I'll grant that Arch takes a while to grok -- I spent at least a few days wrapping my mind around it. Actually following along with the examples in the tutorial helps.
WRT your "unfinished" impression: The code itself is very clean, well-polished, readable, and robust. My only qualm is with the error-handling; there are lots and lots of sanity checks throughout, but the error messages aren't always as useful as they could be (asking for a revision that doesn't exist might give something like "File not found", or even more opaque, rather than "that revision does not exist"). Bugs that cause such things to happen without involvement of user error are extremely uncommon.
With regard to speed, I'm not sure if you'recomparing SVN to CVS or Arch; if the latter, be sure you're comparing against tla 1.1 or later with a revision library enabled. (Even more optimizations are on their way -- Chris Mason of SuSe has proposed a patch which brings the time to replay 100 changesets down to about 4 seconds in optimal conditions; some cleaned-up variant may well make it into tla 1.2 or 1.3).
I distinctly recall commitinfo not being useful for this in actual practice. It was a while ago, so I'm not sure why -- perhaps it was running on the client rather than the server? (Of course, what we *really* need is a 3rd machine set up as the canonical dev environment running the tests, neither the client nor the revision control server -- something which tla-pqm makes trivial).
I can ask the IT lead why that was, if you're really curious; his memory's better than mine.
Does Subversion really handle the repeated merge problem now?
Hmm -- I don't know for sure on Subversion; perhaps someone else here will comment. I'm positive that Arch does (it's what I use personally), and pretty sure that BitKeeper does.
Just curious -- any particular reason you're not considering Arch?
is a heckuvalot of work, and not something I'm really sure is worthwhile -- particularly with the variety of alternatives available.
Aegis, GNU Arch (my personal favorite), Subversion, BitKeeper... all of these work around CVS's worst failings. What's unfortunate is how few people have had their expectations of what a revision control system should do set far too low by CVS.
A few examples of features one should expect of a modern revision control system:
Easy branching - Branching and merging in CVS is a royal PITA, especially remerging branches which have had some changes mutually applied. CVS has a number of other design bugs related to branching -- for instance, files added on a branch suddenly show up on the HEAD when they shouldn't -- that need to be worked around, sometimes painfully.
Corruption-resistant repository formats - Because CVS rewrites the,v files every time a change is made, a CVS server that crashes in the middle of an operation can cause data loss. (Not all of the alternatives are better -- a few years back, for instance, the BitKeeper installation at my workplace had a tendency to corrupt its repositories at well. BitKeeper, however, can at least detect corruption -- in the case of CVS, it's often never picked up on 'till one tries to check out a particular old version. Arch avoids the whole issue by never rewriting or removing files which have been added to the repository, as well as supporting md5sums and cryptographic signatures in the 1.2 branch to detect either low-level corruption or malicious tampering).
Changeset orientation - Actually checking in a set of related changes as one changeset, and attaching metadata (log entries and whatnot) to that complete set. This also makes CVS's "tagging" very cheap -- instead of needing to record the revision number of each file in the repository, only the changeset number of the repository need be tracked.
Intuiting revision control history - A number of tools such as cvsps and cscvs (the latter which I help maintain) will analyze a CVS repository's history and break it down into changesets. This information can be used for a global "who-did-what" or the repository as a whole (whereas in CVS one can only view history for an individual file without extra tools), for importing a CVS repository's history into a changeset-oriented revision control system (most of cscvs's users use it strictly for CVS->Arch conversions), and the like. With CVS, this is a time-consuming and error-prone operation; much of the information just isn't stored on the server at all, so the tool being used needs to try to figure it out. Merges are even worse -- there's no metadata whatsoever available in CVS to distinguish a merge from any other commit, which makes a nmuber of advanced merging algorithms impossible. A modern revision control system, on the other hand, stores all this information up-front; there's no need for the error-prone and tedious process of having some 3rd-party tool intuit it by looking at the revision control history for each individual file.
Automated testing - Having a test suite that automatically runs on every proposed commit is next to impossible to do accurately in CVS (as there's no good way to figure out which changes need to be grouped together into a test run), and CVS has no way to prevent a commit from happening until some external test has been run. Aegis, on the other hand, has this built in as core functionality, and Arch makes it trivial to script when using the available patch queue manager tool, tla-pqm.
