What you're wanting is something that is very difficult for a computer but very easy for a human being. You want to be able to discern which parts of your text file constitute machine-readable instructions (which have to be spelt the way the machine expects them when it's running the compiler/interpreter) and which parts constitute human-readable messages (which have to be spelt the way a human would expect).
The real point is, you shouldn't have user interface messages hard-coded right there into your program at all! It will make it much harder to produce a foreign-language version three years down the line when your company expand and open their first offshore branch. Instead, you should abstract all messages out into a separate file of their own, which can then be spell-checked separately; refer to them only by means of meaningful constants within the code (e.g. if message 6 happens to be "number too small" then use something like NUMTOOSML for 6). This will make the task of internationalisation much simpler -- it can be handed off to anyone who speaks both the current and target languages, not necessarily a programmer.
If your program really is one that you will never need to internationalise, then your users probably will be able to deal with the odd mis-spelt message.
Yes, and this is actually in direct violation of (at least Mainland) European consumer protection law: in the interests of fair competition, third parties would be entirely within their rights to produce Wii-, XBox- or PS3-compatible games without the say-so of Nintendo, MS or Sony. And if any "intellectual property" -- copyrighted code or patented devices -- is used solely to prevent such interoperability, it is null and void and reproducing it for interoperability purposes constitutes Fair Dealing. (This was all confirmed way back in the Atari 2600 days when third-party cartridges began to appear and was recently reaffirmed with the banning of DVD regionalisation). Nothing is happening about it now, because politicians are all old farts and don't take "kids' stuff" seriously (unless it affects their kids; and for Nintendo, MS and Sony, a few consoles and games are cheaper than losing a test case). But soon, people who used to play video games will make their way up through the system, and it will change.
Google "driving on the continent" and notice how in some countries you are not allowed to carry a can of fuel in your car, and in some countries you have to carry a can of fuel in your car. (Most places they don't actually give a damn as long as it doesn't go on fire.) When crossing the border from a "fuel compulsory" to a "fuel forbidden" country, you can always empty the can into your tank; but what do you do when going the other way?
You're not going to get very far being anonymous, though. Create a proper login and use it.
Meanwhile, we have to get writing to our elected representatives stressing the importance of Source Code Access and how it benefits everyone..... and we have to make it look like a proper movement. And we have to convince ordinary people of why it's important. "Eat this nice cake, but don't ask what ingredients are in it because that's none of your business!"
If you're ever building your own CPU out of individual logic gates, it's well worth wiring up LEDs to the flip-flops you use to make the registers, accumulator, program counter and status flags. (I've got a couple of nice 16-bit designs in mind: one using just an accumulator and with only 16 instructions; and another using an orthogonal instruction set, 15 general-purpose registers, every instruction conditional.)
If you're using a 20 meter dish, I don't think it qualifies as "amateur" anything*
Never underestimate what Fred in the Shed can muster. I once knew someone who picked up a mostly-complete electron microscope second-hand at a radio rally. Manufacturers didn't believe him at first when he tried to order spare parts for it.
Oh, and who would ever have thought that a spider could actually survive being gold-plated?
The BSD folks have long complained that the GPL was "less free" because the GNU folks wouldn't let people take their precious code in which they had invested blood, sweat and tears, make one tiny change and then lock it up behind some non-free licence. Kinda like saying that the Antebellum North was "less free" than the South because those damn Yankees didn't recognise the right to own slaves.
Incidentally, when someone makes a closed-source fork of BSD-licenced software, it's my understanding that the BSD licence still applies to the resulting fork. In other words, I have a theoretical right to distribute the Source Code, even if I was not given a copy of same. So..... do I get to use Reasonable Force to obtain the Source Code that the copyright holder has kindly informed me I have a right to distribute?
There is one, and in fact there has been one even longer than Linux has been around; but you have to be able to spell the words "configure", "make" and "install" before you can play.
It's just standard Slashdot groupthink: KDE bad, GNOME good. It dates back to a long, long time ago when Qt was released under a non-free licence. Nowadays it's GPL (not LGPL, but the full-on GPL; which means that non-free applications can't even link to it, so up yours, you leech) but some people have failed to get with the programme and still blame the kids for crimes committed by the great-great-grandparents.
