At the same time they scold us for freaking over a nipple (hey, I'll agree to that extent), they would scold us for a stoned gull making an "obscene" gesture?
Janet J wasn't using her tit to promote a free software office suite for educational use.
Can I build commercial applications on KDE, LGPL style?
Yes, the core KDE libraries (kdelibs) are under the LGPL. Just be careful not to link in any GPL'd code.
If so, does the Qt Commercial license still apply?
Yes.
Re:this SMTP server vs Qmail and Sendmail
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just like KDE is not Free Software because it is based on Qt, which has a comercial license?
I wonder when people will stop repeating this rubbish. Qt has been GPL'd for years. It is also available under a commercial licence, but that has nothing to do with KDE, it's in case you want to develop a closed-source application with Qt. (And it seems to be an excellent business model.)
As for qmail, you're not allowed to distribute modified versions, and the rules on distributing binaries are rather stringent and almost impossible for distributors to follow. That makes it not quite "free software" (by FSF's definition) or "open source". (However, you're allowed to distribute patches, and even bundle patches with unmodified source in a tarball; you can download one such tarball, called netqmail, from http://www.qmail.org).
There's no high-level programming involved. All the software is in ROM, hard-coded on the chips, and cannot be modified. And it dates back to the 1980s and has been in testing since then.
The problems mentioned in the header have very little to do with voting machines: see this post. The repoll could simply be because thugs physically smashed the machines, for example; and even if it's mechanical failure, 191 is a pretty small number given the scale of these elections.
Some polling booths have been ordered to re-poll due to malfunctions in the electronic voting machines. In another article, 191 voting booths were ordered to re-poll.
This should really be compared to what used to happen with ballot boxes: every Indian election has a few repolls, I'm not sure of typical numbers but 191 isn't a huge number given the size of the exercise (670 million voters, each polling station deals with around 1500 voters, you do the math). With the machines, at least you don't have the problem of thugs taking over smaller/more remote stations and "stuffing" the ballot boxes: the electoral officer can simply disable the machines.
Other polling locations seem to be operating on voter lists from 2001.
This has nothing to do with the voting machines. The machines don't contain the voter list.
Electronic voting in the U.S. is only slightly different from that in India.
Just as a modern PDA is just "slightly different" from a 1980s non-programmable pocket calculator.
The systems in India have simpler hardware and software,
That's a huge understatement. See here and here for example: the machines cannot be reprogrammed without inserting a new chip on which you have burned the new machine-language program, and even then they have tamper-detection mechanisms. No touchscreens, no Microsoft Windows, just push-buttons and rather simple electronics. That's really all you need.
have high-quality master backups of their recordings? At the very least, CD quality, but probably a higher-quality multitrack thing? I can't imagine a band actually losing access to their recorded work because of MP3.com's shutdown.
Nothing compares to the satisfaction of completing a good cryptic crossword. But it seems to me hardly anyone in America even knows about these things, more's the pity.
For the uninitiated, here's an excellent article from the Guardian describing what it's all about.
The Guardian also had an article on how these things seem to be popular only in cricket-playing parts of the world (Britain, Australia/New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, South Africa). Both pastimes take forever to complete (but the pleasure is in the process of playing rather than in the end result), both involve arcane rules that seem incomprehensible to the uninitiated, both depend heavily on convention and gentlemanly conduct. The link is subscriber-only, though.
When everyone in your city looks the same, dresses the same, speaks the same language, and belongs to the same religion
I don't know about Denmark, but have you actually been to, say, Paris or Amsterdam or Barcelona? They're a lot more multicultural than pretty much any city in the US except maybe New York and one or two others (and on the whole much less ghettoised than New York). Smaller towns in Europe are comparatively homogeneous, but no more so than mid-western American towns.
I'm much more sympathetic to the request knowing that 2/3rds disappears into the government ether.
I'm sympathetic too, but I'm finding it harder to pony up knowing that 2/3 of it will disappear into the government ether and it's not even my government (especially as I just did my own taxes today, and that's not my government either, it's a government that will spend my money on cluster-bombs and daisy-cutters... hm, perhaps I should indeed donate to PHK and the Danish government)
My laptop (HP Pavilion ZE5300 series) has eight blue LEDs. And one green LED, for the AC-in indicator. It's insane. But it does run linux flawlessly -- everything works, even the winmodem with linuxant's payware driver.