Distributed operation - This isn't often a dealbreaker in commercial environments, but it's exceedingly useful doing Free Software development; indeed, Linus has said that he'll under no circumstances consider switching to a revision control system without it. A system with distributed repository support (such as Arch, or BitKeeper -- Aegis has rudimentry support, but it's error-prone, while Subversion has none at all) can allow 3rd parties to crea
Yes, I can. Just because people vary in height, would you claim that I can't call some tall and others short?
I would have no problem with OBJECTIVE measurements. Things like intelligence, "how dumb you are", stupidity, and so forth are subjective. I don't want to create a world where some people are labelled as being stupid by another class that thinks they somehow are not, especially when there is the implication that these people somehow "deserve" it.
But are you tall or short? That's subjective -- I'm not measuring centimeters, after all, I'm just arbitrarily saying that this person is tall and that person is short. Is it morally wrong for me to think some people are short, because what qualifies as "short" is subjective?
That said, the means I use to class people into "smart" or "dumb" for purposes of this argument are entirely objective, not to mention context-specific. See below.
Where this differs from the Nigerian Scam is that opening email attachments is something that's new. Con men and scammers have been around for the ages, and a need for caution in financial matters has been constant for thousands of years. Stories condemning individuals who fail to exercise caution in caring for their families' fortunes have been part of the collective consciousness for ages.
But these con men are SMART. They don't use the same thing. They modify it. They add things. They modernize it. They fix the flaws. And so on. Snake oil salesmen have been around for ages. The difference is that they don't sell snake oil anymore. This means that the general population still falls for them.
See, this is where I'm running into your general presumption that the general population is dumb, and that while the elites like you and me are intelligent enough to avoid being scammed, this "general population" is by and large gullible enough to not recognize an old con wearing a new skin.
Certainly, you disagree with me using the word "dumb" to describe anyone -- you'd prefer that I used very polite words to refer to the general population, yet at the same time you argue to the effect that the average member of the populace as a whole is less capable of fending for themselves than you or I am; in short, your argument is that there exists some elite class, and that you and I are members thereof.
Understand me: When I use the word "dumb", I am not referring to the general population as a whole. I am referring to a subset of that population, a small subset, which is demonstrably incapable of intelligently looking out for their own interests.
I hold that the vast majority of humanity is capable of fending for themselves, and thus that protecting the relative few who are not in fact capable of such at the expense of all is foolhardy.
It may be foolhardy but it is less elitist. Under your system, who dictates that someone is dumb? For instance, why not LEGALIZE these scams? After all, the "smart ones" will not fall for it, and the "dumb ones" deserve it. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that elitist?
No, incidentally, it's not what I want -- because rewarding any individual for lying to others is wrong.
Even if it were what I wanted -- no, it's not elitist. The "smart ones" and "dumb ones" in the scenario you propose are determined not by some subjective means, but by whether they fall victim to a 3rd-party scam -- an entirely objective determination. You've made it clear you wouldn't consider "you must be this height" signs at amusement park rides to be elitist although they classify people into "tall" or "short" based on some objective mechanism -- why would you find some objection here? (And yes, they're context-sensitive -- the amusement park sign doesn't say you're generally tall, but that you're too tall to go on the ride safely; the scammer whose victims either fall prey or catch on likewise establish themselves as smart
And realistically, if you don't think Starbucks is worth $4 a coffe, then you're not a Starbucks customer.
Thing is, right now, I have lots of reasons to go somewhere other than Starbucks. Not only do the three coffeehouses in town I prefer make dramatically better coffee, but they all have free WiFi.
Free WiFi wouldn't win me back as a Starbucks customer -- but it would at least give me one less reason not to be one.
The suggestion is that they would release archaic code they already have but which is only of very limited or specialized use -- not that they'd write more of it.
Relying on common sense can lead to major mistakes. For example, common sense says that dropping a 100kg weight and a 10kg weight will result in the 100kg weight hitting the ground first. Science says that's not true. I personally rely on rationality over common sense.
Common sense once said that. However, nowadays, any individual with a public-school education knows otherwise. Therefore, this is no longer common sense. Common sense, in short, is the set of things that an average individual should know -- via schooling, teaching from ones' parents, etc etc.