I prefer Window Maker myself anyway, but I think I'm in a minority..... not that that matters much anyway.
Solution 1: Just use the open source "nv" drivers. If you do this, everything will work. Using non-ital drivers will fuck up your system..... if you don't want to get poisoned, don't take pills from strangers.
Solution 2: Employ reasonable force to obtain the Source Code to the nVidia drivers. (Where "reasonable" here means "just enough to get the job done" and will largely be determined by nVidia. Kidnapping family members and returning body parts one at a time can be considered "reasonable" once all more benign methods have been exhausted.)
Solution 3: Lobby your elected representatives to outlaw closed-source drivers altogether.
It's different in a case where a standard is actually law (e.g. BS1363 or EN298). Then any patents that would have got in the way of the standard, have to go -- otherwise you have privatised law.
"GPL is not free"..... that depends on your definition of freedom. Unfortunately, in any population, some individuals tend to be freer than others, and some measure of average freedom across the population is required; the most meaningful average in this case probably being the mode, since it is the most probable value for an individual selected at random from within this population.
In pre-Civil-War days, the Union states were technically "less free" than the Confederate states, since people in the North lacked the freedom to own slaves. However, the average level of freedom in the South probably was rather less than in the North, since slaves lacked any freedom whatsoever.
No, MS won't void the patents -- that's the job of national governments (who grant the patents in the first place). And any nation whose National Standards Body approves the ISO standard as a national standard will have to annul, within that nation's jurisdiction, any patents which it is impossible to avoid whilst complying with the standard; otherwise that nation's citizens will be beholden to a foreign corporation.
GPL notwithstanding, modifying copyrighted works strictly for personal use is almost certainly Fair Dealing, and/or for the authorities to prosecute would require illegal surveillance.
If I'm not going to hold my own copyright, why not just specifically disavow copyright and let it enrich everybody via the public domain?
The problem is that in many countries, it's not illegal to take something that is in the Public Domain, make a few changes to it and claim copyright in the modified work. If you wrote a spiffy program and released it PD, then anyone could take it, alter it just a little, cage it up and sell it as Closed Source. And their marketing department will find ways to dissuade people from using the PD version. If you're really unlucky, they'll even try to claim that you violated their copyright.....
If it was law all around the world that Derived Works based upon Public Domain works -- unless, under the same Fair Dealing rules applied to copyright works, they are altered sufficiently beyond recognition as to constitute a new Work in their own right -- are themselves PD, then there would be no need for the GPL. Until such times, it's about the best weapon anyone has.
It doesn't have to be accompanied by the Source Code, but it does have to be accompanied by the text of the GPL -- which explicitly states that you are entitled to the Source Code and if you didn't find it included with the software, then you need only ask for it.
The GPL is usually the only thing giving you permission to make copies of someone else's copyrighted work (unless your use constitutes Fair Dealing or you have separately-negotiated permission from the copyright holder or their authorised agent); therefore, anybody copying software covered by the GPL whilst failing to abide by the conditions it imposes is probably violating copyright.
Unfortunately, the GPL fails explicitly to mention the use of Reasonable Force in pursuit of your entitlements. Maybe in v4..... things could get quite interesting in the USA where guns are legal.....
(As an aside, I note that this could be eliminated entirely by a requirement for every piece of software, whether it be sold or given away gratis and whether or not it be intended for redistribution, to be accompanied by its Source Code. Permission to copy could then be placed *in* the Source Code. I'll be writing to my Elected Representative about this, soon after I have received his response to the last letter I sent him and allowed a customary grace period to elapse.)
Surely the whole point of standards, be they national or international, is that they are not allowed to depend on encumbered "intellectual property". So if OOXML is adopted as an ISO standard, then all the necessary patents will have to be annulled!
Requiring a person to pay patent royalties to one person or corporation merely in order to comply with the law of the land is extortion, plain and simple.
