On this system, running the KDE version that comes with SuSE 10.0
(3.4.2 judging by the versions of the rpms), Klipper works fine. If
I mark some editable text, or just anything in e.g. Mozilla, I have
to press ctrl-c for it to end up in the clipboard. This is nice
because it should be possible to mark something and then paste over
it with something else. And if I mark some text in a terminal window,
it is immediately stored in the clipboard, and that makes sense too.
But at home, where I've installed SuSE 10.1, and with it a somewhat newer
version of KDE, there seems to be no way to get this behavior. Whenever
I select text anywhere, it immediately kills whatever was in the clipboard.
And since the contents of an input field often are selected when the field
gets focus, it's suddely quite difficult to e.g. paste in a new URL in
the URL bar... I could of course turn off the synchronization between
selection and clipboard, but then I could no longer copy with the
mouse and paste with the keyboard in a terminal window, and that's something
I rely on a whole lot.
They've done something to make the software installing part of YaST take ages to start.
SuseWatcher no longer exists. I'm not sure how/if the system will notify me if a patch should be downloaded/installed and something then needs restarting (or rebooting...).
The lack of codecs for most common audio and video formats is as annoying as ever. I've installed a working xine from Packman.
I have found no way to get readable fonts and non-broken widgets in GTK applications. This was bad enough in 10.0 but now it's a lot worse.
A KDE issue: I can no longer copy text by marking in a terminal without also doing so in programs like Mozilla and OpenOffice.
A good thing: The machine boots a lot quicker than with 9.2.
(even though performance is not a quality of a language, but of a particular implementation)
Many languages only have a single implementation, or at least only a single working implementation (Java, PHP, Perl...), and then this distinction means little. Still, to use runtime performance as the sole, unqualified criterion for judging a language's worth is beyond stoopid.
Another thing: I'm not sure MS are self-destructing just yet - from where I'm standing their despicable business practices seem to still be working. Now, if we could just ramp up the cluebat production enough to give the general population a good thumping...
Are you saying that unless you and I have an agreement explicitly forbidding me to do so, I am free to hack into your computer, ping flood you off the net and torch your mother's house?
Personally, I'm in favor of keeping things on pencil and paper more or less until teachers start asking to have papers typed. (Maybe late middle school?)
That reminds me of how at some point (7th grade or later?) the teachers started asking us to hand in such things typed because at the _next_ level of school they'd require it. And of course at the next level they didn't really require it for the most part, but reminded us that at the _next_ level they would. And the next thing I know I'm writing (and correcting) hand-written reports for graduate courses.
One thing I really can't see in mankind's future is the obsolescence of paper. Or pencils.
From TFA, just to show what this Jack Gold means by "lost":
Is the data protected from loss? Probably not, even though there are many devices now available that include encryption capability (which is rarely used). And what if a competitor picks it up?
So his concern is your company's dirty secrets (or legitimate secrets) leaking to the public, not the actual loss of data. Which is also pretty clear from the "Will you even know?" part of TFA's title.
Not really, though. The outputs are really just on or off, but if you toggle them fast enough you can emulate a whole range of output voltages. Which, incidentally, is what the horribly limited system the RCX ships with does, though so slowly that the motors make wicked grinding noises (well, at least mine do) if you run them at anything less than full speed.
IHMO (less humble now, perhaps, after a glass or two), the processor in the RCX isn't all that limited. Sure, you only have 16-bit registers and 32 kB, but it runs at a higher frequency than the 68k in my Amiga 500. Which makes me wonder whether I should spend the weekend playing with LEGO or playing old computer games...
Here I was hoping that that they'd found a way to drive off prefects of various kinds. Not that I dislike the one we have around here, but sometimes it could be useful.
I bought [Loki's] games. And no, I didn't get any source code.
Nor did I, and that means that I have no hope of ever getting the
bugs in Railroad Tycoon II fixed. (And that includes the one that
makes the game crash if you want to play multiplayer. I wonder how
they could not notice that before release.)
I, too, see the point in hiding the source code of games while they're new.
But I would love for the law to require source to be released when a
program is no longer actively maintained. And that will of course never happen.
How about changing the settings in the directory that is used to
create a user's OOo directory the first time OOo is started?
On our system this happens to be in/export/local/9.0/packages/OpenOffice.org2.0/share / but it would obviously
be elsewhere on your MS Windows system.
I get the impression that you're not using the network for home directories,
so I'm guessing that you don't use it for anything else either.
If OOo is installed separately on each computer, you'd have to somehow
propagate the defaults (or skel, or whatever one should call it) out to every
machine, but that's a whole different problem.
On a more serious note, Antipiratbyrån has been under some fire (very lame fire, since Swedish media generally don't understand the whole copyright issue) recently for planting copyrighed material as an excuse to raid the ISP Bahnhof. More on that here and (in Swedish) here.
