"Well, the articles mentions that some email providers are blocking GMail due to privacy concerns"
Yet somehow not blocking Yahoo! Mail because of privacy concerns, nor blocking Hotmail because of privacy concerns. Really, how many (if any) such webmail services have good privacy guarantees?
"I always just set a cookie with a tracking ID, and then use that to keep track of the anon user. counting the number of tracking cookies given out each day, and the time they were used for seems to work sufficiently for me... or is there some problem with that I don't know about?"
[*] Counting 'bots [*] Browsers with per-session cookie limits [*] Browsers which pre-fetch linked pages [*] Browsers which reload the previous page when you press the back button [*] People using more than one computer [*] People using more than one browser [*] Browsers without any cookie support [*] Browsers with cookies blocked [*] Cached pages
On the plus side, at least it's easier than measuring program downloads, where you have bittorrents, P2P, mirrors, lots of caches, CD distribution and all the rest.
"Oh, that's a very good point. I'll just march over to HR and explain that the corporate lawyers who bill out at over $1500/hr are somehow costing us money because they need 10 hours of tech support a week. The support staffer would have to be paid $150.01 dollars an hour for that to cost us money."
Either complain or don't. If you're happy supporting the every need of your lawyers, then don't moan when they call the helpdesk with trivial problems. (Your calculations are wrong too - they assume that the lawyer does not one iota of work during the whole week if there's a problem with his computer -- get some backup computers!)
But if people are calling the helpdesk with trivial problems, then the use of MS-Windows must be whipping up a storm of complaints. "My computer's going slow"... "somebody sent me a spam email".... "somebody says my computer is sending spam"... "my computer keeps rebooting"... "these windows keep popping up"... "i resized my desktop, and the icons all got rearranged"... "why has the start menu changed in WindowsXP?"... "Where are my programs in WindowsXP?"... "Why is there an animated dog next to my search results?"... "Why does an advert popup whenever I go to this website?"... "my computer just bluescreened when I ran a Java program"...
Re:Great for paranoid nuts, useless for real peopl
on
RF-Blocking Wallpaper
·
· Score: 1
"This wallpaper blocks a lot of RF radation. This means that you can not use WLAN, cellphones and terrestrial TV/Radio. Is this really what you want?"
"I've always liked Nokia phones but I wasn't going to get another one because of their stance (and their campaigning) on software patents but if they are investing in Mozilla - I'm really torn."
Don't be torn -- anyone who is campaigning for software patents so that they can patent the idea of displaying an image on a computer doesn't get any free sympathy just because they use open-source software.
"Who the hell modded this up? The Mozilla source is GPL. The only time you might have to pay the developers is if you're wishing to distribute Mozilla as a closed source app, in which case you'd need to negotiate an alternate (non-GPL) license with each contributor to the codebase."
I think he meant: if you fork, you have to pay some developers. Maybe yours, if you're feeling up for a challenge. Maybe theirs, if you prefer to save some time. But if your project budget is zero, you won't get much of a fork, because you won't have paid anyone to modify it for your purposes.
With mozilla, you get the desktop edition as GPL. If you want the nokia-phone-version, then somebody has to write it, and for that, as the original poster pointed out, you need to pay some developers. Whether you choose someone in your team, or someone from the mozilla team, is up to you.
"Oh, but that's all right! None of the prevalent vendors permit CDs that have been opened to be returned. You could've duplicated it, after all, or extracted the tracks."
Well either it's one or the other. If it's copy-"protected", then you can take it back and use the sticker saying so to prove that it hasn't been copied.
"There are always little apps that you didn't know about and no one else has heard of, except for the one guy in Accounting who absolutely needs it to run payroll every month. Sure it's okay if you migrate it. But it has to work exactly as the current one does. Same input, same output, same format."
Why? Do you never improve programs? If I were that person with the obscure app and someone was re-writing it, we could save a lot of time and money by having something custom-made, rather than emulating the old one line-for-line because that's what the microsoft salesman told them should be the costly part...
"Here's your 10K-line program in Cobol. Look, we can write it as a 2K-line program in Perl, and you can access it from a browser."
"As a result, when they turn on their computer and their icons aren't in the same place, many people assume that the machine is broken and conclude that the best option is to call IT and open a trouble ticket."
If you have people who call tech-support when their icons change position, then they're costing your company more than a linux migration ever will...
"Spoken like a person who has never used Word for anything except writing a college paper. I prefer Open Office to MS Office, and I think that there are plent of problems for MS Office. But saying Office 97 is better than the more recent versions is delusional at best."
