Unless Wordpress is written in ASP.NET (hint: it's not), Whitehouse.gov is not running Wordpress. View source - the ASP.NET ViewState is a dead giveaway.
Also, it's often a practice for employees of competitor stores to buy up the recently advertised loss leaders. Toys 'R Us did this often with a company called Children's Palace in the 80's and drove them out of business. I wonder if BB practiced this against CC???
It seems like this is 15 years too late. The damage of having the GTK / QT rift has been done, and its impact on the desktop Linux world seems irreparable. Personally, while I prefer QT's architecture, I and many other developers have favored GTK because of its license. It kind of makes me sad that after all this time of posturing and zealotry and bravado and division, that the end result is that now there are 2 LGPLed GUI toolkits for Linux. Forgive me for not being as excited today as this news would have made me years ago.
or perhaps the economic situation isn't hitting everyone equally
Exactly. Gun sales are up. Walmart is doing well. There are industries and business that are thriving. We're just going through a natural cut-the-fat period.
To me, unemployment and inflation are the better indicators of the economic environment. Notice how gas skyrocketed, and that affected the prices of, well, everything. But now that gas is $1.50 a gallon again, the reporting has turned the the auto-industry bailouts because that's where the doom-and-gloom still is. Recessions are as much public perception as they are fact. Just look at the 2001/2002 downturn.
It's interesting that IE actually had the private browsing feature with IE 8 Beta first. While I have no interest in going back to IE whatsoever, it's a very good thing that they're finally building innovative features, and it's also a good thing that Firefox is having to play catch-up feature-wise for the first time. Wow - real competition in the browser space - what is this, 1998???
Not only that, but.WMA files have better quality sound at with a smaller file size. A 3:30 song is 1661KB in WMA pro format, and 4902KB in mp3 @ 192. I know because I'm reripping my CDs at this very moment in prep for my post-Christmas Zune purchase:-)
I often find myself doing code generation for repetitive tasks, or for highly dynamic code. So, all the work in maintenance goes into the generator code, and not the generated code. So, if my generated code comes out looking rough sometimes in terms of whitespace, it's because the generated code isn't as important as the generator. With Python and its significant whitespace, generating code is a pain! Boo got it right with adding a -WSA (WhiteSpaceAgnostic) compiler option which means you can use the Ruby style "end" keyword. It's optional, and isn't the default, but it works. Adding this to Python would "end" this argument once and for all. Instead, every slashdot article about Python degenerates into this topic, and many programmers go on about their lives without giving Python a chance. To each his own I suppose.
While I agree with this statement based on the GP's post:
Please don't invoke the fire-in-a-crowded-theater argument
Your premise for this statement is totally wrong:
Shouting "Fire!" isn't really even speech
"Freedom of speech" is a blanket protection for your ability to express yourself - your thoughts, your opinions, or even thoughts and opinions that aren't yours that are just conveyed just to illicit a reaction. Now, that right is somewhat regulated for public safety purposes - and rightfully so. Shouting "Fire", while being one of those rare exceptions, is in fact a form of speech. Or rather, self-expression. Much like art, photography, etc. Consider that the only difference between shouting "Boycott" outside a store or "Hotdogs" at a ball park rather than "Fire" in a crowded theater is the public safety aspect. All three words are speech in the "freedom of speech" sense though.
Here's the simplest solution - require payment and active production of the work to maintain copyright after 30 years. If you're still making enough money on the work to maintain the rights, then pay up. If not - it's now public domain. If you're actively working to keep your work of art viable, then you deserve to keep your copyright, but you have to make an effort to prevent your works from fading into obscurity - show some ownership. Otherwise, the public who the work was produced for in the first place has the opportunity to take over the upkeep. And, I pay less personal taxes to boot because the Disney's and RIAA's and all the others are ponying up. Win, win!
Funny that you mention case-sensitivity. Other than VB, T-SQL, and Pascal, I don't know of any common languages that are case-insensitive. Kind-of a shame really.
> perhaps now that those practices are having a noticeable impact on their business
If IE did it, I might believe you. Until Firefox has more market share though, the pressure is on Mozilla to fix the problem, not the website operators.
> I like someone who can change their mind. That's a good thing. But > this is blatant dishonesty -- he said one thing, and then did > another.
Obama's a politician, not the messiah that everyone's pretending he is. The "But, I'm not Bush so you're sure to vote for me" didn't work for Kerry in 2004, and it's not going to cut it in 2008 either. We need to start expecting more. Of course, the type of person I think would be good at the job is the kind of person who wouldn't run anyway.
> Do you talk to anyone overseas on the telephone? Your calls could > be monitored at any time without a warrant thanks to this bill.
