny how that works out for justice. Stuff about how running a business is not a right, but a privilege. Profit is the reward for serving the community, and harming said community brings about dissolution and seizure of assets.
Mozilla has taken four years to get to release 1.0. In that time, M$ has released at least two major versions of IE.
Did you use IE 2.0? 3.0? I have, and my god they were horrible compared to the competition (Netscape). Version numbers and the frequency of their incrementation are worth less than the bytes they take up in a data section. Which is to say, less than nothing.
How can you possibly know how long IE was in development before they finished v1.0? Hell, it has been a little less than a decade from first release to the crash-tastic, worm-friendlty v6 everyone gets with their dell entry-level special. It makes 4 years to a solid, open browser look absolutely outstanding.
Imagine if all the effort put into Gnome and KDE had been concetrated on just one desktop product.
They'd stagnate. It's the competition and experimentation with different ideas that speeds development of both desktop environments. Then there's the matter of preference and choice...
Some people find one more suitable than the other. I don't even like Gnome or KDE, myself. I find them both clunky and excessive. I find the windows interfaces (9x/2k/xp) slow, unintuitive and put simply, fucking ugly. No amount of theming has succeeded in making the experience any less of a strain. I figure anyone who can actually put up with windows' quirks long enough to get used to them must be a masochist. I find myself using fwvm & blackbox (and more recenrly, fluxbox) simply because I can make them comfortable and they always behave as they're expected. Fast too, no matter the cpu and memory load I heap onto my machines.
Slightly less related, but I also enjoy the fact that they're available to me wether I'm sitting at my sun workstation, or a BSD box in the lab.
The point of the management team is to cut enough resources, make enough changes, and consume enough developer time with meetings and status reports to ensure the deadline is no longer attainable.:)
I'm certainly not going to add Javascript because Opera won't follow Net conventions.
It is, though. The user-agent string is optional and can be whatever the browser wants to send. If Opera wants to send you "Mozilla/4.0 (MSIE 5.5)", it can and will be following standards.
If you want someone to blame, blame arrogant webmasters that actually turn people away if they aren't using a specific browser. Especially banks, which people tend to need to use. They brought this about.
10gbit may sound excessive to you with ata133 drives barely able to push more than 1gbit in burst mode, but you would have no trouble saturating this bandwidth in a high-traffic LAN environment. Even faster if they're using higher-capacity memory and disks. PC2700, scsi, fibre channel...
Okay... but why haven't they made bibliographies or references to specific pages of other works illegal in published works?
It's the same thing. What makes the internet so special?
Oh, that's right. Complete and utter ignorance on the part of the lawmakers.
Actually, the Canadians burned the White House when we tried to invade them.
Sure, they act all polite but deep down they're irritable snowbound bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL isn't dangerous at all. You simply don't use GPL'ed code if you can't abide by the license, wether by choice or legal constraints.
:-P
If it's a matter of not understanding the license fully and running the risk of unknowingly violating it; again, you should not be using GPL'ed code.
It's really too bad if using it would have saved you a lot of time and effort, but that's how it is. Further, if you can't complete your software program without this GPL'ed code then perhaps you're working on the wrong project.
Somehow I doubt you can remember entire libraries in detail. If you write your own getopt workalike without referencing getopt during the process, you have nothing to worry about. You've done a clean-room re-implimentation.
Chances are you'll want things done your way anyway, adding and dropping things... so the end result would be far different from getopt itself.
If you cheat and get nailed for "borrowing" a code block, you get what you deserve.
If you don't have the skills neccessary write code to parse CLI arguments, you're in the wrong line of work.
I should add that photosensitivity doesn't require whole cells, and that movement probably came before animal-type cells. Go into the light! ;)
Simple minerals that react to light are found in many microbes. The evolution of photosensitivity could have been as simple as microbes coming into contact with photosensitive minerals and picking up/absorbing them.
Those that develop their own beneficial reactions to these minerals interacting with light would have a higher chance of survival. ie: seek out light it can now sense in order to fuel metabolism.
Eventually you have cells that actively construct photosensitive organelles in order to survive.
Photosynthisis. If you can find the light, you survive. Plants that subsist on photosynthisis are photosensitive for a reason.
Of course, once you've got photosensitivity, what's to stop you from keeping any and all beneficial additions or alterations to it?