"i want an efficient AC to DC UPS which connects directly to a DC powersupply for my box(en). that would rock."
It exists. The only useful feature of a laptop computer (apart from being able to play Myth2 on the train) is that it's got a built-in UPS with hours of battery backup.
Ignore the crappy small screen that's too low to see, ignore the crappy keyboard that's too small to type, and ignore the crappy touchpad that makes you think it would be easier to control the cursor by blowing on a straw. Just plug in your big monitor, your proper keyboard, and your optical mouse, close the lid, and it becomes a proper computer again, which will carry on working even after your power company's totally capable 60-year-old equipment takes a short nap and redirects your power to Oklahoma.
And if you've got enough laptops in the area, the wireless mesh network might even survive cuts in the telephone system. If only we could create a mesh network without getting spam sent 'from' our connection...
"Try doing the same thing with computers. Go ahead, get some ancient computing hardware from the 70s, 80s, or even early 90s. Install the ancient software. Now try to use that effectively in a technologically-advancing world. Oops! You can't!"
That "oops you can't" sounds rather pessimistic, and although I imagine you're ridiculing the idea just for the sake of it, we should think more seriously about why his idea was a good one.
Take a 1995 computer as a baseline, running linux, and some linux apps from the time. For public sector, I assume that means browsers and servers and Perl and PHP, but we can assume desktop applications too.
Upgrade the hardware. You're going to do it anyway, so get shiny black Dell PCs, or cappucino PCs for peoples' desks or whatever. Operating system still runs fine, applications still run fine. You've just upgraded a big part of the IT structure for less than the usual cost.
Upgrade the applications. New version of Mozilla? Download it. You've just upgraded one of the apps people use all the time, for absolutely minimal cost. New version of KMail comes out? Download that. Voila, upgraded applications, minimal cost. You don't have to budget $600 per computer plus $2000 support plus upgraded hardware every time you want to get the latest office suite - you just incrementally get the best, as it becomes available, without having to worry about the money.
Upgrade the operating system. So you've got Mandrake 7.2 running, and it's starting to look a bit old. Mandrake 9 will cost you $100 with support. And that's per city, not per machine. The applications still run, the hardware can still be used, you've just upgraded the IT infrastructure for minimal cost. Let the proprietary salesmen whine about how much retraining you'll have to do to teach KDE 3.3 to somone who's only used KDE 3.1
And in the future, you don't need to throw away PCs and operating systems and replace them all just to get a new browser or office suite, like you might with commercial operating systems. You just upgrade things as they need replacing, and everything just keeps on working.
When someone says the IT is built to last a long time, there's no need to assume they were talking about bits of hardware lasting magically, it means they're planning to avoid a "must upgrade everything now!!!" situation coming along every 5 years.
Compare: [1] "We need MSOfficeXP to read people's Word documents, so we have to upgrade to WindowsXP. To get WindowsXP, we have to buy new computers. We also have to buy new licenses for MSOffice. We can do it for $2000 per desktop" [2]"OpenOffice 1.1.1 is just released, you can download it from openoffice.org"
"Before someone can submit, they must 'digitally sign' (read: click an [I Agree] button) a statement stating that what they are posting is their own original material, fully licensed under the CPL, etc. etc. That's how you prevent lawsuits: put the liablility in the poster's hands"
We call this the slashdot law. "There exists no problem which cannot be solved using a long-winded encryption technique"
"They're also probably aware that their readership will go down proportional to how much information they want"
Well, the information does have an equivalent monetay value (i.e. what people are prepared to give up the information to receive) which varies from about $10-$20 for simple half-page registration forms, to $50 or more for multi-page forms, or if there's any likelihood of the data actually being used against them (such as giving information for an insurance quote which may end up being used to calculate rates in the future even if you don't buy the insurance)
$20 worth of information to read a newspaper? No thanks, I'm using to newspapers costing 50c, and we only buy those for the television section (which isn't online in any convenient format in any newspaper I know)
oh, and anyone who says "get over it" regarding privacy issues can go live in the big brother household with larry ellison and scott mcnealy...
"As a software developer, I am frequently surprised when a user takes the application I've developed and does something with it that I didn't expect and for which I didn't plan"
The "duct tape test".
You know your program is successful when someone uses it to do things you never imagined.