Atomic clock receivers aren't hard to construct. You can easily modify an old MW/LW radio. Wire the antenna and oscillator gangs of the tuning capacitor in parallel and the MW and LW coils of the ferrite rod in series. This should be enough to get you down to 60kHz, but if you need a few extra pF then two adjacent tracks on a piece of breadboard are as good as anything. Feed the output into a digital storage oscilloscope. Adjust the timebase so it takes a minute to cross the screen. Real geeks can decode it by eye:)
Whilst Asterisk (especially in conjunction with a Grandstream Handytone ATA and a voice modem with ALSA drivers) is in most respects the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on", you cannot spoof caller ID with it. The only known way of spoofing caller ID (without the assistance of a telco) is for you to be on a Strowger exchange (i.e. non-DTMF) and the person on the far end still to have one of the first-generation Cable TV phones with caller ID (which used DTMF tones sent between the ringing pulses, as opposed to the 1200 baud modem tones used by modern caller ID). After dialling, and before they answer, press * to switch your phone to DTMF; any digits you dial will be appended to the display (which will scroll, and lose the original number [sent by the cableco] off the LHS. This behaviour is rather a giveaway). I don't believe there are any clicky-clicky exchanges left anymore (you can buy DTMF-only phones for home use, and they don't come with any warnings).
Even if you have your own PRI, you get allocated (or can buy) a block of 30 numbers to go with it. You can assign any of those thirty numbers as the visible ident on any of your thirty B-channels, even to all of them at once; but if you try to assign a number that isn't yours to one of your lines, then it won't work -- it will come up on the far end's telephone as "number withheld". This all happens transparently and you do not receive any error messages.
I know this from experience, because we ordered a second PRI; and sometimes when we tried to ident a line on PRI2 with a number from the PRI1 group, it would bomb out. Turned out that (due to a spelling mistake on the order form) BT hadn't properly associated the two lines with each other (they thought we were two different companies, and so not entitled to use each other's numbers). It didn't bomb every time, because (1) sometimes the calls were going out over PRI1 and (2) some people's lines still accept anonymous calls. Only once we had made this connection did anyone from the phone company have any clue what was up.....
True; but an interpreter (or even a compiler which supports an eval function, or some other weirdy "calculated" construct such as treating variables as a property of the containing namespace) wouldn't be able to do that, because it wouldn't have any way to know for certain that the variable really was never going to be used again. It could conceivably crop up in an eval, or be accessed by some other indirect means.
Of course, gratuitous misuse of forget (especially inside an eval) could be even more entertaining than gratuitous misuse of goto.....
It's never ambiguous as far as the computer is concerned, because there will always be operator precedence. sqrt binds more tightly than + and so does ln, but the sqrt, being nearer the argument, gets evaluated first; so ln sqrt x + y is ln(sqrt(x)) + y.
I'll admit, that's one case where brackets are actually more of a help than a distraction. But if you were taking baby-steps, it wouldn't be so bad. Also, for the benefit of baby-steppers, how about a forget statement which would free up memory that had once been used by variables which are no longer required? (I know, real programmers just reuse variable names..... it has the same effect..... but the whole idea of modern programming languages is to let the computer do the work for you. An optimising compiler would see the baby-steps followed by a bunch of forgets and decide that since the intermediates were obviously never going to be required again, they could all be stuck into one big long operation.)
..... is a new string concatenation operator. One that doesn't look like any of the "numeric" operators.
Perl got this right. If you want to concatenate strings (using the string concatenation operator.), it coerces the operands to string. If you want to add numbers (using the numeric addition operator +), it coerces the operands to numeric.
Automatic type coercion is, in general, a good thing -- it removes clutter (in the form of unnecessary function calls). However, it breaks down when using "overloaded" operators (that have different meanings in different contexts), when the context in which the operands are meant to be evaluated is ambiguous. It's not always obvious whether something is supposed to be numeric or a string. Perl's rules are that only strings can be concatenated and only numbers can be added. Obviously this can only make sense if the operators themselves are different. (The reason + worked OK in BASIC was that there's no automatic coercion [except between integer and floating-point, in dialects that support integers -- some BASICs treated everything numeric as floating-point]; you have to call STR$ to convert numbers to strings, or VAL to convert strings to numbers. In some BASIC dialects, auto-coercion was introduced and with it a new string concatenation operator, most commonly &.)