In an environment where these plant organisms exist and flourish, just getting some sunlight could become troublesome... Then some of the organisms develop the capacity to consume other organisms for energy. This turns out to be a great way to survive without having to compete for someplace to sunbathe, though it is rather haphazard since you have to wait for food to float your way before you starve. Some of these organisms that develop cellia or even some form of appendages would be able to survive even more easily, as they can now wander around until they bump into food.
But what about those photosensitive cells that haven't been serving any useful purpose since some of the organisms evolved into simple animals? Develop them further and begin detecting the presence of food, which they can then move to and consume.
Repeat and refine through colour detection, segmented eyestakls, compound eyes and the spheres found in almost all high-order animals today. They're damn useful and began development very early (most plants and many microbes are photosensitive), so it isn't really surprising that they exist in so many forms throughout the species.
I'm sure mutations can and do get stored up and then manifest as either highly beneficial or lethally disasterous. I doubt that's the case for the bombadier beetle, though. It has numerous cousins that use the same chemical mixture to a lesser extent.
The fact is, mixing the chemicals does not instantly result in an exploding beetle. Hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide mix to form a very foul brown liquid. Some of the bombadier's cousins like to store the stuff in seperate sacs that will mix when they're eaten by a predator. That predator then gets a very unpalatable surprise instead of the tasty beetle it thought it had caught. Even very slow learners will soon learn not to eat these beetles.
Dr. Gish (the creationist in the beetle article) saves the spray tubes for the last mutation, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There are other beetles that will mix and squirt this noxious brown mixture at would-be predators through similar mechanisms. Their goal is to merely warn a predator about the taste awaiting them, not scald them.
While even more effective than waiting to be eaten to impart the foul taste, it might not deter some starving/dumb predators. This could be what brought the bombadier about.
The bombadier beetle's deviation from its cousins encompasses higher concentrations (not sure about this one- the concentrations could be the same as their cousins) of the chemicals and the addition of a catalyst that causes them to react quickly, producing the energy needed fast enough to superheat the spray.
No doubt some strains of the beetle tried it and got it wrong, which is precisely why they aren't here today. The same thing goes for the beetle's aim. Bombadier beetles with bad aim tend not to live to reproduce. It should be noted that the non-scalding variety of spraying beetles do not miss, either.
Unless you're actively losing genes from the genome and it's literally shrinking, you're only changing information and not losing it.
;)
:-P
Chromosome counts already suggest that the genome has a tendency to GROW as it evolves. Ophioglossum (Ferns that have been around since before the dinosaurs) have more chromosomes than we do. A LOT more. 1260 chromosomes (that's four digits). Hell, King Crabs are also a lot older than us and have 208. We have all of 48. Rats have 42, which could suggest that they evolved more or less alongside us. It might explain why they flourish everywhere we do.
On a side note, Tobacco has exactly 48 chromosomes.
Reference: http://www.kean.edu/~breid/chrom2st.htm
That slant was added by the person who submitted the story. The slashdot editors post those submissions verbatim and often tack on their own commentary to the end of them, outside the quotes.
.asp authors as web developers and not coders. Coding requires different skill sets and dedication that web design/scripting does not. I do both, and web design is like taking a vacation for me.
They don't seem to actually edit anything...
Coding for windows doesn't automatically make you part of a windows community, much the same way that not being a coder doesn't preclude you from being a part of the Linux community.
num_coders != num_community
I would also classify
What's with this "you guys" stuff? I'm in no way associated with the slashdot editors or the people who submit the stories (submissions which are quoted verbatim by said editors, I might add).
FUD sucks, no matter the source. That includes your assumed knowledge of developer community sizes, too.
The one performing the service gets to decide under what terms the service is offered. Same goes for everything else you listed.
That's a sad state of affairs... The one performing the service and the one receiving the service are supposed to negotiate the terms under which the service is performed. This is how you do business.
Pity nobody remembers this.
Aside from the whole leverage/stranglehold thing, they wouldn't be giving away anywhere near 1 billion dollars if they had their way.
They'd be giving away 1 billion worth of microsoft products. Which is to say, a 25-cent CD for every 200 dollars or so. They would be essentially chopping off three zeroes from that "fine".
Add to this the fact that under this plan of microsoft's, the schools would eventually have to start subscribing to continue using the software. They'd actually be profiting from this "punishment" financially as well as with market share.