Pine has a superior IMAP implementation than any of these alternatives.
I was using imap with mutt back in 1999. I haven't needed to use imap since 2000, but I don't imagine the support has gone away.
What modifications are needed to it in the first place? The stock-binary is well-maintained. And it is easy enough to apply a patch to the source code & recompile.
So apply the patch and compile it. But Red Hat won't do it for you because they can't distribute a binary based on modified source.
Why take RMS's opinion on free/nonfree as scripture? It is funny to see gratis software that ships with source being bashed for not being libre more than progams which don't ship with source.
Not "more than", but "as much as". If Red Hat can't patch pine even to fix bugs, why should they distribute it? If you need it you can always compile it yourself.
I've scaled my Yahoo account back from a paid account to a plane old free account. I was a paid user for about 3 years. But the forced advertising was pissing me off too much (esp. with the flash advertising these days)
If you're a paid user you can download your mail via POP. I practically never visit the yahoo page. But I don't plan to renew either, I don't like their privacy policies.
Wouldn't it be a better idea if they concentrated on fuel-cell powered laptops instead of PDAs? I would kill to have a laptop whose battery lasted 40hours, and was topped-up using cigarette lighter gas (butane)!
If you RTFA, you'll notice that the 40 hour thing was for the laptop, not the PDA (Slashdot's summary is messed up as usual).
except for stuff like scientific simulations, complex graphics/video applications etc, which you can always install by hand when you want. I'd go with packages when available just because of the time saved in installing them. You won't even notice a difference between -O and -O2 compiler options: most programs spend their time waiting on I/O, not running (run top to see who's occupying your CPU right now).
A bigger issue is compatibility with various packages, whether binary or source. On FreeBSD for example you have the option of either a source-based install via the ports, or a binary package of the same port (via pkg_add -r) when available. The issue is not optimisation or "control": it's whether that package conflicts with the existing packages. Shortly before every release the FreeBSD ports team freezes the ports tree to be sure that there are no major problems; if you stick to that, or say to a release from Red Hat or SuSE, you'll have no issues, while if you're the type who keeps upgrading complex things like KDE to the latest and greatest version, you'll quickly run into conflicts.
It sounds like you're just mad that Trolltech decided not to go with a "free for commercial use" model like the LGPL
I'm perennially amazed that the GNOME zealots, who started out from the GNU "all software must be free" zealot camp, now argue that Qt is bad because it doesn't allow proprietary applications. (Actually, it does, if you buy a licence from Qt. Unlike, say, GNU's readline library, which was deliberately GPL'd and not LGPL'd by Stallman, who will not issue you a commercial licence.)
In fact, RMS even wrote an article on why you shouldn't use the LGPL for your next library. Without the backing RMS gave GNOME in its early days, when it was an unusable piece of crap and KDE had already hit a high-quality 1.0, it would never have got off the ground. (Remember GNOME 1.0? *shudder*) And yet the selling point now is that GNOME is more suitable to proprietary apps? I just can't figure out where all this is coming from.
If anything, Qt is a shining success story on how to make money with GPL'd software using a dual-licensing strategy. Far from continuing to vilify Troll Tech, the GNU/GNOME zealots ought to trumpet this story as a way to encourage more proprietary software companies to play nice with the linux world. (Peter Deutsch did the dual-licence thing long back with ghostscript, but he only released year-old versions of ghostscript under the GPL, and that's still the practice. Troll Tech releases current versions of Qt under GPL as well as their commercial licence.)
Which suggests that I cannot make a GPL'ed commercial application?
Where did you read that? It only says you cannot make proprietary/closed-source software with Qt, just as you can't with the GNU Readline library or the GNU Scientific Library or any other GPL'd software.
This becomes even more obvious when you consider that replacing elementary particles is a no-op.
Nope. This is a logical fallacy called the Paradox of the heap.
I think you misunderstood the earlier post. Grains of sand are not identical; replacing every grain of sand in a heap, one at a time, gives you a different heap (though it may "look" the same. Actually, it would probably be impossible to replace each grain with a new one in the exact same position, because of packing issues.) However, elementary particles are identical, in a very fundamental and non-trivial sense. It doesn't mean anything to talk of "replacing every electron in your body by a different electron": in programming terms this really is a quantum mechanical NO-OP (or at most a change of sign in the overall wavefunction of the universe, if the number of electrons being replaced is odd, but this doesn't affect anything).