Licencing your code under a slightly less restrictive licence, something like the BSD licence, will also aid in adoption by those who don't want to be so limited by it's terms of use. [emphasis added by me]
I don't think people normally consider "modify and redistribute" to be covered by "use". It almost sounds to me like you're propagating the idea that by simply using software released under a copyleft license (like the GPL), you're somehow being tied up. That the GPL does
not limit how you can use the software is one of its major points.
Nanotechnology is defined by devices smaller or in the range of a nanometer, like a virus
Ah-hrm. A covalent bond (or an individual atom, if you wish) is on the order of a tenth of a nanometer (an Ångström) or more. Anything as tiny as a single nanometer can hardly be more than a small-ish molecule. There's a page about virus sizes here.
The most coherent definition of nanotech I've encountered is along the lines of "anything with features as small as 100nm or less". The point would be that that's when micrometers give you annoyingly many leading 0s.
It's late in the afternoon (or possibly evening, depending on your frame of reference) in Sweden right now, and unless someone has stealthily moved Denmark to someplace better, it should be the same time there.
Take Doom3. The only version released (so far) doesn't run without DirectX 9. So is it clearly a derivative work? Does Microsoft(tm) actually own copyright on Doom?
Doom is a lot of things: the source code, the executables, a bunch of data files, the full product in a cardboard box...
If the program's really statically linked (or whatever the MS Windows equivalent of that is) against these libraries, then it's hard to imagine that Microsoft wouldn't hold any copyright. But most likely there's then some sort of license which gives Id and other developers the right to use the libraries in the way that they do. Or maybe they're linked dynamically, and the headers are either in the public domain (possibly because they're not protectable), or under some fairly permissive license.
But then again, I'm no expert on Microsoft and its licensing - I try to stay as far away from it as possible.
If you distribute MyApp it must be under the GPL regardless of whether you have made changes to LibFoo. Well, at least if linking is considered to be "combining two modules into one program". See
the GPL FAQ, and specifically this.
The online update part of SuSE's Yast2 doesn't require you to not have modified any of the files it's upgrading, so it can't very well be a binary diff. And it takes forever for minor patches on big things, such as Mozilla or the kernel sources.
Here's a snippet from a patch description used by the online update, to give you some idea of what it does:
On the contrary, Boulder must be quite big. ~10 km (thats km^3, in case something dislikes Latin-1 and swallows the ) is a whole lot. If we assume that the city would make a 10 meter layer of rubble if crushed, it'd cover some 30 km * 30 km.
Go do the math - you'll find that the dependence on the population size is very weak once the population size gets much bigger than the sample size. Or in other words, when a normal distribution starts to be a good approximation of the Poisson distribution. Think of it like this: when the Poisson distribution gets close enough to the normal distribution, the size of the deviation isn't important anymore.
If I don't make much sense to you (frankly, I don't make much sense to me), head over to Mathworld where I'm sure they do a much better job of explaining this.
Nitpick of the day: pH (-log hydrogen) is one thing, PhD (Philosophiæ Doctor; Doctor of Philosophy) is another.
Anyhow, I was going to say a few words about the consequences of letting someone get away with the kind of thing Schön did, but some other posters have already so I won't bother.
Slashdot Mirror
On this system, running the KDE version that comes with SuSE 10.0 (3.4.2 judging by the versions of the rpms), Klipper works fine. If I mark some editable text, or just anything in e.g. Mozilla, I have to press ctrl-c for it to end up in the clipboard. This is nice because it should be possible to mark something and then paste over it with something else. And if I mark some text in a terminal window, it is immediately stored in the clipboard, and that makes sense too.
But at home, where I've installed SuSE 10.1, and with it a somewhat newer version of KDE, there seems to be no way to get this behavior. Whenever I select text anywhere, it immediately kills whatever was in the clipboard. And since the contents of an input field often are selected when the field gets focus, it's suddely quite difficult to e.g. paste in a new URL in the URL bar...
I could of course turn off the synchronization between selection and clipboard, but then I could no longer copy with the mouse and paste with the keyboard in a terminal window, and that's something I rely on a whole lot.
So no, copy and paste is still a big problem.
Many languages only have a single implementation, or at least only a single working implementation (Java, PHP, Perl...), and then this distinction means little. Still, to use runtime performance as the sole, unqualified criterion for judging a language's worth is beyond stoopid.
Another thing: I'm not sure MS are self-destructing just yet - from where I'm standing their despicable business practices seem to still be working. Now, if we could just ramp up the cluebat production enough to give the general population a good thumping...
Are you saying that unless you and I have an agreement explicitly forbidding me to do so, I am free to hack into your computer, ping flood you off the net and torch your mother's house?
That reminds me of how at some point (7th grade or later?) the teachers started asking us to hand in such things typed because at the _next_ level of school they'd require it. And of course at the next level they didn't really require it for the most part, but reminded us that at the _next_ level they would. And the next thing I know I'm writing (and correcting) hand-written reports for graduate courses.
