Nope, being a mere user of software someone else wrote is a perfectly acceptable behaviour in the software libre world. It is the position I am in, and while it is a position of very little status it is not a position of dishonour.
If however I were to develop some improvement worth releasing to "the" software commons I would be expected to do so. The GPL incidently does not mandate even this unless unless I distribute or publish the change.
I read the GPL as a defense of the GPL software commons and a tool for advocating software libre. The tragedy (and this is where the "viral" nature comes in) is that some of the provisions defending the commons also prevent the free intermingling of code with other commonses. I suspect that this cannot be remedied under the current legal system without weakening the GPL, and there are some programs (such as the linux kernel) which cannot now be relicensed (I doubt all copyright holders could be tracked down, nevermind all of them agreeing to a change).
Somewhat OT but a neat trick I learned several years ago is to put the constant first in a comparison. This helps to eliminate one common C typo, that of using a single "=" (assignment) when you meant "==" (compare).
So the code would look like this:
if(0==strcmp(foo,bar))
It's a bit awkward to read but if there was a single "=" there the compiler would complain.
I don't think I've run across a compiler that didn't warn on if(foo=0). I highly recomend compiling with -Wall or equivalent.
The two things I miss from pascal are:= for assignment (= looks too much like a comparison operator), and a postfix dereference operator.
The absolute positioning trick destroys the layout in Galeon (I've got the minimum font size set to 22 for the sake of my sanity). The left hand column overlaps the centre column (although gecko should arguably character-wrap to prevent that), and some of the text in the boxes on the right is missing because it doesn't fit. And the only reason the line spacing isn't far to small is because I've overridden it in my user stylesheet to fix similarly brain-damaged sites. The "lite" site isn't much better.
To be sure, the page would likely look fine if I let Mr. Davidson dictate my choice of font size and browser. Presumably I should set my video mode to 800x600 as well, so as to conform to the desires of espn marketing.
Espn does have "every right to not consider the non-upgrader person". They also have every right to lock out the non-upgrader until they upgrade. But doing the latter is moronic. I don't visit warnerbrothers.com at all anymore due to similar rudeness despite the fact that my current browser is probably allowed.
Oh, and the whole point of "alt=''" is to indicate to the browser that the "images... aren't important unless they are physically seen". It's to prevent the page filling up with [image] or similar notations in browsers that aren't displaying images.
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Nope, being a mere user of software someone else wrote is a perfectly acceptable behaviour in the software libre world. It is the position I am in, and while it is a position of very little status it is not a position of dishonour.
If however I were to develop some improvement worth releasing to "the" software commons I would be expected to do so. The GPL incidently does not mandate even this unless unless I distribute or publish the change.
I read the GPL as a defense of the GPL software commons and a tool for advocating software libre. The tragedy (and this is where the "viral" nature comes in) is that some of the provisions defending the commons also prevent the free intermingling of code with other commonses. I suspect that this cannot be remedied under the current legal system without weakening the GPL, and there are some programs (such as the linux kernel) which cannot now be relicensed (I doubt all copyright holders could be tracked down, nevermind all of them agreeing to a change).
I don't think I've run across a compiler that didn't warn on if(foo=0). I highly recomend compiling with -Wall or equivalent.
The two things I miss from pascal are := for assignment (= looks too much like a comparison operator), and a postfix dereference operator.
The absolute positioning trick destroys the layout in Galeon (I've got the minimum font size set to 22 for the sake of my sanity). The left hand column overlaps the centre column (although gecko should arguably character-wrap to prevent that), and some of the text in the boxes on the right is missing because it doesn't fit. And the only reason the line spacing isn't far to small is because I've overridden it in my user stylesheet to fix similarly brain-damaged sites. The "lite" site isn't much better.
To be sure, the page would likely look fine if I let Mr. Davidson dictate my choice of font size and browser. Presumably I should set my video mode to 800x600 as well, so as to conform to the desires of espn marketing.
Espn does have "every right to not consider the non-upgrader person". They also have every right to lock out the non-upgrader until they upgrade. But doing the latter is moronic. I don't visit warnerbrothers.com at all anymore due to similar rudeness despite the fact that my current browser is probably allowed.
Oh, and the whole point of "alt=''" is to indicate to the browser that the "images ... aren't important unless they are physically seen". It's to prevent the page filling up with [image] or similar notations in browsers that aren't displaying images.