Why is that useful, anyway? Does anyone actually need to do that? Or is it just another annoyance that people will accidentally click on while trying to do something else? (Or maybe I just have bad mouse skills? Which is why I do all my file management from the command line on Linux?)
I'm a UIUC undergrad (CompE) right now. The first guy quoted in the article, Professor Milton Feng, taught my ECE440 (solid-state electronics) class last semester. In lecture, he would often mention some tradeoff in semiconductor design and say something like, "If you can come up with a solution for this, you will make millions." And then he would go off on tangents about all of the grad students he worked with that went on to make millions at Intel and whatnot.
Along with other things that have been mentioned here, UIUC had a big hand in early electronic music in the '40s and '50s. John Cage did some big concerts here, including one in a barn (I think it was the only space big and flat enough to do what he wanted to do or something), and a huge one in Assembly Hall that turned into kind of a hippy freak-out if I'm to believe what I've been told. Not to mention the concert which is claimed to be the first computer music concert in the Western hemisphere, which is kind of a controversial claim which depends on your definition of "computer music".
"I don't have a right in my non-communist country to add to a business overhead to suit my own needs."
Businesses, in a non-communist country, don't have a right to profit, and don't have a right to all the favorable conditions they want. The same kind of argument about "overhead" could be made about any open source products that are designed to interoperate with closed systems, but the businesses have to adapt to the situations that face them.
Perhaps Tridge "should" have written his own source control software; what he should have done is determined by his own goals. Would that have solved the problem, for example, that current developers of Subversion are prohibited by BitKeeper's license (since they develop a competing product) from using BitKeeper, and thus as it stands have no way of interacting with projects that use BitKeeper? Well, I suppose I should answer that question, no, it wouldn't. If he created his own file-sharing protocol, would that allow Linux clients to interoperate with Windows servers and vice-versa? That's why he made Samba.
Well you'd need at least a (binary) copy of Prof. Brent's program to do this, in order to be able to do test runs without risking your class grade. The article didn't indicate that he'd sell his program to individuals, just schools and businesses...
Still, it seems like something that could be at least partially reverse-engineered.
The one concern I'd have about the program in general is that it would teach people to write in a very particular way to make the program happy. When I used to run all my papers through MS-Word's grammar check it really hammered certain rules into my head. If the program continually makes the same kinds of mistakes it could hammer mistakes in there (In MS Word 2000's spellchecker, "ridiculous" was misspelled "rediculous". That made me look dumb quite often).
As an aside, there was a story recently that where there was some discussion about the difficulty of automatic grammar checking (I think the story was just some guy bitching about the current state of grammar checking programs). It would seem that this would be just as complicated if not more so (analyzing flow), and also solving a very similar problem. It would be interesting to see what some people that really wanted to attack grammar checking could do with the source code to this program (even if it could not be open-sourced because of cheating paranoia, there would probably be some kind of option to license the technology, at the right price)
There's a balance to be struck in terms of when to require giving code back, and the desired end result is that code is used freely and effectively; that it helps people. That some guy doing internal computer work for some company can reuse the solution that some other guy doing internal work came up with a few years ago when his company had the same problem. Or that someone else can play around with it at home, too.
Something like the RPL is one type of balance. If a company has a project that for whatever reason it can't release the source to (legal obligations, trade secrets, etc.) they're stuck. If it scares people away from using the software, it defeats the goal that the code is used to help the community. However, it ensures that the code does not benefit any corporation ever (if that's your cup of tea...)
The BSD license strikes a totally different balance by not forcing anyone to give back at all; it allows code to be "locked down into large corporate structures" where it can be distributed to anyone. There's a dispute over whether this helps more or less people derive value from the software than the GPL, where distribution requires source code access... but I think it's hard to argue that either of these licenses do a worse job of fulfilling the goal of a programmer that wants his code to be of use to many people as the RPL.
What do you mean when you say, "users in the developed world, who are generally richer, can avoid doing this by paying for a liberal version"?
If the code gets back to them under the GPL there's nothing they can do to avoid contributing their changes back (if they distribute of course).
