Version 3 of the GPL will add additional restrictions on top of what v2 does. GPL v2 explicitly states that you can't add more restrictions
Clause 9 from the GPL 2 text says that you *can* use v2 with a later version of the GPL.
It may appear that the "no additional restrictions" clause in v2 might come into conflict with clause 9 and a GPL v3 (or later).
But in this case I think that clause 9 clearly takes precedence. That appears to be spirit of the license and the intention of clause 9. You would have a hard time arguing that "no additional restrictions takes precedence" is how the GPL v2 should be read. IMHO.
I'm pretty sure that Mandrake and Conectiva are working together and/or sponsering the development of Smart package manager. I expect this to replace URPMI.
Being able to define natural looking domain-specific languages using Ruby's code blocks seems like something that would be very difficult in Python.
Do you any examples of this in action? I mean a non-trivial example showing a Ruby block based solution for a problem that is clearly better than the more tradional (messy?) solution.
Pay-to-surf was a British attempt to pay people to watch advertising online - it failed, partly because a lot of users found a way to move the advertising off-screen using virtual desktops
That and advertisers not interested in using these free-internet companies to advertise to the cheapskate demographic.
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Simon
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design
on
What Makes a Good UI?
·
· Score: 1
The main benefit of Qt's container types is that they are the same on each platform. You have to deal with different STL implementations having different bugs. The other reason Qt doesn't use STL is simply because when Qt was started the STL hadn't settled yet and was a PITA to use for cross platform stuff. So then made their own. Now they have to continue using and supporting their containers types. Their customers have too much code depending on it now.
Black text on mid/light grey instead of white is my recommendation. Plenty of contrast and you avoid having to stare at a bright light-bulb thing all day. It's also not too radical.:) (This was the default colour scheme for AmigaOS 2.0 BTW. I don't know why everyone swears by white backgrounds these days).
Also LCDs are way better than CRTs. The image is just plain *sharper* and solid as a rock.
UI-centric design makes sense for the UI layer. For the logic and data layers, the equivalent design consideration is API design, which is not as compelling as functional design, including maintenance features. Dictating the whole application's design by the UI is like flying not just on one wing, but on no wings, or engine, just the cockpit dashboard.
That's absurd. If you don't know what the UI is going to be then how the hell do you know what the logic and data layer must support in order so that you can build the UI on top???
And of course the UI designer doesn't design the software under the UI, that's the job of a Software Engineer. The UI designer creates the specification for UI and then gives it to the SE who takes it plus any other technical specs (such as which CPU/OS) and then designs and implements software itself. That is UI-centric design. Everything is directed toward supporting the user and UI, and that is where you begin.
And as for the other poster and designing the F-16. Computer applications and fighter jets are totally different situations when it comes to design.
This just looks like another case of using US taxpayer money to fund US high-tech industries/corporations. I mean, the US government can't say "Hey, let's just hand over $24 billion to these high-tech corporations". People won't accept that, but they can say "The military needs $24 billion to build a new superduper network thingy to fight terrorists or whatever". People won't blink an eyelid at that: "That stuff sounds complicated! What would we know!".
Either way the money goes to the same place. Whether the military gets a new network or not is irrelevant. The corporations get to use the money to fund their R&D (or line their pockets) safe in the knowledge that a regular "welfare" cheque will be coming in from the US government. Any inventions/products can then be brought onto the so-called 'free' market. Except this time everything will be properly patented, trade-secret-ed or whatever, unlike Internet version 1.
Maybe I'm out of touch with reality, but isn't memory bandwidth/speed the real limiting factor as to how well a modern CPU performs these days? Won't dual core just make this problem much much worse?
Workers shall not be required to hand over government-issued identification, passports or work permits as a condition of employment.
I wish I can have employment with presenting identification. Alas, I must also submit to a background check, a credit check and a drug test.
I'm not sure, but I have a dark feeling that this is not refering to ID per se, but to employers actully holding employees' passports in thier possesion during thier term of employment and using that to make it difficult for employees to quit at will.
I think it's time to point out Super Obvious Tax Fact #1-- 99% of tax loopholes AREN'T. They are specifically written into law in order to promote free enterprise health, the backbone of this country lest everybody have a lobotomy at the mention of Microsoft.
I'll just quote the relevent parts of the article converning this:
For example, over the past decade, Microsoft has likely saved an additional $172 million from a state incentive program called the Research and Development Tax Credit. [...] Between January 2003 and February 2004, Microsoft spent $666,190 lobbying the Legislature, in part to push for the program's successful renewal for another 10 years. Unfortunately, few legislators question why our state should continue to subsidize the growth of a company able to distribute $75 billion to shareholders while we're struggling with the problems its presence creates. [...] Yet a Washington Department of Revenue study of the impact of the R&D tax credit found no consequent growth in the state's share of high-tech jobs, and few companies reported relocating to Washington for the incentives.
So the bottom line here is, no, it is not a loophole per se, but a legal tax-dodge that Microsoft payed/lobbied for, and furthermore provides little real benefit for the state or the country.