"I agree, SAMBA is one of the largest piles of mess I've ever run across. Most of the docs available tell you TOO much, which is just confusing and causes more problems then it solves. When I first used SAMBA I read through the entire documentation. After the headache subsided, I only needed to look at 3 pages to configure it. Then I used SWAT and had to reconfigure it afterwards since it messed it all up."
Oh believe me, it doesn't get any easier on Windows. Sure you can share a directory with a few clicks, if the workgroup is right, and you edit the security settings in control panel::admin tools, and you're not administrator, and you don't have a blank password, and you're not using WindowsXP, and you're not using WindowsNT, and you're not using any combination of different operating systems, and if you don't want to do anything complicated with passwords, but...
but anything other than that just gets confusing as hell. Trying to figure out why you can't copy files from one machine to another, only to find out that it's been helpfully blocked because your password was blank, or that you can't authenticate because you didn't logon using Windows Explorer before you tried to do it from your program... you can easily lose days or weeks trying to get samba (is it called that in windows?) working in windows.
"clicking a link [in a browser] replaces what you are seeing with the new content, unless the link points to another web site (in which case it may open a new browser window for your convenience)"
And later:
"Sometimes they [users] even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."
WTF? So I'm wrong to use tabs unless they're pointing to the same website, while websites which open links in a new window are "convenient"?
Is it just my imagination, or is this the complete opposite of what people normally do when they get a tabbed browser?
"Do you mean coordinating multiple distributed debuggers, or installing devenv in various places? Coordination can definitely be a pain, but there's no need to install devenv all over the place - just use ntsd."
To debug a piece of code on your development machine, just press F5 to start the program, run to a breakpoint, step through, etc.. And if you have a program that consists of 10.exe files, then you usually have to run 9 of them normally and one in the debugger. Still not that much of a problem, and you can run more than one process in a debugger if you don't mind it being a bit more complicated to synchronise.
If you've got a feature that you can only test by having the code running on 4 machines talking to each other, then it becomes that much more difficult to use debuggers without really confusing yourself.
However, if a program crashes in a function, you can just put a MessageBox() after each block of code, compile it, and run it normally. The last messagebox displayed tells you where the crash is, and you can then narrow your search. It's very useful for finding crashes (which in Windows are normally null pointers).
For debugging networking-type code you can dump "events" (i.e. logging, which we probably should do even when not debugging) into a file. This is useful when there're lots of threads or processes communicating, and you want to know who sent what, and who received it. "Thread x on computer y received message z" and you can get all the messages in order. fprintf can also handle loads of different data types quite easily, so you can send strings to the file without having to allocate new memory to create a debug message in.
I still find the visual studio debugger quite good for looking at linked-lists and stuff, but it seems to get overwhelmed quite easily when you've got more than one program running at once.
"you put a peace of gpl software in your code [get infected], the entire body of the software has to be gpl'ed"
Not automatically. You can choose to GPL your software because you've incorporated someone else's GPL program and you want to distribute it without breaking the law, but it's still a choice.
What would be viral is if you believe that EULAs are valid, because the "by continuing you agree to x" statements can cause self-replicating (i.e. viral or worm) behaviour. You can write an EULA that says "by using this program you agree to use license x for your other work", and it will be just as valid as an other clause in an EULA (whatever your opinion on that)
"In computer security terminology, a virus is a piece of program code that, like a biological virus, makes copies of itself and spreads by attaching itself to a host, often damaging the host in the process. The host is another computer program, often a computer operating system, which then infects the applications that are transferred to other computers." -
Wikipedia
So if the GPL isn't self-replicating, but only spreads through the re-use of code, does that give it virus or worm attributes? Can it be either, given that accepting the GPL is optional? If you're given an option to run a virus on your computer, does that mean you've been infected?
If you take GPL'd code and include it in your program, then the virus argument says that it would make your program GPL. But it doesn't. It simply makes your program a copyright-infringement. At that point, the GPL hasn't transferred itself anywhere, so it's not really acting like either a virus or a worm.
Ok, you can choose to put the GPL on your code, in the same way that you can choose to run a program on your computer, but "click here to run a screensaver" or "use the GPL if you want to legally distribute this code" is not exactly viral behaviour, its somebody choosing what to do with their system. As an aside, I'm also not convinced that the addition of a GPL causes damage to the program it's attached to...
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, the articles mentions that some email providers are blocking GMail due to privacy concerns"
Yet somehow not blocking Yahoo! Mail because of privacy concerns, nor blocking Hotmail because of privacy concerns. Really, how many (if any) such webmail services have good privacy guarantees?