At any rate, the purpose of GPL software isn't so that companies in any country can make money selling it, it's so that people in any country can get value out of using it. People in the third world can't modify GPL projects and use them as their own IP for free (only companies in Hawaii can do that), but they can modify GPL projects and use them to set up computing centers for no cost above hardware.
They also could not take commercial products and use them as a base for their own commercial works, but nobody thinks of that because they can't get the source code to those commercial products anyway. They can license technology from other companies, but it's still not their IP!
I'm neither GNOME or KDE... and they don't let me telnet into the mail server any more... but fortunately mutt is really not hard. I'd recommend mutt over any graphical client to any of my non-geek friends that use linux (I have a few, but most of them use webmail interfaces, which work fine too, I guess). If you need calendaring or whatnot, you probably need something else (like a calendar and a marker), but for just reading e-mail, I think mutt is the best and easiest solution.
1. How many people know and don't know wtf thunderbird is, anyway? 2. Last time I tried it, thunderbird sucked. It took 30 seconds to start (on a linux box where FF takes 5 seconds the first time after startup and less thereafter) and crashed constantly. It drove me to actually learn how to configure mutt properly. Of course, that's not a prospect that any non-geek will relish....
Actually I kind of wonder how it's "not funded by taxpayers" and at the same time "the city is actually paying $5000/year". Seems to be a mismatch. I don't think there's anything wrong with taxpayers paying for something like this, though, even as someone that doesn't own a laptop. I think it's a lot like a standardized set of city roads: a service that's valuable to lots of people that no company would offer (why would a company put up a WiFi hotspot covering all of downtown? Would they charge people for use? People would find other ways of getting online, just as they would try to find ways to avoid the most pricey private roads).
It's your own choice whether you spend your bandwidth making some advertiser happy. It's your own choice how your computer interprets the data that it's sent. That's why we don't run the VBScript attachments in our e-mail... If someone comes to your door selling magazines to raise money (say to go to college... this is common enough), and you like the person and want to see that person succeed but you don't really have any interest in what he's selling, why should you buy a magazine? Why should you clutter your own home with some shit like Rolling Stone Magazine when you would never read it? He gets some small cut of the proceeds and most of the money goes to people you don't care about. If you want to help him, give him money directly or offer him a chance to do something for you that you actually want or need. If you think the site is worthwhile then donate some money to it. But don't feel that you have to support the web advertising model in the process.
I think you are missing the point with the bodega guy. He doesn't ask you to remember a number every time you come back. Stores like Sam's Club and Cosco do that, but that's explicitly opt-in: you have to sign up for a membership... I guess more and more supermarkets ask you to get a "preferred card" or whatnot to track you with (and then dangle savings in front of you). But the guy at the bodega remembers in HIS OWN BRAIN what you look like. If he asks you to keep a number, he can't hold you to storing it and keeping it around. You have every right to throw away the number when you get home.
Yeah. It's nice to have Mookie looking out for us. Now I can delete cookies without fear of losing his delicious PIE! What Mookie has helped me realize is that while many of the cookies that have found their way onto my computer over the years are useless, undesirable or worse, PIE will only be delievered by the pure of heart! I can trust PIE! *heart* Mookie.
Macromedia's not on your side. You know how I know?
Correct me if my history is wrong here, but first came shockwave, then came flash. The shockwave plugin let you mute or turn down the volume of a playing shockwave object. The flash plugin doesn't. When ads with sound hit the web, there was no easy way to block them in most browsers.
I never would have bothered with flashblock except for those damn ads with sound.
"If you are visiting a site, the developer of that site has every right to track your page views while you're there..." You're not *there*. The developer isn't putting ads on his site, the developer is putting ads on your computer screen. More specifically, you tell your computer to send a request to a server for information. The server sends back information (often an html page) with references to other information: the advertisements and other images on the page. If you don't need or want to see the advertisements, why should you waste your own bandwidth sending more requests to the server and downloading ads?