In any case, common sense varies with people. You cannot claim some person is "dumb" for falling to these schemes.
Yes, I can. Just because people vary in height, would you claim that I can't call some tall and others short?
In any case, common sense varies with people. You cannot claim some person is "dumb" for falling to these schemes. For example, there are MILLIONS of people clicking on attached e-mail links (attached files, links to websites, virsuses, etc). That might be dumb to a person like you, who has knowledge of computers (and hence probably never clicks on an attached file). But claiming that these people are dumb is just wrong. The VAST MAJORITY of people, in this case, are not like you.
Quite right. Not clicking on attachments isn't common sense yet -- at least not in most cases. I'd say there are some groups of people (particularly the young in areas with high computer use) in which this is common sense, but I'll certainly agree that it isn't, as of yet, for the general case.
Where this differs from the Nigerian Scam is that opening email attachments is something that's new. Con men and scammers have been around for the ages, and a need for caution in financial matters has been constant for thousands of years. Stories condemning individuals who fail to exercise caution in caring for their families' fortunes have been part of the collective consciousness for ages. The comparison you propose between this and something so new as behaviour making one succeptible to computer viruses is simply untenable.
How can *I* be elitist? I think it's YOU who is more elitist. Aren't you closer to the definition than me?
Arguing that the poor are somehow so feeble-minded as to need protections (such as a mandatory "fraud insurance" tax) enacted by right-thinking individuals such as yourself is as elitist a position as I can think of. I hold that the vast majority of humanity is capable of fending for themselves, and thus that protecting the relative few who are not in fact capable of such at the expense of all is foolhardy.
If we take the average man to be as intelligent as we are (an antithesis of the elitist view), then is that man not capable of deciding for himself whether it is more beneficial for him to purchase fraud insurance, or trust to his judgement and take his chances? In short: If you believe that you are better able to decide what is best for the average man than he himself is, "elitist" is the most effective word I can find.
One just needs to look at the stock market, or puchase of cars, or houses, or whatever. There is no such thing as 'too good to be true' because people have different thresholds. You cannot use that.
First off, I object -- quite strongly -- to you taking single phrase out of my argument and ignoring the rest. That said, let me try to defend that one phrase, on the premise you're unable to find anything disagreeable with the rest.
"Too good to be true" is a reference to the effect that an individual is responsible for maintaining and using some level of that thing known as "common sense". I will certainly agree that what qualifies as common sense is prone to variant interpretation -- but that's a matter of degree. We certainly might disagree on whether a 15% return on a corporate bond is something which a reasonable person should be suspicious of, but neither of us is likely to disagree that a promised 3000% return requiring a substantial upfront investment is something with regard to which a reasonable person should see fit to engage in substantial due dicipline.
If my argument is elitist, it is such only inasmuch as it presumes that the average individual is reasonably intelligent and capable of looking out for their own best interests. Frankly, I believe that it is your position -- which presumes the average individual to be a simple-minded fool who must be protected lest they throw away their fortune -- to be elitist.
FAT support without long filenames may still be useful to embedded device manufacturers, but it's *not* useful to (say) the bulk of folks making interactive use of the vfat driver on Linux.
There is no such thing as taking compassion too far!!!... Compassion and empathy comes from some terrible thing that happens to a person. It NEVER justifies the victim's deeds, regardless of what those deeds are.
Presume, then, the following:
Some person commits a bad deed which causes harm to a number of others. Some consequence of this deed comes around to the individual who committed the harm. Should others, out of compassion, save the "victim" from what might be considered the just desserts of their actions?
Consider the case where "just desserts" may be criminal charges of some variety. The "compassionate" thing to do might be for a governor (or like individual with the power to do so) to forgive all criminals of their crimes, for instance; is that to say that this is an appropriate course of action?
The problem with the world is not this guy. No he isn't. Instead, the problem is people like you... people who want to hurt those making mistakes
Not that we wish to do harm to those making mistakes out of malice, but we wish to see bad deeds -- such as giving money earned by others to criminals, and thus encouraging future criminal behaviour -- punished. Fortunately, in cases such as this, the bad deed is its own reward, so no additional punishment is necessary -- the man who gives his money, and that borrowed from others, to thieves finds himself amply rewarded by his actions by the loss of his savings, a result which (while it will not help those who must pay higher interest rates because of his defaulted loans) discourages others from making the same error.