Also, ditch the requirement to have function arguments in brackets. They are just more clutter. The computer can work out for itself how many arguments belong to a function. I'd rather see
The problem is, people act as if they want to be bugged.
Mod parent up.
People also act as if they want mobile phones to be dangerous. Every time a study says they are harmless, they immediately call for more research to try and find some way they might be harmful.
If you have to have more than one person modifying a file at the same time, that just tells me that the file needs to be split up. Keep each function in a completely separate source file, if you have to. Isn't that what #include and its equivalents are for?
Slashdot Mirror
What you're wanting is something that is very difficult for a computer but very easy for a human being. You want to be able to discern which parts of your text file constitute machine-readable instructions (which have to be spelt the way the machine expects them when it's running the compiler/interpreter) and which parts constitute human-readable messages (which have to be spelt the way a human would expect).
The real point is, you shouldn't have user interface messages hard-coded right there into your program at all! It will make it much harder to produce a foreign-language version three years down the line when your company expand and open their first offshore branch. Instead, you should abstract all messages out into a separate file of their own, which can then be spell-checked separately; refer to them only by means of meaningful constants within the code (e.g. if message 6 happens to be "number too small" then use something like NUMTOOSML for 6). This will make the task of internationalisation much simpler -- it can be handed off to anyone who speaks both the current and target languages, not necessarily a programmer.
If your program really is one that you will never need to internationalise, then your users probably will be able to deal with the odd mis-spelt message.
Yes, and this is actually in direct violation of (at least Mainland) European consumer protection law: in the interests of fair competition, third parties would be entirely within their rights to produce Wii-, XBox- or PS3-compatible games without the say-so of Nintendo, MS or Sony. And if any "intellectual property" -- copyrighted code or patented devices -- is used solely to prevent such interoperability, it is null and void and reproducing it for interoperability purposes constitutes Fair Dealing. (This was all confirmed way back in the Atari 2600 days when third-party cartridges began to appear and was recently reaffirmed with the banning of DVD regionalisation). Nothing is happening about it now, because politicians are all old farts and don't take "kids' stuff" seriously (unless it affects their kids; and for Nintendo, MS and Sony, a few consoles and games are cheaper than losing a test case). But soon, people who used to play video games will make their way up through the system, and it will change.
This is true.
Google "driving on the continent" and notice how in some countries you are not allowed to carry a can of fuel in your car, and in some countries you have to carry a can of fuel in your car. (Most places they don't actually give a damn as long as it doesn't go on fire.) When crossing the border from a "fuel compulsory" to a "fuel forbidden" country, you can always empty the can into your tank; but what do you do when going the other way?
I agree.
..... and we have to make it look like a proper movement. And we have to convince ordinary people of why it's important. "Eat this nice cake, but don't ask what ingredients are in it because that's none of your business!"
You're not going to get very far being anonymous, though. Create a proper login and use it.
Meanwhile, we have to get writing to our elected representatives stressing the importance of Source Code Access and how it benefits everyone
Does this one come with the Source Code?
Fair enough, I'll stick with Konqueror, then.
Very true.
If you're ever building your own CPU out of individual logic gates, it's well worth wiring up LEDs to the flip-flops you use to make the registers, accumulator, program counter and status flags. (I've got a couple of nice 16-bit designs in mind: one using just an accumulator and with only 16 instructions; and another using an orthogonal instruction set, 15 general-purpose registers, every instruction conditional.)
Oh, and who would ever have thought that a spider could actually survive being gold-plated?
The BSD folks have long complained that the GPL was "less free" because the GNU folks wouldn't let people take their precious code in which they had invested blood, sweat and tears, make one tiny change and then lock it up behind some non-free licence. Kinda like saying that the Antebellum North was "less free" than the South because those damn Yankees didn't recognise the right to own slaves.
..... do I get to use Reasonable Force to obtain the Source Code that the copyright holder has kindly informed me I have a right to distribute?
Incidentally, when someone makes a closed-source fork of BSD-licenced software, it's my understanding that the BSD licence still applies to the resulting fork. In other words, I have a theoretical right to distribute the Source Code, even if I was not given a copy of same. So
There is one, and in fact there has been one even longer than Linux has been around; but you have to be able to spell the words "configure", "make" and "install" before you can play.