Not to argue a technicality, but it's your oversea friend's conversation that's being monitored and you just happen to be part of that. I'm not saying I think it's right, but I don't think it's fair to equate this with domestic spying. There's another side to this coin that many people find reasonable. Of course, this is probably not an easy opinion for the slash-crowd to handle.
> I think what people really forget about the GPL is that it has a unique > potential for dual licensing
So, I have a legitimate question. If Bob takes the GPL'ed QT and extends it and releases a "QuTie" product under the GPL, then can Troll Tech incorporate those extensions back into their QT product and still sell a commercial license? Can't they only dual license when they have the copyright? Bob released his code under the GPL, and not Trolltech's commercial license, so my understanding is that Trolltech should have no ability to incorporate Bob's code in their commercial product. Doesn't this entirely defeat the share-and-share alike point of GPL'ed code? I think people forget about dual licensing because it only works on a product where you're the only one holding the copyright to all the code so that you can choose the licensing. Please correct me if I've misunderstood.
So, the N. Pole is growing while the S. Pole is growing new ice despite a big hole in the ozone and chiken little claims of global warming. Yep - we live on a dynamic Earth, and I'm convinced that most of these scientists don't really know jack.
Um, don't be so sure. There's a lot of FUD out there, and much of it comes from the open source community as anywhere else. My point was not that these particular things constitute a 'release', but that there's a grey area that makes companies nervous. As for me, I'll stick with BSD, thanks a bunch.
Yeah, but what constitutes a software "release"? Hosting a public website with some GPL code linked on the back end may spell trouble. Passing out CDs containing marketing materials at a trade show may constitute a software "release". Not every company is a software company, and when your primary business is not creating software you may not be the most savvy about these sorts of things or have the strictest policies about what your developers, contractors, or consultants can inadvertently do.
Custom software is a major driving factor in most businesses, and there's an understandable undercurrent of cautious distrust of the GPL when the consequences of the smallest touch could unintentionally taint a codebase.
Every single link on that grammars page you provided is broken, even though a lot of the stuff says 2008. That's exactly the kind of documentation frustrations I was talking about with ANTLR. ANTLR may well be the cat's meow, but much like a cat I personally found it fickle on its best days.
In contrast, here are some of Gold Parser's grammars including the one for COBOL. And, you can also find example grammars for things you already fundamentally understand the full scope of like phone numbers. The grammars are written in a BNF dialect similar to what ANTLR uses, but incompatible.
Gold might not be as mature a product, have the best architecture, or have much active development happening, but it's a good enough LALR parser with plain English documentation, which is what ANTLR could really use and what this book attempts to be. YMMV of course.
On a project I was on, I needed to parse 50+ COBOL copybooks in.NET so that we could use those data definitions to whittle down a 600MB flat file full of nightly data for a data warehouse.
I tried ANTLR, and I wound up abandoning it. I wanted ANTLR to work - I really thought it seemed to be the best and most mature solution, but the documentation is ABYSMAL. And if you want to use.NET with it instead of Java, there's a reserved circle in hell for that.
I'm sure if I'd had proper documentation, I could have managed it. I have a CS degree and took a 400 level automata class as part of my curriculum, so I'm no feather weight on this topic. Heck, I've even used this in a past life. But, I still was at a loss as to how to even begin with ANTLR and C#.
I found Gold Parser, and I was done with 151 commented lines in my grammar file, 148 lines of generated C# code in a constants file, and less than 500 lines of business logic to actually deal with the parsed copybook to do what we needed to do with it. The whole development effort was mere days, and let me quickly get out of the weeds and back to solving the real business problem.
Recently, I saw this ANTLR reference discarded on a shelf in Half Price Books, and just had to pick it up. I thought, maybe this would have gotten me there. Alas, the book is not even close to a reasonable reference. Moving from tokenizers and Regular Expressions to full-fledged CFGs is not a layman's topic, but there's not much help to be gleaned from the arcane drivel that comes from Mr. Parr's book on his already overly complicated application. If you're interested in theory and wallowing in the mire of acedemia, then this is the book for you. But, if you have a working understanding of the topic and just want to get the blasted tool to work, the best advice I have is to stay far, far away. At least, that is, until someone other than Parr himself sets forth a reasonable guide to this ANTLR'ed beast.
I found this to be much the same with Parr's StringTemplate project. After trying to figure it out from the limited documentation, I found it less painful to just dredge up NVelocity from its hidden location at Castle Project, fish for the necessary dlls, throw away the rind (who uses Castle anyway???) and happily went about my merry way.
I stopped reading at "Ubama and McSoft". Thanks for doing the political equivalent of "M$" so that I could spare myself the agony of having wasted my time reading your entire comment.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless Wordpress is written in ASP.NET (hint: it's not), Whitehouse.gov is not running Wordpress. View source - the ASP.NET ViewState is a dead giveaway.