Ideally, others will learn from this story, and fewer will fall victim to this scam, and so there will be less reward in the future for the bad people who would perpetrate such a thing. The goal, then, is the reduction in people who will fall victim to this scam, and thus a reduction in profit to be made via this scam, and thus a reduction in individuals perpetrating the scam.
Yes, we have little compassion with regard to the effects on those whose greed leads them to victimhood -- but the end result (the reduction in scammers) is a Good Thing, and the people who come to harm via being victims did so not by chance but by their own actions... so, que sera sera, no?
Yes I'm angry at the Slashdot response... All of you lack a heart... and on Christmas to boot...:(
It's not that we're heartless -- not all of us, anyhow -- but that we aren't headless either, on Christmas or otherwise.
If you don't defend your patent with due diligance, (say, wait 15 years to sue someone) you can run into legal difficulties.
If you wait 15 years to sue someone after you know about their specific use, yes, you might have some issues in that specific case. That's not to say, however, that you can't still sue someone else who is just starting to use the technology just because you waited on a different party's usage.
The cases are different because in the former you're knowingly allowing them to become dependant on the technology you hold rights to without informing them of your claim; there's a variety of estoppel, IIRC, which can apply in that situation. There's no reason, however, why the patent can't still be enforced against a different party whose usage has not been hitherto overlooked; patents, unlike trademarks, need not be defended to be valid.
I left CSU, Chico after four years with a surplus in the bank. Tuition was only a bit over $2000 per year, books and such about $800 -- I paid as I went, and never needed a single loan.
That said, in several industries, the whole matter of having a degree at all is really quite optional. Several of the best engineers I know don't, and their careers are getting along just fine. Further, in the job I have now, I was selected from a pool of candidates which included multiple PHDs.
Further, living in Texas (as I do now), the taxes I pay are minimal (there are no state income taxes here), so I'm able to live far more comfortably than I could in Canada. (That said, I certainly don't have the same kind of safety nets available in the event of some severe hardship).
Folks like the grandparent poster who claim that a tremendously expensive education is mandatory in the US (except in some specialized fields such as medicine) are simply full of it.
If people can fly you around the world, set up fake guards, metal cases filled with cash, etc, it is SO EASY for someone to fall for that. None of you have any idea how sophisticated scammers are.
If one is willing to suspend sense in favor of appearances, certainly.
I've been a victim of fraud -- to the tune of about $5000, granted a much smaller scale. Stupidity on my part not to recognize it and back out sooner, yes -- but not even nearly as much stupidity as this fellow here exhibited. Since when did the presence of guards, chemists, etc. make a scenario which has long been running as a high-dollar scam into something which an individual can reasonably take part in without an expectation of getting ripped off? If I walk into a bank which I believe to be a branch of a legitimate and well-known organization and a man whom I believe to be a legitimate representative of said organization offers me a deal that's too good to be true, I have a responsibility to myself and to those whom I care for to recognize it as too good to be true, and carefully consider the risks involved, despite the apparent legitimacy of the individual who may be making the offer. Those who don't do that -- who accept the apparent authority of those who would pull the wool over their eyes -- are idiots, and I have no compunctions with saying so directly.
Most people here are conservatives and quite clueless on these issues, not to mention heartless.
If by "clueless" you mean presuming that the scammers are indeed running an operation which appears (based on appearances alone, without critical thinking or reasearch applied) to be a scam, absolutely not. As for "heartless" -- damn straight. I may have a heart, on occasion -- but I prefer to do my thinking with my head, particularly when my finances are at stake.
They already own the patent -- the PTO granted it to them, and patents (unlike trademarks) don't need to be defended in order to maintain their ownership.
This package includes not only reference code but also several patent licenses -- and a patent applies to any implementation that uses the covered technique, not just theirs.
So while they may be describing this move as fairly harmless, I'm not inclined to be so sure.
The obvious answer would be a "No support is offered" rule, but what happens when someone sues or brings an official complaint?
Have you seen the disclaimer of liability that GPLed (and most other Free) software carries? It's pretty damned heavy-duty.