It's just standard Slashdot groupthink: KDE bad, GNOME good. It dates back to a long, long time ago when Qt was released under a non-free licence. Nowadays it's GPL (not LGPL, but the full-on GPL; which means that non-free applications can't even link to it, so up yours, you leech) but some people have failed to get with the programme and still blame the kids for crimes committed by the great-great-grandparents.
..... not that that matters much anyway.
I prefer Window Maker myself anyway, but I think I'm in a minority
Solution 1: Just use the open source "nv" drivers. If you do this, everything will work. Using non-ital drivers will fuck up your system ..... if you don't want to get poisoned, don't take pills from strangers.
Solution 2: Employ reasonable force to obtain the Source Code to the nVidia drivers. (Where "reasonable" here means "just enough to get the job done" and will largely be determined by nVidia. Kidnapping family members and returning body parts one at a time can be considered "reasonable" once all more benign methods have been exhausted.)
Solution 3: Lobby your elected representatives to outlaw closed-source drivers altogether.
It's different in a case where a standard is actually law (e.g. BS1363 or EN298). Then any patents that would have got in the way of the standard, have to go -- otherwise you have privatised law.
"GPL is not free" ..... that depends on your definition of freedom. Unfortunately, in any population, some individuals tend to be freer than others, and some measure of average freedom across the population is required; the most meaningful average in this case probably being the mode, since it is the most probable value for an individual selected at random from within this population.
In pre-Civil-War days, the Union states were technically "less free" than the Confederate states, since people in the North lacked the freedom to own slaves. However, the average level of freedom in the South probably was rather less than in the North, since slaves lacked any freedom whatsoever.
No, MS won't void the patents -- that's the job of national governments (who grant the patents in the first place). And any nation whose National Standards Body approves the ISO standard as a national standard will have to annul, within that nation's jurisdiction, any patents which it is impossible to avoid whilst complying with the standard; otherwise that nation's citizens will be beholden to a foreign corporation.
If it was law all around the world that Derived Works based upon Public Domain works -- unless, under the same Fair Dealing rules applied to copyright works, they are altered sufficiently beyond recognition as to constitute a new Work in their own right -- are themselves PD, then there would be no need for the GPL. Until such times, it's about the best weapon anyone has.
It doesn't have to be accompanied by the Source Code, but it does have to be accompanied by the text of the GPL -- which explicitly states that you are entitled to the Source Code and if you didn't find it included with the software, then you need only ask for it.
..... things could get quite interesting in the USA where guns are legal .....
The GPL is usually the only thing giving you permission to make copies of someone else's copyrighted work (unless your use constitutes Fair Dealing or you have separately-negotiated permission from the copyright holder or their authorised agent); therefore, anybody copying software covered by the GPL whilst failing to abide by the conditions it imposes is probably violating copyright.
Unfortunately, the GPL fails explicitly to mention the use of Reasonable Force in pursuit of your entitlements. Maybe in v4
(As an aside, I note that this could be eliminated entirely by a requirement for every piece of software, whether it be sold or given away gratis and whether or not it be intended for redistribution, to be accompanied by its Source Code. Permission to copy could then be placed *in* the Source Code. I'll be writing to my Elected Representative about this, soon after I have received his response to the last letter I sent him and allowed a customary grace period to elapse.)
Aren't Microsoft missing something here?
Surely the whole point of standards, be they national or international, is that they are not allowed to depend on encumbered "intellectual property". So if OOXML is adopted as an ISO standard, then all the necessary patents will have to be annulled!
Requiring a person to pay patent royalties to one person or corporation merely in order to comply with the law of the land is extortion, plain and simple.