Also, it's often a practice for employees of competitor stores to buy up the recently advertised loss leaders. Toys 'R Us did this often with a company called Children's Palace in the 80's and drove them out of business. I wonder if BB practiced this against CC???
Are you saying that the GPL is the only way they stayed in business?
It seems like this is 15 years too late. The damage of having the GTK / QT rift has been done, and its impact on the desktop Linux world seems irreparable. Personally, while I prefer QT's architecture, I and many other developers have favored GTK because of its license. It kind of makes me sad that after all this time of posturing and zealotry and bravado and division, that the end result is that now there are 2 LGPLed GUI toolkits for Linux. Forgive me for not being as excited today as this news would have made me years ago.
or perhaps the economic situation isn't hitting everyone equally
Exactly. Gun sales are up. Walmart is doing well. There are industries and business that are thriving. We're just going through a natural cut-the-fat period.
To me, unemployment and inflation are the better indicators of the economic environment. Notice how gas skyrocketed, and that affected the prices of, well, everything. But now that gas is $1.50 a gallon again, the reporting has turned the the auto-industry bailouts because that's where the doom-and-gloom still is. Recessions are as much public perception as they are fact. Just look at the 2001/2002 downturn.
It's interesting that IE actually had the private browsing feature with IE 8 Beta first. While I have no interest in going back to IE whatsoever, it's a very good thing that they're finally building innovative features, and it's also a good thing that Firefox is having to play catch-up feature-wise for the first time. Wow - real competition in the browser space - what is this, 1998???
Not only that, but .WMA files have better quality sound at with a smaller file size. A 3:30 song is 1661KB in WMA pro format, and 4902KB in mp3 @ 192. I know because I'm reripping my CDs at this very moment in prep for my post-Christmas Zune purchase :-)
Or could it be because he'd like to listen to the radio occasionally on his music device? Geez Apple - how hard could it be?!
DSL's mainly.
I often find myself doing code generation for repetitive tasks, or for highly dynamic code. So, all the work in maintenance goes into the generator code, and not the generated code. So, if my generated code comes out looking rough sometimes in terms of whitespace, it's because the generated code isn't as important as the generator. With Python and its significant whitespace, generating code is a pain! Boo got it right with adding a -WSA (WhiteSpaceAgnostic) compiler option which means you can use the Ruby style "end" keyword. It's optional, and isn't the default, but it works. Adding this to Python would "end" this argument once and for all. Instead, every slashdot article about Python degenerates into this topic, and many programmers go on about their lives without giving Python a chance. To each his own I suppose.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Your premise for this statement is totally wrong:
"Freedom of speech" is a blanket protection for your ability to express yourself - your thoughts, your opinions, or even thoughts and opinions that aren't yours that are just conveyed just to illicit a reaction. Now, that right is somewhat regulated for public safety purposes - and rightfully so. Shouting "Fire", while being one of those rare exceptions, is in fact a form of speech. Or rather, self-expression. Much like art, photography, etc. Consider that the only difference between shouting "Boycott" outside a store or "Hotdogs" at a ball park rather than "Fire" in a crowded theater is the public safety aspect. All three words are speech in the "freedom of speech" sense though.
Here's the simplest solution - require payment and active production of the work to maintain copyright after 30 years. If you're still making enough money on the work to maintain the rights, then pay up. If not - it's now public domain. If you're actively working to keep your work of art viable, then you deserve to keep your copyright, but you have to make an effort to prevent your works from fading into obscurity - show some ownership. Otherwise, the public who the work was produced for in the first place has the opportunity to take over the upkeep. And, I pay less personal taxes to boot because the Disney's and RIAA's and all the others are ponying up. Win, win!
Funny that you mention case-sensitivity. Other than VB, T-SQL, and Pascal, I don't know of any common languages that are case-insensitive. Kind-of a shame really.
> perhaps now that those practices are having a noticeable impact on their business
If IE did it, I might believe you. Until Firefox has more market share though, the pressure is on Mozilla to fix the problem, not the website operators.
> I like someone who can change their mind. That's a good thing. But
> this is blatant dishonesty -- he said one thing, and then did
> another.
Obama's a politician, not the messiah that everyone's pretending he is. The "But, I'm not Bush so you're sure to vote for me" didn't work for Kerry in 2004, and it's not going to cut it in 2008 either. We need to start expecting more. Of course, the type of person I think would be good at the job is the kind of person who wouldn't run anyway.
> Do you talk to anyone overseas on the telephone? Your calls could
> be monitored at any time without a warrant thanks to this bill.