If you can show me a US case in which a distributor of Free software was forced to offer support to a customer who had no separate and paid-for support contract, then perhaps I'll consider your argument to have merit. At present, though, I disagree that the liability is so severe as you make it to be.
I just went by the bookstore earlier today and ended up passing by one of Connelly's latest (Lost Light) in favor of another from a few years ago. (Having read the first chapter, Lost Light was hard to put down -- but the $13 price at a discount book store where most titles are closer to $4 was just a bit much). Waiting for the softcover to come out and reading the book later just makes more sense from an economic perspective if nothing else.
I'll believe WBEM is useful when the servlet engines, web servers, VPN software and firewall systems I already use are WBEM compliant -- and not a moment before.
"XML" in and of itself isn't a format -- more a "meta-format" maybe. One can still make closed formats on top of XML, and plenty of people do that.
(Since you ask "where is that on Linux", btw: Damn near everywhere. Applications from OpenOffice to Glade save in XML-based, documented, non-patent-encumbered formats. Go stick that in your pipe and smoke it).
The DB filesystem core -- frankly, it's been done before (with built-in revision control, even -- see Katie for an example), and nobody was impressed. Maybe it'll be done again some time if anyone sees a reason to bother.
And no, POSIX isn't enough by way of standard APIs -- if one can't write a complete, modern app with open, cross-platform APIs, I'm not interested.
Name buzzwords all you like -- they don't close the gap between Linux and Windows in terms of ease-of-development.
I think Novell/IBM takeover of Ximian may be very dangerous for the freedom of software, hmm?
How so?
It's not like they can withdraw the licensing they've offered older versions, or anything like that. Besides, it's in IBM's interest to be seen as The Good Guys -- it's good for their services business, and for business in general. (I know *I've* been urging my company to do more business with IBM since they've started doing the responsible-OSS-community-members thing).
What could IBM do with the resources they've bought that would be worth more than this massive and widespread goodwill?
I know perfectly well what the FSF thinks. I think they're wrong.
The best way for Free libraries to take over the world is to make them useful everywhere. Free applications will follow. Doing otherwise simply leads to extra work in the form of 3rd parties reimplementing the functionality of GPLed libraries with *BSD- or proprietary-licensed code.
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I'll grant that Arch takes a while to grok -- I spent at least a few days wrapping my mind around it. Actually following along with the examples in the tutorial helps.
WRT your "unfinished" impression: The code itself is very clean, well-polished, readable, and robust. My only qualm is with the error-handling; there are lots and lots of sanity checks throughout, but the error messages aren't always as useful as they could be (asking for a revision that doesn't exist might give something like "File not found", or even more opaque, rather than "that revision does not exist"). Bugs that cause such things to happen without involvement of user error are extremely uncommon.
With regard to speed, I'm not sure if you'recomparing SVN to CVS or Arch; if the latter, be sure you're comparing against tla 1.1 or later with a revision library enabled. (Even more optimizations are on their way -- Chris Mason of SuSe has proposed a patch which brings the time to replay 100 changesets down to about 4 seconds in optimal conditions; some cleaned-up variant may well make it into tla 1.2 or 1.3).
I distinctly recall commitinfo not being useful for this in actual practice. It was a while ago, so I'm not sure why -- perhaps it was running on the client rather than the server? (Of course, what we *really* need is a 3rd machine set up as the canonical dev environment running the tests, neither the client nor the revision control server -- something which tla-pqm makes trivial).
I can ask the IT lead why that was, if you're really curious; his memory's better than mine.
Does Subversion really handle the repeated merge problem now?
Hmm -- I don't know for sure on Subversion; perhaps someone else here will comment. I'm positive that Arch does (it's what I use personally), and pretty sure that BitKeeper does.
Just curious -- any particular reason you're not considering Arch?
Aegis, GNU Arch (my personal favorite), Subversion, BitKeeper... all of these work around CVS's worst failings. What's unfortunate is how few people have had their expectations of what a revision control system should do set far too low by CVS.
A few examples of features one should expect of a modern revision control system:
There are always ways to make someone talk, be it offering a good plea bargain (or a wad of cash) or threatening bodily harm.