Atomic clock receivers aren't hard to construct. You can easily modify an old MW/LW radio. Wire the antenna and oscillator gangs of the tuning capacitor in parallel and the MW and LW coils of the ferrite rod in series. This should be enough to get you down to 60kHz, but if you need a few extra pF then two adjacent tracks on a piece of breadboard are as good as anything. Feed the output into a digital storage oscilloscope. Adjust the timebase so it takes a minute to cross the screen. Real geeks can decode it by eye :)
Whilst Asterisk (especially in conjunction with a Grandstream Handytone ATA and a voice modem with ALSA drivers) is in most respects the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on", you cannot spoof caller ID with it. The only known way of spoofing caller ID (without the assistance of a telco) is for you to be on a Strowger exchange (i.e. non-DTMF) and the person on the far end still to have one of the first-generation Cable TV phones with caller ID (which used DTMF tones sent between the ringing pulses, as opposed to the 1200 baud modem tones used by modern caller ID). After dialling, and before they answer, press * to switch your phone to DTMF; any digits you dial will be appended to the display (which will scroll, and lose the original number [sent by the cableco] off the LHS. This behaviour is rather a giveaway). I don't believe there are any clicky-clicky exchanges left anymore (you can buy DTMF-only phones for home use, and they don't come with any warnings).
.....
Even if you have your own PRI, you get allocated (or can buy) a block of 30 numbers to go with it. You can assign any of those thirty numbers as the visible ident on any of your thirty B-channels, even to all of them at once; but if you try to assign a number that isn't yours to one of your lines, then it won't work -- it will come up on the far end's telephone as "number withheld". This all happens transparently and you do not receive any error messages.
I know this from experience, because we ordered a second PRI; and sometimes when we tried to ident a line on PRI2 with a number from the PRI1 group, it would bomb out. Turned out that (due to a spelling mistake on the order form) BT hadn't properly associated the two lines with each other (they thought we were two different companies, and so not entitled to use each other's numbers). It didn't bomb every time, because (1) sometimes the calls were going out over PRI1 and (2) some people's lines still accept anonymous calls. Only once we had made this connection did anyone from the phone company have any clue what was up
True; but an interpreter (or even a compiler which supports an eval function, or some other weirdy "calculated" construct such as treating variables as a property of the containing namespace) wouldn't be able to do that, because it wouldn't have any way to know for certain that the variable really was never going to be used again. It could conceivably crop up in an eval, or be accessed by some other indirect means.
.....
Of course, gratuitous misuse of forget (especially inside an eval) could be even more entertaining than gratuitous misuse of goto
It's never ambiguous as far as the computer is concerned, because there will always be operator precedence. sqrt binds more tightly than + and so does ln, but the sqrt, being nearer the argument, gets evaluated first; so ln sqrt x + y is ln(sqrt(x)) + y.
..... it has the same effect ..... but the whole idea of modern programming languages is to let the computer do the work for you. An optimising compiler would see the baby-steps followed by a bunch of forgets and decide that since the intermediates were obviously never going to be required again, they could all be stuck into one big long operation.)
I'll admit, that's one case where brackets are actually more of a help than a distraction. But if you were taking baby-steps, it wouldn't be so bad. Also, for the benefit of baby-steppers, how about a forget statement which would free up memory that had once been used by variables which are no longer required? (I know, real programmers just reuse variable names
Perl got this right. If you want to concatenate strings (using the string concatenation operator
Automatic type coercion is, in general, a good thing -- it removes clutter (in the form of unnecessary function calls). However, it breaks down when using "overloaded" operators (that have different meanings in different contexts), when the context in which the operands are meant to be evaluated is ambiguous. It's not always obvious whether something is supposed to be numeric or a string. Perl's rules are that only strings can be concatenated and only numbers can be added. Obviously this can only make sense if the operators themselves are different. (The reason + worked OK in BASIC was that there's no automatic coercion [except between integer and floating-point, in dialects that support integers -- some BASICs treated everything numeric as floating-point]; you have to call STR$ to convert numbers to strings, or VAL to convert strings to numbers. In some BASIC dialects, auto-coercion was introduced and with it a new string concatenation operator, most commonly &.)
Also, ditch the requirement to have function arguments in brackets. They are just more clutter. The computer can work out for itself how many arguments belong to a function. I'd rather see than anyday.
People also act as if they want mobile phones to be dangerous. Every time a study says they are harmless, they immediately call for more research to try and find some way they might be harmful.
If you have to have more than one person modifying a file at the same time, that just tells me that the file needs to be split up. Keep each function in a completely separate source file, if you have to. Isn't that what #include and its equivalents are for?