As far as cookies go, at the "bodega on the corner" the "guy who works there" writes down *in his own records* when you came and what you bought. He doesn't give you a piece of paper and ask you to file it in your records and then bring it back to him next time you visit.
Here goes. I think DosBox is a full emulator, and Bochs definitely is a full emulator. Which means that yes, you can boot operating systems in Bochs, but it's very slow, to the extent that you wouldn't really want to boot a modern operating system in it to do real work (unless the work is something like system or driver programming, which emulators are quite nice for).
UAE emulates the Amiga. Somehow I doubt the vast software library of the Amiga will come to the rescue of this system.
And my experience with the third-party applications on bebits.com is that many of them are pretty good, but there still isn't a whole lot of variety.
I think the best hope for any new operating system to have "no shortage of software" is to be as close to source-compatible with Unixes (particularly Linux) as possible so as to leverage their large development community. And sever apps, like Mozilla, end up getting ported to beOS... I don't know just how easy it is to do, though.
Yeah, this is offtopic and I'll be modded down, but I'll just let you know for the sake of bettering humanity... there is no need to reboot a linux box just to login as root. Just issue the "su" command at any terminal, and you're root. There aren't really many times when you need to fully reboot, unless you are recompiling the kernel or you have to test some hardware whose driver can't be loaded as a module... and maybe a few other rare cases.
Well maybe you'll never take a few bars from a piece of music, but what about musicians that use samples? Or in the case of IP in the composition rather than the performance, ringtones for cell-phones (or other short announcements produced by electronics or programs).
Short movie clips probably aren't used as commonly... although I'm sure creative types use them somehow. And it's really all the same in the end. I suppose if it were a court decision rather than a law specifically allowing copying of music that could be used as a precedent in a legal case... I don't think laws can be used quite the same way, though.
Think about it from Google's perspective. What would be the reaction if people tried to search for Microsoft on Google and couldn't find it? They would think Google was crap. Google would have to make some kind of decision about what to do, but I highly doubt that they would remove a site as major as microsoft.com from their search results.
Now Microsoft would never engage in this particular type of shady doin's, because they don't need the money, that is, they don't need money from some scheme unrelated to their business. One might even say that Generic Evil Corp. would probably shy away from measures like that because their ordinary evil activities should make them enough money as long as they can maintain something approximating a clean image...
Often, when used judiciously, mid-instruction breaks make long instructions easier to read and allow the entire line to be displayed at once. Keeping your code's width at less than 80 characters is nice, too. Yeah, it's kind of an arbitrary number enforced by console widths, but (a) some people still use the console. (b) most code has many short lines and a few very long ones (conditionals, loops, insane bit arithmetic and what have you); having lines stretch horizontally for a really long time makes you move your eyes far away from the rest of the code to read it. Most code I've seen that breaks long lines and comments at 70-80 characters looks about right in terms of the tradeoff of having enough space on a line to say your piece and still not having a few lines that disrupt the reading of the code. And that way, if you have a huge monitor, the horizontal space can be used to display multiple source files without having to scroll any of them horizontally.
I made the exact same mis-read. I guess despite the tall 'k' making a striking impact on the contour of the beginning of "workmanlike" it still looks like "womanlike".
Kinda did a double-take there... like, whoa, blatant sexism is now acceptable on the front page of slashdot, not only in the comments.
So I guess this means that neither men nor women can read.
Perhaps he could not be fired for whistle-blowing. However, I think that he could be fired for writing code for the company that the company could not fully use. If he signs an agreement saying, "anything I write belongs to the company", and then he writes code that is based on a GPL work and thus limits the ability of the company to do Whatever They Want(tm) with it, he probably isn't making the company very happy.
Now, if he was told or advised to use the GPL code by his boss or something... then that's a different story.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that useful, anyway? Does anyone actually need to do that? Or is it just another annoyance that people will accidentally click on while trying to do something else? (Or maybe I just have bad mouse skills? Which is why I do all my file management from the command line on Linux?)
xpdf has an icon at the bottom of the screen that looks like binoculars.