"I always just set a cookie with a tracking ID, and then use that to keep track of the anon user. counting the number of tracking cookies given out each day, and the time they were used for seems to work sufficiently for me... or is there some problem with that I don't know about?"
[*] Counting 'bots
[*] Browsers with per-session cookie limits
[*] Browsers which pre-fetch linked pages
[*] Browsers which reload the previous page when you press the back button
[*] People using more than one computer
[*] People using more than one browser
[*] Browsers without any cookie support
[*] Browsers with cookies blocked
[*] Cached pages
On the plus side, at least it's easier than measuring program downloads, where you have bittorrents, P2P, mirrors, lots of caches, CD distribution and all the rest.
"Microsoft doesn't improve their products-- ever-- except in the presence of a viable competitor"
And they would improve a product with 95% market share that they give away for free why?
"Oh, that's a very good point.
I'll just march over to HR and explain that the corporate lawyers who bill out at over $1500/hr are somehow costing us money because they need 10 hours of tech support a week. The support staffer would have to be paid $150.01 dollars an hour for that to cost us money."
Either complain or don't. If you're happy supporting the every need of your lawyers, then don't moan when they call the helpdesk with trivial problems. (Your calculations are wrong too - they assume that the lawyer does not one iota of work during the whole week if there's a problem with his computer -- get some backup computers!)
But if people are calling the helpdesk with trivial problems, then the use of MS-Windows must be whipping up a storm of complaints. "My computer's going slow"... "somebody sent me a spam email".... "somebody says my computer is sending spam"... "my computer keeps rebooting"... "these windows keep popping up"... "i resized my desktop, and the icons all got rearranged"... "why has the start menu changed in WindowsXP?"... "Where are my programs in WindowsXP?"... "Why is there an animated dog next to my search results?"... "Why does an advert popup whenever I go to this website?"... "my computer just bluescreened when I ran a Java program"...
"This wallpaper blocks a lot of RF radation. This means that you can not use WLAN, cellphones and terrestrial TV/Radio. Is this really what you want?"
How soon can we fit it to trains?
"I've always liked Nokia phones but I wasn't going to get another one because of their stance (and their campaigning) on software patents but if they are investing in Mozilla - I'm really torn."
Don't be torn -- anyone who is campaigning for software patents so that they can patent the idea of displaying an image on a computer doesn't get any free sympathy just because they use open-source software.
"Who the hell modded this up? The Mozilla source is GPL. The only time you might have to pay the developers is if you're wishing to distribute Mozilla as a closed source app, in which case you'd need to negotiate an alternate (non-GPL) license with each contributor to the codebase."
I think he meant: if you fork, you have to pay some developers. Maybe yours, if you're feeling up for a challenge. Maybe theirs, if you prefer to save some time. But if your project budget is zero, you won't get much of a fork, because you won't have paid anyone to modify it for your purposes.
With mozilla, you get the desktop edition as GPL. If you want the nokia-phone-version, then somebody has to write it, and for that, as the original poster pointed out, you need to pay some developers. Whether you choose someone in your team, or someone from the mozilla team, is up to you.
Is there any way to get the "proper" google search working in FireFox?
(i.e. type something in the URL bar, and the google search is the last item in the drop-down list)
FireFox's separate search box is just less easy to use
"Oh, but that's all right! None of the prevalent vendors permit CDs that have been opened to be returned. You could've duplicated it, after all, or extracted the tracks."
Well either it's one or the other. If it's copy-"protected", then you can take it back and use the sticker saying so to prove that it hasn't been copied.
"There are always little apps that you didn't know about and no one else has heard of, except for the one guy in Accounting who absolutely needs it to run payroll every month.
Sure it's okay if you migrate it. But it has to work exactly as the current one does. Same input, same output, same format."
Why? Do you never improve programs? If I were that person with the obscure app and someone was re-writing it, we could save a lot of time and money by having something custom-made, rather than emulating the old one line-for-line because that's what the microsoft salesman told them should be the costly part...
"Here's your 10K-line program in Cobol. Look, we can write it as a 2K-line program in Perl, and you can access it from a browser."
"As a result, when they turn on their computer and their icons aren't in the same place, many people assume that the machine is broken and conclude that the best option is to call IT and open a trouble ticket."
If you have people who call tech-support when their icons change position, then they're costing your company more than a linux migration ever will...
"Spoken like a person who has never used Word for anything except writing a college paper. I prefer Open Office to MS Office, and I think that there are plent of problems for MS Office. But saying Office 97 is better than the more recent versions is delusional at best."
