>There's a brand new neighborhood just a few blocks south of me here. I figured I try out my new GPS puck w/ NetStumbler on my laptop, just to see how it worked out. I picked up about 30 APs in substantially *less* than 1/4 square mile, and there's still empty lots available. Assuming the whole square mile could be made over to housing, there'd be at least 120 APs.
You do realise there are 16 quarter square miles in a square mile and not 4? [ducks]
>2 - If you want someone to check your ID when you sign your card, please hand it to the cashier with your credit card.
Don't be facetious. You know exactly what the previous posters meant. The purpose is to have cashiers check for id every time your card is used. Not to have your person checked for id everytime.
Sure you can go online and spend thousands on a credit card. But you would be hard pressed to do so and reap the rewards without leaving an obvious trail to yourself. And that's only if the shop allowed you to specify a shipping address separate from the billing address.
Further to the above replies (each chunk is md5 hashed, as is the whole torrent) some of the clients out have the option of ignoring peers that supply corrupt data.
These features that 95% of people will not use are designed to make things easier for the 5% who do use opera. As another poster has mentioned opera is a business, and has to look to its own customer base and their needs.
Many of these people use opera on their mobile phones/devices where opera is the dominant browser. How important do you think it would be to have the first browser with decent voice support for keyboardless devices? If another company got there first opera could lose the one market in which they are dominant, with predictably disastrous results.
If you like Firefox as it is then you have little need to switch...
If you do try opera again, have you tried setting the minimum font size in the options?
As for operas (homegrown?) scrollbars, I don't know. However I do know that you can enable styled scrollbars which follow the (css?) styles of any webpages which support the feature.
You're right, there is no reason for you to buy a device to read ebooks on.
However the reason for that, at the moment, is that you read only 5 books a year. It will be many years before decent ebooks devices drop to a price that is attractive to someone who reads 5 books a year.
However consider the person who reads 50 books in a year, roughly one a week. Using your calculations, adjusting for 50 books that is: 50x$5=250, 250-20=230. 230/50=4.6
So if you could buy your books for under $4.60 instead of $5 you could be saving money, in the long term.
There are many people who buy dozens of books in a year. There are even people who buy/read more than one book a week. That kind of price reduction is well within the abilities of publishers to do so and still make a profit.
The cheapest book readers right now are the old palm pilots. They have low power processors running at double digit mhz speeds, long battery lifetimes and small internal memory (2-16Mb).
As old pdas they suffer for their old technology (poor screens, no media ports, serial connectivity) but they follow the correct philosophy for building a cheap bookreader and they're more than powerful enough to do the job.
When you're only manipulating text and a few images you don't need fast, powerful hardware.
The solution for reading an ebook in the bath is the venerable ziplock bag.
I use ziplock sandwich bags I bought in a 99pence shop.
As for whether reading from a screen is conducive to enjoyment of a book: you'll either get used to it or you won't. I suspect most people could get used to it and find it enjoyable if they gave it a chance. Have you?
At www.baen.com/library you will find the Baen Free Library where some excellent (and some not so excellent) sci-fi/fantasy authors offer some of their works for free, with no strings attached in a variety of unencrypted formats (and microsofts encrypted lit format, for those who like it).
Amongst these authors are some of the highest selling sci-fi authors around, as well as hugo and nebula winners.
Or they skipped a digit because that's in the mode right now. Then they justified it with some marketing gimmick about the feel of 2 and features of 3.
And the marketing gimmick was so successful that some people believed it...
I thought that (reduction in brightness, not necessarily the time scale) was normal for plasma screens; after a period of time the plasma must be replaced.
Quoth the poster:
Well for starters he's not charging for the distribution of it, it is a later charge for using the code.
808140: I must admit, I have no idea what you're talking about here. A later charge for using the code? What? If you clarify what you mean, I'll respond.
I think the poster here is referring to the shareware code. Download of the program is free. 30 days after installing the program is disabled and displays a nag dialog instructing you to register to continue using the program. This code seems to be a trivial date check, as setting the date of your pc forward and back enables and disables the program.