I'd prefer using '/' to search, but it works well enough.
Why not just use a ^W instead of all those ^Hs?
I'm a UIUC undergrad (CompE) right now. The first guy quoted in the article, Professor Milton Feng, taught my ECE440 (solid-state electronics) class last semester. In lecture, he would often mention some tradeoff in semiconductor design and say something like, "If you can come up with a solution for this, you will make millions." And then he would go off on tangents about all of the grad students he worked with that went on to make millions at Intel and whatnot.
Along with other things that have been mentioned here, UIUC had a big hand in early electronic music in the '40s and '50s. John Cage did some big concerts here, including one in a barn (I think it was the only space big and flat enough to do what he wanted to do or something), and a huge one in Assembly Hall that turned into kind of a hippy freak-out if I'm to believe what I've been told. Not to mention the concert which is claimed to be the first computer music concert in the Western hemisphere, which is kind of a controversial claim which depends on your definition of "computer music".
"I don't have a right in my non-communist country to add to a business overhead to suit my own needs."
Businesses, in a non-communist country, don't have a right to profit, and don't have a right to all the favorable conditions they want. The same kind of argument about "overhead" could be made about any open source products that are designed to interoperate with closed systems, but the businesses have to adapt to the situations that face them.
Perhaps Tridge "should" have written his own source control software; what he should have done is determined by his own goals. Would that have solved the problem, for example, that current developers of Subversion are prohibited by BitKeeper's license (since they develop a competing product) from using BitKeeper, and thus as it stands have no way of interacting with projects that use BitKeeper? Well, I suppose I should answer that question, no, it wouldn't. If he created his own file-sharing protocol, would that allow Linux clients to interoperate with Windows servers and vice-versa? That's why he made Samba.
Well you'd need at least a (binary) copy of Prof. Brent's program to do this, in order to be able to do test runs without risking your class grade. The article didn't indicate that he'd sell his program to individuals, just schools and businesses...
Still, it seems like something that could be at least partially reverse-engineered.
The one concern I'd have about the program in general is that it would teach people to write in a very particular way to make the program happy. When I used to run all my papers through MS-Word's grammar check it really hammered certain rules into my head. If the program continually makes the same kinds of mistakes it could hammer mistakes in there (In MS Word 2000's spellchecker, "ridiculous" was misspelled "rediculous". That made me look dumb quite often).
As an aside, there was a story recently that where there was some discussion about the difficulty of automatic grammar checking (I think the story was just some guy bitching about the current state of grammar checking programs). It would seem that this would be just as complicated if not more so (analyzing flow), and also solving a very similar problem. It would be interesting to see what some people that really wanted to attack grammar checking could do with the source code to this program (even if it could not be open-sourced because of cheating paranoia, there would probably be some kind of option to license the technology, at the right price)
Big heavy boxes full of paper (or large engraved stone tablets for that matter) containing the text of licenses kill people.
Big difference.
There's a balance to be struck in terms of when to require giving code back, and the desired end result is that code is used freely and effectively; that it helps people. That some guy doing internal computer work for some company can reuse the solution that some other guy doing internal work came up with a few years ago when his company had the same problem. Or that someone else can play around with it at home, too.
Something like the RPL is one type of balance. If a company has a project that for whatever reason it can't release the source to (legal obligations, trade secrets, etc.) they're stuck. If it scares people away from using the software, it defeats the goal that the code is used to help the community. However, it ensures that the code does not benefit any corporation ever (if that's your cup of tea...)
The BSD license strikes a totally different balance by not forcing anyone to give back at all; it allows code to be "locked down into large corporate structures" where it can be distributed to anyone. There's a dispute over whether this helps more or less people derive value from the software than the GPL, where distribution requires source code access... but I think it's hard to argue that either of these licenses do a worse job of fulfilling the goal of a programmer that wants his code to be of use to many people as the RPL.
What do you mean when you say, "users in the developed world, who are generally richer, can avoid doing this by paying for a liberal version"?
If the code gets back to them under the GPL there's nothing they can do to avoid contributing their changes back (if they distribute of course).