Erasing the memories of those involved is thus quite worthwhile.
But are you tall or short? That's subjective -- I'm not measuring centimeters, after all, I'm just arbitrarily saying that this person is tall and that person is short. Is it morally wrong for me to think some people are short, because what qualifies as "short" is subjective?
That said, the means I use to class people into "smart" or "dumb" for purposes of this argument are entirely objective, not to mention context-specific. See below.
See, this is where I'm running into your general presumption that the general population is dumb, and that while the elites like you and me are intelligent enough to avoid being scammed, this "general population" is by and large gullible enough to not recognize an old con wearing a new skin.
Certainly, you disagree with me using the word "dumb" to describe anyone -- you'd prefer that I used very polite words to refer to the general population, yet at the same time you argue to the effect that the average member of the populace as a whole is less capable of fending for themselves than you or I am; in short, your argument is that there exists some elite class, and that you and I are members thereof.
Understand me: When I use the word "dumb", I am not referring to the general population as a whole. I am referring to a subset of that population, a small subset, which is demonstrably incapable of intelligently looking out for their own interests.
No, incidentally, it's not what I want -- because rewarding any individual for lying to others is wrong.
Even if it were what I wanted -- no, it's not elitist. The "smart ones" and "dumb ones" in the scenario you propose are determined not by some subjective means, but by whether they fall victim to a 3rd-party scam -- an entirely objective determination. You've made it clear you wouldn't consider "you must be this height" signs at amusement park rides to be elitist although they classify people into "tall" or "short" based on some objective mechanism -- why would you find some objection here? (And yes, they're context-sensitive -- the amusement park sign doesn't say you're generally tall, but that you're too tall to go on the ride safely; the scammer whose victims either fall prey or catch on likewise establish themselves as smart
And realistically, if you don't think Starbucks is worth $4 a coffe, then you're not a Starbucks customer.
Thing is, right now, I have lots of reasons to go somewhere other than Starbucks. Not only do the three coffeehouses in town I prefer make dramatically better coffee, but they all have free WiFi.
Free WiFi wouldn't win me back as a Starbucks customer -- but it would at least give me one less reason not to be one.
The suggestion is that they would release archaic code they already have but which is only of very limited or specialized use -- not that they'd write more of it.
Yes, I can. Just because people vary in height, would you claim that I can't call some tall and others short?
Quite right. Not clicking on attachments isn't common sense yet -- at least not in most cases. I'd say there are some groups of people (particularly the young in areas with high computer use) in which this is common sense, but I'll certainly agree that it isn't, as of yet, for the general case.
Where this differs from the Nigerian Scam is that opening email attachments is something that's new. Con men and scammers have been around for the ages, and a need for caution in financial matters has been constant for thousands of years. Stories condemning individuals who fail to exercise caution in caring for their families' fortunes have been part of the collective consciousness for ages. The comparison you propose between this and something so new as behaviour making one succeptible to computer viruses is simply untenable.
Arguing that the poor are somehow so feeble-minded as to need protections (such as a mandatory "fraud insurance" tax) enacted by right-thinking individuals such as yourself is as elitist a position as I can think of. I hold that the vast majority of humanity is capable of fending for themselves, and thus that protecting the relative few who are not in fact capable of such at the expense of all is foolhardy.
If we take the average man to be as intelligent as we are (an antithesis of the elitist view), then is that man not capable of deciding for himself whether it is more beneficial for him to purchase fraud insurance, or trust to his judgement and take his chances? In short: If you believe that you are better able to decide what is best for the average man than he himself is, "elitist" is the most effective word I can find.
One just needs to look at the stock market, or puchase of cars, or houses, or whatever. There is no such thing as 'too good to be true' because people have different thresholds. You cannot use that.
First off, I object -- quite strongly -- to you taking single phrase out of my argument and ignoring the rest. That said, let me try to defend that one phrase, on the premise you're unable to find anything disagreeable with the rest.
"Too good to be true" is a reference to the effect that an individual is responsible for maintaining and using some level of that thing known as "common sense". I will certainly agree that what qualifies as common sense is prone to variant interpretation -- but that's a matter of degree. We certainly might disagree on whether a 15% return on a corporate bond is something which a reasonable person should be suspicious of, but neither of us is likely to disagree that a promised 3000% return requiring a substantial upfront investment is something with regard to which a reasonable person should see fit to engage in substantial due dicipline.