Go on then... what's improved since Word 6?
"i want an efficient AC to DC UPS which connects directly to a DC powersupply for my box(en).
that would rock."
It exists. The only useful feature of a laptop computer (apart from being able to play Myth2 on the train) is that it's got a built-in UPS with hours of battery backup.
Ignore the crappy small screen that's too low to see, ignore the crappy keyboard that's too small to type, and ignore the crappy touchpad that makes you think it would be easier to control the cursor by blowing on a straw. Just plug in your big monitor, your proper keyboard, and your optical mouse, close the lid, and it becomes a proper computer again, which will carry on working even after your power company's totally capable 60-year-old equipment takes a short nap and redirects your power to Oklahoma.
And if you've got enough laptops in the area, the wireless mesh network might even survive cuts in the telephone system. If only we could create a mesh network without getting spam sent 'from' our connection...
"Try doing the same thing with computers. Go ahead, get some ancient computing hardware from the 70s, 80s, or even early 90s. Install the ancient software. Now try to use that effectively in a technologically-advancing world. Oops! You can't!"
That "oops you can't" sounds rather pessimistic, and although I imagine you're ridiculing the idea just for the sake of it, we should think more seriously about why his idea was a good one.
Take a 1995 computer as a baseline, running linux, and some linux apps from the time. For public sector, I assume that means browsers and servers and Perl and PHP, but we can assume desktop applications too.
Upgrade the hardware. You're going to do it anyway, so get shiny black Dell PCs, or cappucino PCs for peoples' desks or whatever. Operating system still runs fine, applications still run fine. You've just upgraded a big part of the IT structure for less than the usual cost.
Upgrade the applications. New version of Mozilla? Download it. You've just upgraded one of the apps people use all the time, for absolutely minimal cost. New version of KMail comes out? Download that. Voila, upgraded applications, minimal cost. You don't have to budget $600 per computer plus $2000 support plus upgraded hardware every time you want to get the latest office suite - you just incrementally get the best, as it becomes available, without having to worry about the money.
Upgrade the operating system. So you've got Mandrake 7.2 running, and it's starting to look a bit old. Mandrake 9 will cost you $100 with support. And that's per city, not per machine. The applications still run, the hardware can still be used, you've just upgraded the IT infrastructure for minimal cost. Let the proprietary salesmen whine about how much retraining you'll have to do to teach KDE 3.3 to somone who's only used KDE 3.1
And in the future, you don't need to throw away PCs and operating systems and replace them all just to get a new browser or office suite, like you might with commercial operating systems. You just upgrade things as they need replacing, and everything just keeps on working.
When someone says the IT is built to last a long time, there's no need to assume they were talking about bits of hardware lasting magically, it means they're planning to avoid a "must upgrade everything now!!!" situation coming along every 5 years.
Compare:
[1] "We need MSOfficeXP to read people's Word documents, so we have to upgrade to WindowsXP. To get WindowsXP, we have to buy new computers. We also have to buy new licenses for MSOffice. We can do it for $2000 per desktop"
[2]"OpenOffice 1.1.1 is just released, you can download it from openoffice.org"
"Before someone can submit, they must 'digitally sign' (read: click an [I Agree] button) a statement stating that what they are posting is their own original material, fully licensed under the CPL, etc. etc. That's how you prevent lawsuits: put the liablility in the poster's hands"
We call this the slashdot law. "There exists no problem which cannot be solved using a long-winded encryption technique"
"At Imperial Home Decor Group / Blue Mountain Wallcoverings, we decided to switch to Firefox"
So can you remap the "set image as wallpaper" to really become your wallpaper?
"They're also probably aware that their readership will go down proportional to how much information they want"
Well, the information does have an equivalent monetay value (i.e. what people are prepared to give up the information to receive) which varies from about $10-$20 for simple half-page registration forms, to $50 or more for multi-page forms, or if there's any likelihood of the data actually being used against them (such as giving information for an insurance quote which may end up being used to calculate rates in the future even if you don't buy the insurance)
$20 worth of information to read a newspaper? No thanks, I'm using to newspapers costing 50c, and we only buy those for the television section (which isn't online in any convenient format in any newspaper I know)
oh, and anyone who says "get over it" regarding privacy issues can go live in the big brother household with larry ellison and scott mcnealy...
"As a software developer, I am frequently surprised when a user takes the application I've developed and does something with it that I didn't expect and for which I didn't plan"
The "duct tape test".