At any rate, the purpose of GPL software isn't so that companies in any country can make money selling it, it's so that people in any country can get value out of using it. People in the third world can't modify GPL projects and use them as their own IP for free (only companies in Hawaii can do that), but they can modify GPL projects and use them to set up computing centers for no cost above hardware.
They also could not take commercial products and use them as a base for their own commercial works, but nobody thinks of that because they can't get the source code to those commercial products anyway. They can license technology from other companies, but it's still not their IP!
I'm neither GNOME or KDE... and they don't let me telnet into the mail server any more... but fortunately mutt is really not hard. I'd recommend mutt over any graphical client to any of my non-geek friends that use linux (I have a few, but most of them use webmail interfaces, which work fine too, I guess). If you need calendaring or whatnot, you probably need something else (like a calendar and a marker), but for just reading e-mail, I think mutt is the best and easiest solution.
1. How many people know and don't know wtf thunderbird is, anyway?
2. Last time I tried it, thunderbird sucked. It took 30 seconds to start (on a linux box where FF takes 5 seconds the first time after startup and less thereafter) and crashed constantly. It drove me to actually learn how to configure mutt properly. Of course, that's not a prospect that any non-geek will relish....
Actually I kind of wonder how it's "not funded by taxpayers" and at the same time "the city is actually paying $5000/year". Seems to be a mismatch. I don't think there's anything wrong with taxpayers paying for something like this, though, even as someone that doesn't own a laptop. I think it's a lot like a standardized set of city roads: a service that's valuable to lots of people that no company would offer (why would a company put up a WiFi hotspot covering all of downtown? Would they charge people for use? People would find other ways of getting online, just as they would try to find ways to avoid the most pricey private roads).
It's your own choice whether you spend your bandwidth making some advertiser happy. It's your own choice how your computer interprets the data that it's sent. That's why we don't run the VBScript attachments in our e-mail... If someone comes to your door selling magazines to raise money (say to go to college... this is common enough), and you like the person and want to see that person succeed but you don't really have any interest in what he's selling, why should you buy a magazine? Why should you clutter your own home with some shit like Rolling Stone Magazine when you would never read it? He gets some small cut of the proceeds and most of the money goes to people you don't care about. If you want to help him, give him money directly or offer him a chance to do something for you that you actually want or need. If you think the site is worthwhile then donate some money to it. But don't feel that you have to support the web advertising model in the process.
I think you are missing the point with the bodega guy. He doesn't ask you to remember a number every time you come back. Stores like Sam's Club and Cosco do that, but that's explicitly opt-in: you have to sign up for a membership... I guess more and more supermarkets ask you to get a "preferred card" or whatnot to track you with (and then dangle savings in front of you). But the guy at the bodega remembers in HIS OWN BRAIN what you look like. If he asks you to keep a number, he can't hold you to storing it and keeping it around. You have every right to throw away the number when you get home.
Yeah. It's nice to have Mookie looking out for us. Now I can delete cookies without fear of losing his delicious PIE! What Mookie has helped me realize is that while many of the cookies that have found their way onto my computer over the years are useless, undesirable or worse, PIE will only be delievered by the pure of heart! I can trust PIE! *heart* Mookie.
Macromedia's not on your side. You know how I know?
Correct me if my history is wrong here, but first came shockwave, then came flash. The shockwave plugin let you mute or turn down the volume of a playing shockwave object. The flash plugin doesn't. When ads with sound hit the web, there was no easy way to block them in most browsers.
I never would have bothered with flashblock except for those damn ads with sound.
"If you are visiting a site, the developer of that site has every right to track your page views while you're there..."
You're not *there*. The developer isn't putting ads on his site, the developer is putting ads on your computer screen. More specifically, you tell your computer to send a request to a server for information. The server sends back information (often an html page) with references to other information: the advertisements and other images on the page. If you don't need or want to see the advertisements, why should you waste your own bandwidth sending more requests to the server and downloading ads?