I believe it was the other way around - without being hired, you can't get a visa.
That's right (you can get a tourist visa but can't work on it), and it's the same in every other country I know of including the US. Just recently I heard of a German (a senior 70-year-old professor from a well-known university) who did not realise he needed a work visa for a short (under 3 month) teaching stint, and tried to enter under the visa waiver programme showing his invitation papers; he was arrested, kept in night for a jail and deported. Now that's barbaric. Ironically if he hadn't shown the papers they'd probably have let him in, it's just that his hosts couldn't have paid him then.
Slashdot Mirror
from last November.
Janet J wasn't using her tit to promote a free software office suite for educational use.
Yes, the core KDE libraries (kdelibs) are under the LGPL. Just be careful not to link in any GPL'd code.
If so, does the Qt Commercial license still apply?
Yes.
I wonder when people will stop repeating this rubbish. Qt has been GPL'd for years. It is also available under a commercial licence, but that has nothing to do with KDE, it's in case you want to develop a closed-source application with Qt. (And it seems to be an excellent business model.)
As for qmail, you're not allowed to distribute modified versions, and the rules on distributing binaries are rather stringent and almost impossible for distributors to follow. That makes it not quite "free software" (by FSF's definition) or "open source". (However, you're allowed to distribute patches, and even bundle patches with unmodified source in a tarball; you can download one such tarball, called netqmail, from http://www.qmail.org).
It's not a 4 month marathon: it's around 3 weeks, in 4 phases.
The problems mentioned in the header have very little to do with voting machines: see this post. The repoll could simply be because thugs physically smashed the machines, for example; and even if it's mechanical failure, 191 is a pretty small number given the scale of these elections.
This should really be compared to what used to happen with ballot boxes: every Indian election has a few repolls, I'm not sure of typical numbers but 191 isn't a huge number given the size of the exercise (670 million voters, each polling station deals with around 1500 voters, you do the math). With the machines, at least you don't have the problem of thugs taking over smaller/more remote stations and "stuffing" the ballot boxes: the electoral officer can simply disable the machines.
Other polling locations seem to be operating on voter lists from 2001.
This has nothing to do with the voting machines. The machines don't contain the voter list.
Just as a modern PDA is just "slightly different" from a 1980s non-programmable pocket calculator.
The systems in India have simpler hardware and software, That's a huge understatement. See here and here for example: the machines cannot be reprogrammed without inserting a new chip on which you have burned the new machine-language program, and even then they have tamper-detection mechanisms. No touchscreens, no Microsoft Windows, just push-buttons and rather simple electronics. That's really all you need.
have high-quality master backups of their recordings? At the very least, CD quality, but probably a higher-quality multitrack thing? I can't imagine a band actually losing access to their recorded work because of MP3.com's shutdown.
Mercury. May not be a good idea to submerge electronics in it though. And it's expensive, and toxic.
For the uninitiated, here's an excellent article from the Guardian describing what it's all about.
The Guardian also had an article on how these things seem to be popular only in cricket-playing parts of the world (Britain, Australia/New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, South Africa). Both pastimes take forever to complete (but the pleasure is in the process of playing rather than in the end result), both involve arcane rules that seem incomprehensible to the uninitiated, both depend heavily on convention and gentlemanly conduct. The link is subscriber-only, though.
I don't know about Denmark, but have you actually been to, say, Paris or Amsterdam or Barcelona? They're a lot more multicultural than pretty much any city in the US except maybe New York and one or two others (and on the whole much less ghettoised than New York). Smaller towns in Europe are comparatively homogeneous, but no more so than mid-western American towns.
I'm sympathetic too, but I'm finding it harder to pony up knowing that 2/3 of it will disappear into the government ether and it's not even my government (especially as I just did my own taxes today, and that's not my government either, it's a government that will spend my money on cluster-bombs and daisy-cutters... hm, perhaps I should indeed donate to PHK and the Danish government)
Make that 12 blue and 1 green LED I guess. I missed out quite a few in my case -- I have all the ones you mention, and my HD activity one is blue too.