My understanding is that this kind of time-bomb is not permitted under the gpl.
However if it's not gpl then your point about whether the author of (most, but not all of) xchat has the right to change the licence is key.
Morally and intuitively I would argue that he does not have that right. The submitted patches were written and distributed (to him) as derivative works of a gpl program, and he shouldn't be able to change the licence just because he alone wants to.
Legally? I don't know, IANAL and neither is anyone else who has weighed in so far.
What has been added/changed with the Windows version exactly?
I've installed and tested the new binary.
There is a register button in the help menu which links to the registration web page.
Setting the computer date forward the program no longer functions and displays a dialog with a spelling error in it (evalution) stating the 30 day evalution (sic) period has expired.
I have the release source dated 14/aug/2004 and the cvs: a cursory search hasn't revealed any time-bomb code. The cvs available on sourceforge seems to show that there have been no changes less than 2 weeks old and grep -Rin shows nothing for evalution or evaluation. If the time-bomb code is in there it isn't obvious.
wingimp doesn't provide a crippled shareware version and then not provide source code for that version.
It looks like wingimp charges for getting a copy of the software, and you can email for instructions on how to get full source code (look at the faq under distributing on a magazine cd)
I've had a quick look at the shareware binary, and it appears he has compiled in the shareware functionality/crippleware.
I've also had a quick look at the latest source (2.4.0) and it doesn't seem to include any shareware code.
Therefore he is distributing a binary to which he has not included source to, which is a GPL violation.
There may be other violations (and I think there are) such as charging for and restricting the *use* of the program or relicensing of GPL code to another licence without the consent of the copyright holders of the code.
My take on this is that it is ok for him to charge for Windows binaries, provided that he makes the changes that he does to the Win version available to the world with the rest of XChat.
Which he doesn't.
This means that he can't build in hidden/extra features to the XChat for Windows client without giving them to everyone. That, would be a violation of the GPL.
He has taken the newest contributed code (to a GPL project) and his modifications (for building on win32) and declared it shareware (contrary to the gpl according to GNU) and does not provide source code for this modified version.
The rest of your post seems reasonable, but of course is based on invalid premise (hardly your fault, as the site is STILL slashdotted.)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it should be illegal to buy from spammers...
You do realise there are 16 quarter square miles in a square mile and not 4? [ducks]
Don't be facetious. You know exactly what the previous posters meant. The purpose is to have cashiers check for id every time your card is used. Not to have your person checked for id everytime.
Sure you can go online and spend thousands on a credit card. But you would be hard pressed to do so and reap the rewards without leaving an obvious trail to yourself. And that's only if the shop allowed you to specify a shipping address separate from the billing address.
Until the weight of the clients crushes the tracker.
As have I. It once went up when I changed my mind and increased my maximum bid (when I was the only bidder).
Further to the above replies (each chunk is md5 hashed, as is the whole torrent) some of the clients out have the option of ignoring peers that supply corrupt data.
These features that 95% of people will not use are designed to make things easier for the 5% who do use opera. As another poster has mentioned opera is a business, and has to look to its own customer base and their needs.
Many of these people use opera on their mobile phones/devices where opera is the dominant browser. How important do you think it would be to have the first browser with decent voice support for keyboardless devices? If another company got there first opera could lose the one market in which they are dominant, with predictably disastrous results.
If you like Firefox as it is then you have little need to switch...
If you do try opera again, have you tried setting the minimum font size in the options?
As for operas (homegrown?) scrollbars, I don't know. However I do know that you can enable styled scrollbars which follow the (css?) styles of any webpages which support the feature.
However the reason for that, at the moment, is that you read only 5 books a year. It will be many years before decent ebooks devices drop to a price that is attractive to someone who reads 5 books a year.
However consider the person who reads 50 books in a year, roughly one a week. Using your calculations, adjusting for 50 books that is: 50x$5=250, 250-20=230. 230/50=4.6
So if you could buy your books for under $4.60 instead of $5 you could be saving money, in the long term.