If my argument is elitist, it is such only inasmuch as it presumes that the average individual is reasonably intelligent and capable of looking out for their own best interests. Frankly, I believe that it is your position -- which presumes the average individual to be a simple-minded fool who must be protected lest they throw away their fortune -- to be elitist.
That's hardly a mitigating factor.
FAT support without long filenames may still be useful to embedded device manufacturers, but it's *not* useful to (say) the bulk of folks making interactive use of the vfat driver on Linux.
There is no such thing as taking compassion too far!!! ... Compassion and empathy comes from some terrible thing that happens to a person. It NEVER justifies the victim's deeds, regardless of what those deeds are.
:(
Presume, then, the following:
Some person commits a bad deed which causes harm to a number of others. Some consequence of this deed comes around to the individual who committed the harm. Should others, out of compassion, save the "victim" from what might be considered the just desserts of their actions?
Consider the case where "just desserts" may be criminal charges of some variety. The "compassionate" thing to do might be for a governor (or like individual with the power to do so) to forgive all criminals of their crimes, for instance; is that to say that this is an appropriate course of action?
The problem with the world is not this guy. No he isn't. Instead, the problem is people like you... people who want to hurt those making mistakes
Not that we wish to do harm to those making mistakes out of malice, but we wish to see bad deeds -- such as giving money earned by others to criminals, and thus encouraging future criminal behaviour -- punished. Fortunately, in cases such as this, the bad deed is its own reward, so no additional punishment is necessary -- the man who gives his money, and that borrowed from others, to thieves finds himself amply rewarded by his actions by the loss of his savings, a result which (while it will not help those who must pay higher interest rates because of his defaulted loans) discourages others from making the same error.
Ideally, others will learn from this story, and fewer will fall victim to this scam, and so there will be less reward in the future for the bad people who would perpetrate such a thing. The goal, then, is the reduction in people who will fall victim to this scam, and thus a reduction in profit to be made via this scam, and thus a reduction in individuals perpetrating the scam.
Yes, we have little compassion with regard to the effects on those whose greed leads them to victimhood -- but the end result (the reduction in scammers) is a Good Thing, and the people who come to harm via being victims did so not by chance but by their own actions... so, que sera sera, no?
Yes I'm angry at the Slashdot response... All of you lack a heart... and on Christmas to boot...
It's not that we're heartless -- not all of us, anyhow -- but that we aren't headless either, on Christmas or otherwise.
If you don't defend your patent with due diligance, (say, wait 15 years to sue someone) you can run into legal difficulties.
If you wait 15 years to sue someone after you know about their specific use, yes, you might have some issues in that specific case. That's not to say, however, that you can't still sue someone else who is just starting to use the technology just because you waited on a different party's usage.
The cases are different because in the former you're knowingly allowing them to become dependant on the technology you hold rights to without informing them of your claim; there's a variety of estoppel, IIRC, which can apply in that situation. There's no reason, however, why the patent can't still be enforced against a different party whose usage has not been hitherto overlooked; patents, unlike trademarks, need not be defended to be valid.
I left CSU, Chico after four years with a surplus in the bank. Tuition was only a bit over $2000 per year, books and such about $800 -- I paid as I went, and never needed a single loan.
That said, in several industries, the whole matter of having a degree at all is really quite optional. Several of the best engineers I know don't, and their careers are getting along just fine. Further, in the job I have now, I was selected from a pool of candidates which included multiple PHDs.
Further, living in Texas (as I do now), the taxes I pay are minimal (there are no state income taxes here), so I'm able to live far more comfortably than I could in Canada. (That said, I certainly don't have the same kind of safety nets available in the event of some severe hardship).
Folks like the grandparent poster who claim that a tremendously expensive education is mandatory in the US (except in some specialized fields such as medicine) are simply full of it.
If people can fly you around the world, set up fake guards, metal cases filled with cash, etc, it is SO EASY for someone to fall for that. None of you have any idea how sophisticated scammers are.
If one is willing to suspend sense in favor of appearances, certainly.