Is it any wonder they were eager to push the proposal?
Altering default behaviour does you no good. You can close many exploit vectors, sure... but applications can't ignore or override the WM_TIMER message. Welcome back to square one.
If you want to secure against these exploits, nothing running as another user must interact with the desktop, visible or not.
Any and all microsoft tools or services that do this must be corrected (by MS), and you must not install anything that will "runas" unless you're absolutely certain it won't ever touch the desktop with those privileges.
Nah, the barcode scanner was invented by an engineer turned business owner from California. I can't recall his first name, but the last is Baglio.
He doesn't read slashdot, at least as far as his son Vic has told me.
There's no reason for the scanner to stop working without any light. A lot of red ambient lighting might interfere, though... But all the same, I would expect it to be less effective underwater. You don't get refraction since there are no transitions but you do get more scatter of the beam from the density of the water as opposed to air. Well, that's not entirely true... You'll have refractions anyway since the beam has to pass from a sealed emitter, through glass/plastic and finally into water, but these should be predictable and compensated for.
An underwater scanner would need to be much more sensitive and have a far more refined laser. This is prohibitively expensive as compared to a cheap webcam with some software.
And then there's the matter of getting close enough to scan properly...
They've got laws up there that punish companies and politicians severely if they get into bed together, so to speak.
Funny how that works out for justice.
Stuff about how running a business is not a right, but a privilege. Profit is the reward for serving the community, and harming said community brings about dissolution and seizure of assets.
http://66.161.12.113/%73%65%61%72%63%68?%71=%68%75 %6Do%72
Mozilla has taken four years to get to release 1.0. In that time, M$ has released at least two major versions of IE.
Did you use IE 2.0? 3.0?
I have, and my god they were horrible compared to the competition (Netscape). Version numbers and the frequency of their incrementation are worth less than the bytes they take up in a data section. Which is to say, less than nothing.
How can you possibly know how long IE was in development before they finished v1.0?
Hell, it has been a little less than a decade from first release to the crash-tastic, worm-friendlty v6 everyone gets with their dell entry-level special.
It makes 4 years to a solid, open browser look absolutely outstanding.
Imagine if all the effort put into Gnome and KDE had been concetrated on just one desktop product.
They'd stagnate. It's the competition and experimentation with different ideas that speeds development of both desktop environments. Then there's the matter of preference and choice...
Some people find one more suitable than the other. I don't even like Gnome or KDE, myself. I find them both clunky and excessive. I find the windows interfaces (9x/2k/xp) slow, unintuitive and put simply, fucking ugly. No amount of theming has succeeded in making the experience any less of a strain. I figure anyone who can actually put up with windows' quirks long enough to get used to them must be a masochist. I find myself using fwvm & blackbox (and more recenrly, fluxbox) simply because I can make them comfortable and they always behave as they're expected. Fast too, no matter the cpu and memory load I heap onto my machines.
Slightly less related, but I also enjoy the fact that they're available to me wether I'm sitting at my sun workstation, or a BSD box in the lab.
The point of the management team is to cut enough resources, make enough changes, and consume enough developer time with meetings and status reports to ensure the deadline is no longer attainable. :)
I don't blame them. I wouldn't use Visual C++ for anything important, either.
That would require actual work, and you know how dot-boom, fly-by-night college diploma having, "web guru" prima-donnas feel about work...
I'm certainly not going to add Javascript because Opera won't follow Net conventions.
It is, though. The user-agent string is optional and can be whatever the browser wants to send. If Opera wants to send you "Mozilla/4.0 (MSIE 5.5)", it can and will be following standards.
If you want someone to blame, blame arrogant webmasters that actually turn people away if they aren't using a specific browser. Especially banks, which people tend to need to use. They brought this about.
10gbit may sound excessive to you with ata133 drives barely able to push more than 1gbit in burst mode, but you would have no trouble saturating this bandwidth in a high-traffic LAN environment. Even faster if they're using higher-capacity memory and disks. PC2700, scsi, fibre channel...
Okay... but why haven't they made bibliographies or references to specific pages of other works illegal in published works? It's the same thing. What makes the internet so special? Oh, that's right. Complete and utter ignorance on the part of the lawmakers.
Actually, the Canadians burned the White House when we tried to invade them. Sure, they act all polite but deep down they're irritable snowbound bastards.