You know your program is successful when someone uses it to do things you never imagined.
"I agree, SAMBA is one of the largest piles of mess I've ever run across. Most of the docs available tell you TOO much, which is just confusing and causes more problems then it solves. When I first used SAMBA I read through the entire documentation. After the headache subsided, I only needed to look at 3 pages to configure it. Then I used SWAT and had to reconfigure it afterwards since it messed it all up."
Oh believe me, it doesn't get any easier on Windows. Sure you can share a directory with a few clicks, if the workgroup is right, and you edit the security settings in control panel::admin tools, and you're not administrator, and you don't have a blank password, and you're not using WindowsXP, and you're not using WindowsNT, and you're not using any combination of different operating systems, and if you don't want to do anything complicated with passwords, but...
but anything other than that just gets confusing as hell. Trying to figure out why you can't copy files from one machine to another, only to find out that it's been helpfully blocked because your password was blank, or that you can't authenticate because you didn't logon using Windows Explorer before you tried to do it from your program... you can easily lose days or weeks trying to get samba (is it called that in windows?) working in windows.
"Could you add filters that look for, say, more than 10% of the words mis-spelled"
So that'll kill any email from your friends who weren't already blocked by the "from AOL" or "HTML" filters...
From the article:
"clicking a link [in a browser] replaces what you are seeing with the new content, unless the link points to another web site (in which case it may open a new browser window for your convenience)"
And later:
"Sometimes they [users] even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."
WTF? So I'm wrong to use tabs unless they're pointing to the same website, while websites which open links in a new window are "convenient"?
Is it just my imagination, or is this the complete opposite of what people normally do when they get a tabbed browser?
"Unfortunate, I really liked Monopoly for Palm."
Don't you need Windows to run a monopoly?
"Do you mean coordinating multiple distributed debuggers, or installing devenv in various places? Coordination can definitely be a pain, but there's no need to install devenv all over the place - just use ntsd."
.exe files, then you usually have to run 9 of them normally and one in the debugger. Still not that much of a problem, and you can run more than one process in a debugger if you don't mind it being a bit more complicated to synchronise.
To debug a piece of code on your development machine, just press F5 to start the program, run to a breakpoint, step through, etc.. And if you have a program that consists of 10
If you've got a feature that you can only test by having the code running on 4 machines talking to each other, then it becomes that much more difficult to use debuggers without really confusing yourself.
However, if a program crashes in a function, you can just put a MessageBox() after each block of code, compile it, and run it normally. The last messagebox displayed tells you where the crash is, and you can then narrow your search. It's very useful for finding crashes (which in Windows are normally null pointers).
For debugging networking-type code you can dump "events" (i.e. logging, which we probably should do even when not debugging) into a file. This is useful when there're lots of threads or processes communicating, and you want to know who sent what, and who received it. "Thread x on computer y received message z" and you can get all the messages in order. fprintf can also handle loads of different data types quite easily, so you can send strings to the file without having to allocate new memory to create a debug message in.
I still find the visual studio debugger quite good for looking at linked-lists and stuff, but it seems to get overwhelmed quite easily when you've got more than one program running at once.
"you put a peace of gpl software in your code [get infected], the entire body of the software has to be gpl'ed"
Not automatically. You can choose to GPL your software because you've incorporated someone else's GPL program and you want to distribute it without breaking the law, but it's still a choice.
What would be viral is if you believe that EULAs are valid, because the "by continuing you agree to x" statements can cause self-replicating (i.e. viral or worm) behaviour. You can write an EULA that says "by using this program you agree to use license x for your other work", and it will be just as valid as an other clause in an EULA (whatever your opinion on that)
So if the GPL isn't self-replicating, but only spreads through the re-use of code, does that give it virus or worm attributes? Can it be either, given that accepting the GPL is optional? If you're given an option to run a virus on your computer, does that mean you've been infected?
If you take GPL'd code and include it in your program, then the virus argument says that it would make your program GPL. But it doesn't. It simply makes your program a copyright-infringement. At that point, the GPL hasn't transferred itself anywhere, so it's not really acting like either a virus or a worm.
Ok, you can choose to put the GPL on your code, in the same way that you can choose to run a program on your computer, but "click here to run a screensaver" or "use the GPL if you want to legally distribute this code" is not exactly viral behaviour, its somebody choosing what to do with their system. As an aside, I'm also not convinced that the addition of a GPL causes damage to the program it's attached to...