I've been a victim of fraud -- to the tune of about $5000, granted a much smaller scale. Stupidity on my part not to recognize it and back out sooner, yes -- but not even nearly as much stupidity as this fellow here exhibited. Since when did the presence of guards, chemists, etc. make a scenario which has long been running as a high-dollar scam into something which an individual can reasonably take part in without an expectation of getting ripped off? If I walk into a bank which I believe to be a branch of a legitimate and well-known organization and a man whom I believe to be a legitimate representative of said organization offers me a deal that's too good to be true, I have a responsibility to myself and to those whom I care for to recognize it as too good to be true, and carefully consider the risks involved, despite the apparent legitimacy of the individual who may be making the offer. Those who don't do that -- who accept the apparent authority of those who would pull the wool over their eyes -- are idiots, and I have no compunctions with saying so directly.
Most people here are conservatives and quite clueless on these issues, not to mention heartless.
If by "clueless" you mean presuming that the scammers are indeed running an operation which appears (based on appearances alone, without critical thinking or reasearch applied) to be a scam, absolutely not. As for "heartless" -- damn straight. I may have a heart, on occasion -- but I prefer to do my thinking with my head, particularly when my finances are at stake.
Why?
They already own the patent -- the PTO granted it to them, and patents (unlike trademarks) don't need to be defended in order to maintain their ownership.
This package includes not only reference code but also several patent licenses -- and a patent applies to any implementation that uses the covered technique, not just theirs.
So while they may be describing this move as fairly harmless, I'm not inclined to be so sure.
The obvious answer would be a "No support is offered" rule, but what happens when someone sues or brings an official complaint?
Have you seen the disclaimer of liability that GPLed (and most other Free) software carries? It's pretty damned heavy-duty.
If you can show me a US case in which a distributor of Free software was forced to offer support to a customer who had no separate and paid-for support contract, then perhaps I'll consider your argument to have merit. At present, though, I disagree that the liability is so severe as you make it to be.
Damn you, introducing *more* people to A Song of Fire and Ice?
:)
How am I supposed to find a copy of A Feast For Crows in the bookstore if there're so many people looking for it the moment it comes out?
Fully agreed.
I just went by the bookstore earlier today and ended up passing by one of Connelly's latest (Lost Light) in favor of another from a few years ago. (Having read the first chapter, Lost Light was hard to put down -- but the $13 price at a discount book store where most titles are closer to $4 was just a bit much). Waiting for the softcover to come out and reading the book later just makes more sense from an economic perspective if nothing else.
Oh, hush.
I'll believe WBEM is useful when the servlet engines, web servers, VPN software and firewall systems I already use are WBEM compliant -- and not a moment before.
"XML" in and of itself isn't a format -- more a "meta-format" maybe. One can still make closed formats on top of XML, and plenty of people do that.
(Since you ask "where is that on Linux", btw: Damn near everywhere. Applications from OpenOffice to Glade save in XML-based, documented, non-patent-encumbered formats. Go stick that in your pipe and smoke it).
The DB filesystem core -- frankly, it's been done before (with built-in revision control, even -- see Katie for an example), and nobody was impressed. Maybe it'll be done again some time if anyone sees a reason to bother.
And no, POSIX isn't enough by way of standard APIs -- if one can't write a complete, modern app with open, cross-platform APIs, I'm not interested.
Name buzzwords all you like -- they don't close the gap between Linux and Windows in terms of ease-of-development.
I think Novell/IBM takeover of Ximian may be very dangerous for the freedom of software, hmm?
How so?
It's not like they can withdraw the licensing they've offered older versions, or anything like that. Besides, it's in IBM's interest to be seen as The Good Guys -- it's good for their services business, and for business in general. (I know *I've* been urging my company to do more business with IBM since they've started doing the responsible-OSS-community-members thing).
What could IBM do with the resources they've bought that would be worth more than this massive and widespread goodwill?
I know perfectly well what the FSF thinks. I think they're wrong.
The best way for Free libraries to take over the world is to make them useful everywhere. Free applications will follow. Doing otherwise simply leads to extra work in the form of 3rd parties reimplementing the functionality of GPLed libraries with *BSD- or proprietary-licensed code.
I already corrected myself elsewhere in this thread (and 50 minutes before you posted your comment).