My laptop (HP Pavilion ZE5300 series) has eight blue LEDs. And one green LED, for the AC-in indicator. It's insane. But it does run linux flawlessly -- everything works, even the winmodem with linuxant's payware driver.
Still no cigar. It should read, "We actually thought Cisco had a better track record..."
I was using imap with mutt back in 1999. I haven't needed to use imap since 2000, but I don't imagine the support has gone away.
What modifications are needed to it in the first place? The stock-binary is well-maintained. And it is easy enough to apply a patch to the source code & recompile.
So apply the patch and compile it. But Red Hat won't do it for you because they can't distribute a binary based on modified source.
Why take RMS's opinion on free/nonfree as scripture? It is funny to see gratis software that ships with source being bashed for not being libre more than progams which don't ship with source.
Not "more than", but "as much as". If Red Hat can't patch pine even to fix bugs, why should they distribute it? If you need it you can always compile it yourself.
If you're a paid user you can download your mail via POP. I practically never visit the yahoo page. But I don't plan to renew either, I don't like their privacy policies.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that the 40 hour thing was for the laptop, not the PDA (Slashdot's summary is messed up as usual).
A bigger issue is compatibility with various packages, whether binary or source. On FreeBSD for example you have the option of either a source-based install via the ports, or a binary package of the same port (via pkg_add -r) when available. The issue is not optimisation or "control": it's whether that package conflicts with the existing packages. Shortly before every release the FreeBSD ports team freezes the ports tree to be sure that there are no major problems; if you stick to that, or say to a release from Red Hat or SuSE, you'll have no issues, while if you're the type who keeps upgrading complex things like KDE to the latest and greatest version, you'll quickly run into conflicts.
Nope that wasn't directed at you :)
I'm perennially amazed that the GNOME zealots, who started out from the GNU "all software must be free" zealot camp, now argue that Qt is bad because it doesn't allow proprietary applications. (Actually, it does, if you buy a licence from Qt. Unlike, say, GNU's readline library, which was deliberately GPL'd and not LGPL'd by Stallman, who will not issue you a commercial licence.)
In fact, RMS even wrote an article on why you shouldn't use the LGPL for your next library. Without the backing RMS gave GNOME in its early days, when it was an unusable piece of crap and KDE had already hit a high-quality 1.0, it would never have got off the ground. (Remember GNOME 1.0? *shudder*) And yet the selling point now is that GNOME is more suitable to proprietary apps? I just can't figure out where all this is coming from.
If anything, Qt is a shining success story on how to make money with GPL'd software using a dual-licensing strategy. Far from continuing to vilify Troll Tech, the GNU/GNOME zealots ought to trumpet this story as a way to encourage more proprietary software companies to play nice with the linux world. (Peter Deutsch did the dual-licence thing long back with ghostscript, but he only released year-old versions of ghostscript under the GPL, and that's still the practice. Troll Tech releases current versions of Qt under GPL as well as their commercial licence.)
Where did you read that? It only says you cannot make proprietary/closed-source software with Qt, just as you can't with the GNU Readline library or the GNU Scientific Library or any other GPL'd software.
Nope. This is a logical fallacy called the Paradox of the heap.
I think you misunderstood the earlier post. Grains of sand are not identical; replacing every grain of sand in a heap, one at a time, gives you a different heap (though it may "look" the same. Actually, it would probably be impossible to replace each grain with a new one in the exact same position, because of packing issues.) However, elementary particles are identical, in a very fundamental and non-trivial sense. It doesn't mean anything to talk of "replacing every electron in your body by a different electron": in programming terms this really is a quantum mechanical NO-OP (or at most a change of sign in the overall wavefunction of the universe, if the number of electrons being replaced is odd, but this doesn't affect anything).
I believe it was the other way around - without being hired, you can't get a visa.
That's right (you can get a tourist visa but can't work on it), and it's the same in every other country I know of including the US. Just recently I heard of a German (a senior 70-year-old professor from a well-known university) who did not realise he needed a work visa for a short (under 3 month) teaching stint, and tried to enter under the visa waiver programme showing his invitation papers; he was arrested, kept in night for a jail and deported. Now that's barbaric. Ironically if he hadn't shown the papers they'd probably have let him in, it's just that his hosts couldn't have paid him then.