There are many people who buy dozens of books in a year. There are even people who buy/read more than one book a week. That kind of price reduction is well within the abilities of publishers to do so and still make a profit.
The cheapest book readers right now are the old palm pilots. They have low power processors running at double digit mhz speeds, long battery lifetimes and small internal memory (2-16Mb).
As old pdas they suffer for their old technology (poor screens, no media ports, serial connectivity) but they follow the correct philosophy for building a cheap bookreader and they're more than powerful enough to do the job.
When you're only manipulating text and a few images you don't need fast, powerful hardware.
I use ziplock sandwich bags I bought in a 99pence shop.
As for whether reading from a screen is conducive to enjoyment of a book: you'll either get used to it or you won't. I suspect most people could get used to it and find it enjoyable if they gave it a chance. Have you?
Amongst these authors are some of the highest selling sci-fi authors around, as well as hugo and nebula winners.
>Oh my god, we Slashdotted Google!
>
>(Gathers canned goods, candles, heads for cave)
Truly it is the end of world!!!
I found this also. Earlier today google groups v1 was not available via groups.google.com as it forwarded my to the beta page.
And the marketing gimmick was so successful that some people believed it...
I thought that (reduction in brightness, not necessarily the time scale) was normal for plasma screens; after a period of time the plasma must be replaced.
Obviously not
808140: I must admit, I have no idea what you're talking about here. A later charge for using the code? What? If you clarify what you mean, I'll respond.
I think the poster here is referring to the shareware code. Download of the program is free. 30 days after installing the program is disabled and displays a nag dialog instructing you to register to continue using the program. This code seems to be a trivial date check, as setting the date of your pc forward and back enables and disables the program.
My understanding is that this kind of time-bomb is not permitted under the gpl.
However if it's not gpl then your point about whether the author of (most, but not all of) xchat has the right to change the licence is key.
Morally and intuitively I would argue that he does not have that right. The submitted patches were written and distributed (to him) as derivative works of a gpl program, and he shouldn't be able to change the licence just because he alone wants to.
Legally? I don't know, IANAL and neither is anyone else who has weighed in so far.
I've installed and tested the new binary.
- There is a register button in the help menu which links to the registration web page.
- Setting the computer date forward the program no longer functions and displays a dialog with a spelling error in it (evalution) stating the 30 day evalution (sic) period has expired.
I have the release source dated 14/aug/2004 and the cvs: a cursory search hasn't revealed any time-bomb code. The cvs available on sourceforge seems to show that there have been no changes less than 2 weeks old and grep -Rin shows nothing for evalution or evaluation. If the time-bomb code is in there it isn't obvious.wingimp doesn't provide a crippled shareware version and then not provide source code for that version.
It looks like wingimp charges for getting a copy of the software, and you can email for instructions on how to get full source code (look at the faq under distributing on a magazine cd)
Or maybe it could be argued that the "payoff" was knowingly released linked to GPL code so therefore should be GPL'd itself... :)
I've had a quick look at the shareware binary, and it appears he has compiled in the shareware functionality/crippleware.
I've also had a quick look at the latest source (2.4.0) and it doesn't seem to include any shareware code.
Therefore he is distributing a binary to which he has not included source to, which is a GPL violation.
There may be other violations (and I think there are) such as charging for and restricting the *use* of the program or relicensing of GPL code to another licence without the consent of the copyright holders of the code.
Which he doesn't.
This means that he can't build in hidden/extra features to the XChat for Windows client without giving them to everyone. That, would be a violation of the GPL.
He has taken the newest contributed code (to a GPL project) and his modifications (for building on win32) and declared it shareware (contrary to the gpl according to GNU) and does not provide source code for this modified version.
The rest of your post seems reasonable, but of course is based on invalid premise (hardly your fault, as the site is STILL slashdotted.)
The problem is he's not just providing a compiling service.
The version that he's providing is *modified* and no source is provided for the modified version.