One thing I really can't see in mankind's future is the obsolescence of paper. Or pencils.
Is the data protected from loss? Probably not, even though there are many devices now available that include encryption capability (which is rarely used). And what if a competitor picks it up?
So his concern is your company's dirty secrets (or legitimate secrets) leaking to the public, not the actual loss of data. Which is also pretty clear from the "Will you even know?" part of TFA's title.
Not really, though. The outputs are really just on or off, but if you toggle them fast enough you can emulate a whole range of output voltages. Which, incidentally, is what the horribly limited system the RCX ships with does, though so slowly that the motors make wicked grinding noises (well, at least mine do) if you run them at anything less than full speed.
IHMO (less humble now, perhaps, after a glass or two), the processor in the RCX isn't all that limited. Sure, you only have 16-bit registers and 32 kB, but it runs at a higher frequency than the 68k in my Amiga 500. Which makes me wonder whether I should spend the weekend playing with LEGO or playing old computer games...
Here I was hoping that that they'd found a way to drive off prefects of various kinds. Not that I dislike the one we have around here, but sometimes it could be useful.
Nor did I, and that means that I have no hope of ever getting the bugs in Railroad Tycoon II fixed. (And that includes the one that makes the game crash if you want to play multiplayer. I wonder how they could not notice that before release.)
I, too, see the point in hiding the source code of games while they're new. But I would love for the law to require source to be released when a program is no longer actively maintained. And that will of course never happen.
How about changing the settings in the directory that is used to create a user's OOo directory the first time OOo is started? On our system this happens to be in /export/local/9.0/packages/OpenOffice.org2.0/share / but it would obviously
be elsewhere on your MS Windows system.
I get the impression that you're not using the network for home directories,
so I'm guessing that you don't use it for anything else either.
If OOo is installed separately on each computer, you'd have to somehow
propagate the defaults (or skel, or whatever one should call it) out to every
machine, but that's a whole different problem.
But the grandparent wasn't too bright either, really. Hoping the finer^Wblunter points of sarcasm would be appreciated on slashdot. Sheesh.
On a more serious note, Antipiratbyrån has been under some fire (very lame fire, since Swedish media generally don't understand the whole copyright issue) recently for planting copyrighed material as an excuse to raid the ISP Bahnhof. More on that here and (in Swedish) here.
Exactingly.
I don't think people normally consider "modify and redistribute" to be covered by "use". It almost sounds to me like you're propagating the idea that by simply using software released under a copyleft license (like the GPL), you're somehow being tied up. That the GPL does not limit how you can use the software is one of its major points.
Ah-hrm. A covalent bond (or an individual atom, if you wish) is on the order of a tenth of a nanometer (an Ångström) or more. Anything as tiny as a single nanometer can hardly be more than a small-ish molecule. There's a page about virus sizes here.
The most coherent definition of nanotech I've encountered is along the lines of "anything with features as small as 100nm or less". The point would be that that's when micrometers give you annoyingly many leading 0s.
Symbian sex machine? Remind me never to borrow your smartphone.
It's late in the afternoon (or possibly evening, depending on your frame of reference) in Sweden right now, and unless someone has stealthily moved Denmark to someplace better, it should be the same time there.
I'll go meta-moderate now, and if I happen to come across the moderation of your post as offtopic I'll... err... do something.
Doom is a lot of things: the source code, the executables, a bunch of data files, the full product in a cardboard box...
If the program's really statically linked (or whatever the MS Windows equivalent of that is) against these libraries, then it's hard to imagine that Microsoft wouldn't hold any copyright. But most likely there's then some sort of license which gives Id and other developers the right to use the libraries in the way that they do. Or maybe they're linked dynamically, and the headers are either in the public domain (possibly because they're not protectable), or under some fairly permissive license.
But then again, I'm no expert on Microsoft and its licensing - I try to stay as far away from it as possible.
If you distribute MyApp it must be under the GPL regardless of whether you have made changes to LibFoo. Well, at least if linking is considered to be "combining two modules into one program". See the GPL FAQ, and specifically this.
Here's a snippet from a patch description used by the online update, to give you some idea of what it does:
On the contrary, Boulder must be quite big. ~10 km (thats km^3, in case something dislikes Latin-1 and swallows the ) is a whole lot. If we assume that the city would make a 10 meter layer of rubble if crushed, it'd cover some 30 km * 30 km.
If I don't make much sense to you (frankly, I don't make much sense to me), head over to Mathworld where I'm sure they do a much better job of explaining this.
...and then _you_ get modded as Troll. Slashdot is strange indeed. :-O
Anyhow, I was going to say a few words about the consequences of letting someone get away with the kind of thing Schön did, but some other posters have already so I won't bother.