As far as cookies go, at the "bodega on the corner" the "guy who works there" writes down *in his own records* when you came and what you bought. He doesn't give you a piece of paper and ask you to file it in your records and then bring it back to him next time you visit.
"Flash better not be on my computer."
Well did you disable it?
Here goes. I think DosBox is a full emulator, and Bochs definitely is a full emulator. Which means that yes, you can boot operating systems in Bochs, but it's very slow, to the extent that you wouldn't really want to boot a modern operating system in it to do real work (unless the work is something like system or driver programming, which emulators are quite nice for).
UAE emulates the Amiga. Somehow I doubt the vast software library of the Amiga will come to the rescue of this system.
And my experience with the third-party applications on bebits.com is that many of them are pretty good, but there still isn't a whole lot of variety.
I think the best hope for any new operating system to have "no shortage of software" is to be as close to source-compatible with Unixes (particularly Linux) as possible so as to leverage their large development community. And sever apps, like Mozilla, end up getting ported to beOS... I don't know just how easy it is to do, though.
Yeah, this is offtopic and I'll be modded down, but I'll just let you know for the sake of bettering humanity... there is no need to reboot a linux box just to login as root. Just issue the "su" command at any terminal, and you're root. There aren't really many times when you need to fully reboot, unless you are recompiling the kernel or you have to test some hardware whose driver can't be loaded as a module... and maybe a few other rare cases.
Well maybe you'll never take a few bars from a piece of music, but what about musicians that use samples? Or in the case of IP in the composition rather than the performance, ringtones for cell-phones (or other short announcements produced by electronics or programs).
Short movie clips probably aren't used as commonly... although I'm sure creative types use them somehow. And it's really all the same in the end. I suppose if it were a court decision rather than a law specifically allowing copying of music that could be used as a precedent in a legal case... I don't think laws can be used quite the same way, though.
Perhaps Generic Evil Corp., but not Microsoft.
Think about it from Google's perspective. What would be the reaction if people tried to search for Microsoft on Google and couldn't find it? They would think Google was crap. Google would have to make some kind of decision about what to do, but I highly doubt that they would remove a site as major as microsoft.com from their search results.
Now Microsoft would never engage in this particular type of shady doin's, because they don't need the money, that is, they don't need money from some scheme unrelated to their business. One might even say that Generic Evil Corp. would probably shy away from measures like that because their ordinary evil activities should make them enough money as long as they can maintain something approximating a clean image...
Often, when used judiciously, mid-instruction breaks make long instructions easier to read and allow the entire line to be displayed at once. Keeping your code's width at less than 80 characters is nice, too. Yeah, it's kind of an arbitrary number enforced by console widths, but (a) some people still use the console. (b) most code has many short lines and a few very long ones (conditionals, loops, insane bit arithmetic and what have you); having lines stretch horizontally for a really long time makes you move your eyes far away from the rest of the code to read it. Most code I've seen that breaks long lines and comments at 70-80 characters looks about right in terms of the tradeoff of having enough space on a line to say your piece and still not having a few lines that disrupt the reading of the code. And that way, if you have a huge monitor, the horizontal space can be used to display multiple source files without having to scroll any of them horizontally.
I made the exact same mis-read. I guess despite the tall 'k' making a striking impact on the contour of the beginning of "workmanlike" it still looks like "womanlike".
Kinda did a double-take there... like, whoa, blatant sexism is now acceptable on the front page of slashdot, not only in the comments.
So I guess this means that neither men nor women can read.
Our only hope is the androgynous.
Perhaps he could not be fired for whistle-blowing. However, I think that he could be fired for writing code for the company that the company could not fully use. If he signs an agreement saying, "anything I write belongs to the company", and then he writes code that is based on a GPL work and thus limits the ability of the company to do Whatever They Want(tm) with it, he probably isn't making the company very happy.
Now, if he was told or advised to use the GPL code by his boss or something... then that's a different story.
It would require a correct wireless card configuration in Windows. As it stands, QEMU emulates a network card and a network gateway...
m l# SEC19
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.ht