Not to argue a technicality, but it's your oversea friend's conversation that's being monitored and you just happen to be part of that. I'm not saying I think it's right, but I don't think it's fair to equate this with domestic spying. There's another side to this coin that many people find reasonable. Of course, this is probably not an easy opinion for the slash-crowd to handle.
> I think what people really forget about the GPL is that it has a unique
> potential for dual licensing
So, I have a legitimate question. If Bob takes the GPL'ed QT and extends it and releases a "QuTie" product under the GPL, then can Troll Tech incorporate those extensions back into their QT product and still sell a commercial license? Can't they only dual license when they have the copyright? Bob released his code under the GPL, and not Trolltech's commercial license, so my understanding is that Trolltech should have no ability to incorporate Bob's code in their commercial product. Doesn't this entirely defeat the share-and-share alike point of GPL'ed code? I think people forget about dual licensing because it only works on a product where you're the only one holding the copyright to all the code so that you can choose the licensing. Please correct me if I've misunderstood.
So, the N. Pole is growing while the S. Pole is growing new ice despite a big hole in the ozone and chiken little claims of global warming. Yep - we live on a dynamic Earth, and I'm convinced that most of these scientists don't really know jack.
Um, don't be so sure. There's a lot of FUD out there, and much of it comes from the open source community as anywhere else. My point was not that these particular things constitute a 'release', but that there's a grey area that makes companies nervous. As for me, I'll stick with BSD, thanks a bunch.
> code used within the company and never released
Yeah, but what constitutes a software "release"? Hosting a public website with some GPL code linked on the back end may spell trouble. Passing out CDs containing marketing materials at a trade show may constitute a software "release". Not every company is a software company, and when your primary business is not creating software you may not be the most savvy about these sorts of things or have the strictest policies about what your developers, contractors, or consultants can inadvertently do.
Custom software is a major driving factor in most businesses, and there's an understandable undercurrent of cautious distrust of the GPL when the consequences of the smallest touch could unintentionally taint a codebase.
Quick addendum - I would be remiss if I forgot to mention that my personal favorite language is implemented using ANTLR, so it isn't all bad.
Every single link on that grammars page you provided is broken, even though a lot of the stuff says 2008. That's exactly the kind of documentation frustrations I was talking about with ANTLR. ANTLR may well be the cat's meow, but much like a cat I personally found it fickle on its best days.
In contrast, here are some of Gold Parser's grammars including the one for COBOL. And, you can also find example grammars for things you already fundamentally understand the full scope of like phone numbers. The grammars are written in a BNF dialect similar to what ANTLR uses, but incompatible.
Gold might not be as mature a product, have the best architecture, or have much active development happening, but it's a good enough LALR parser with plain English documentation, which is what ANTLR could really use and what this book attempts to be. YMMV of course.
On a project I was on, I needed to parse 50+ COBOL copybooks in .NET so that we could use those data definitions to whittle down a 600MB flat file full of nightly data for a data warehouse.
.NET with it instead of Java, there's a reserved circle in hell for that.
I tried ANTLR, and I wound up abandoning it. I wanted ANTLR to work - I really thought it seemed to be the best and most mature solution, but the documentation is ABYSMAL. And if you want to use
I'm sure if I'd had proper documentation, I could have managed it. I have a CS degree and took a 400 level automata class as part of my curriculum, so I'm no feather weight on this topic. Heck, I've even used this in a past life. But, I still was at a loss as to how to even begin with ANTLR and C#.
I found Gold Parser, and I was done with 151 commented lines in my grammar file, 148 lines of generated C# code in a constants file, and less than 500 lines of business logic to actually deal with the parsed copybook to do what we needed to do with it. The whole development effort was mere days, and let me quickly get out of the weeds and back to solving the real business problem.
Recently, I saw this ANTLR reference discarded on a shelf in Half Price Books, and just had to pick it up. I thought, maybe this would have gotten me there. Alas, the book is not even close to a reasonable reference. Moving from tokenizers and Regular Expressions to full-fledged CFGs is not a layman's topic, but there's not much help to be gleaned from the arcane drivel that comes from Mr. Parr's book on his already overly complicated application. If you're interested in theory and wallowing in the mire of acedemia, then this is the book for you. But, if you have a working understanding of the topic and just want to get the blasted tool to work, the best advice I have is to stay far, far away. At least, that is, until someone other than Parr himself sets forth a reasonable guide to this ANTLR'ed beast.
I found this to be much the same with Parr's StringTemplate project. After trying to figure it out from the limited documentation, I found it less painful to just dredge up NVelocity from its hidden location at Castle Project, fish for the necessary dlls, throw away the rind (who uses Castle anyway???) and happily went about my merry way.
I stopped reading at "Ubama and McSoft". Thanks for doing the political equivalent of "M$" so that I could spare myself the agony of having wasted my time reading your entire comment.