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Simon
more about VDare
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This page from that news article explains what V-Dare is about.:
V-DARE
www.vdare.com
V-DARE - shorthand for Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in what is now the United States - is a web site run by a "coalition" whose most prominent member is Peter Brimelow.
Brimelow, a leading anti-immigration activist and author of Alien Nation, argues that America is historically a predominantly white nation, and that Americans have a right to demand that it remain that way.
A past columnist for the conservative National Review, Brimelow says he once considered adding a fictional end to his Alien Nation, a nonfiction critique of immigration, about the last white family to leave Los Angeles.
V-DARE posts anti-immigration articles by Brimelow's twin brother John; right-wing columnists like Paul Craig Roberts and Joseph Fallon (Brimelow's main researcher on Alien Nation); and defenders of The Bell Curve - a controversial book arguing that whites are more intelligent than blacks - like Steve Sailer.
Both Brimelow and Fallon have defended Jared Taylor, who edits the racist American Renaissance magazine. Taylor's deputy, James Lubinskas, has returned the favor by writing for V-DARE.
Brimelow has close ties to several other leaders on the anti-immigration scene, among them John Vinson of the American Immigration Control Foundation, Llewellyn Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and John H. Tanton of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
*sigh*, it is just great to see this on the front page of Slashdot...:(
You know you are talking about Doom and Wolf3D here. (And lots of sports , racing , adventure games which I still like to play). Sure they arent any thing compared to the new games but please dont call them crap, dude.
Actually we are not talking about Doom. We are talking pre-Doom, 80s and early 90s. (Yes, time and games did exist before Doom).
Castle Wolfenstein was one of the first games that showed the PC doing something (textured 3D) which hadn't already been done on the other computer systems at the time. It was the start of the PC as a gaming platform. (3D gfx cards and modular/upgradable nature of the PC being key here. Other systems like the Amiga couldn't evolve their gfx hardware fast enough).
to think Lotus and Wordperfect drove the success is misguided at best. As the parent poster suggested it was MSDOS and its ease of use and simple design that allowed programs like Lotus and wordperfect to work
:-) MSDOS didn't have any "ease of use". Programs like Lotus and WordPerfect were loaded into memory by MSDOS after which point they received little support from MSDOS as an operating system, especially in comparision to the OSes at the time such as AmigaOS and the Mac. "simple design"!? MSDOS was/is a mess.
As for PCs as a gaming platform. The PC was always seen and marketed as the "serious business computer" in the 80s. DOS games were absolute crap in comparision to the competion then. It wasn't until the early 90s that the PC started to emerge as the primary home gaming platform.
2. Gates and Microsoft, as much as people don't want to admit, drove the PC into the mainstream use for end-user consumers. Microsoft followed others such as DEC, Sun, etc., and had something that ran on hardware of the day for academic and commercial reasons, and then took a leap (albeit Apple was already there in small representation, and Xerox just didn't market their workstation as effectively as MS did), and voila! They made a new market of people who found the usefulness of a computer at home.
oh! come on! I'm not quite 30 and I can still remember the 80s well enough to know that that is not how it happened. IBM, the clone manufacturers and applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect are what drove the success of the PC in the 80s, it certainly wasn't MSDOS. Even in the 90s we see that WWW, email and the internet pushed the PC even further into the mainstream. It is IBM's orignal screw up with the licensing of MSDOS that bootstrapped Microsoft's rise to where it is now.
There seems to be an assumption by the technologists and music industry that people are dying for a better format to replace MP3. Better quality, smaller file sizes. I don't believe that is so.
Filesize: But when a new computer comes with a 200Gb harddrive do most people these days even care that MP3 maybe isn't the most effective compression algorithm? I mean, you've got plenty for space so who cares if the typical music collection is 5Gb or 10Gb?
Quality: Most people are happy with CD quality. 192Kb MP3 pretty much gives you that quality. Most people are more than happy with MP3, especially on a portable device where listen conditions are 'suboptimal' shall we say.
Portablity vs DRM: This is the killer feature of digital music. The music industry wants to stop it, for everyone else it is all about being able to move music around. This is the one 'feature' that people do not want to see go.
What I've trying to say here is that people are more than happy with MP3 and the 'problems' with MP3 really aren't an issue for the majority of people, while these replacement formats kill the one feature that people really care about.
Good luck marketing your new formats, music industry. You'll need it!
How can a country lose $300 billion in productivity and still be the most productive country in the world?
I suspect it is because of the way productivity is usually measured, by using the GDP.
A big chunk of that $300 billion shows up in the GDP as a profit, not a loss. When someone gets sick and spends $500 on medical, that $500 gets counted as productivity in the health sector. Same goes for any medication, psychologist visits, the whole stress-reduction industry, etc etc.
Does anyone else think that merely analyzing how english is read is very closed minded?
no, not really. It seems very reasonable considering that english is most likely the native language of the researchers. Research is hard enough without introducing extra complexity through using a foreign language and then having to find subjects that are fluent in that language.
You can't study everything at the same time. Quit complaining for the sake of complaining... sheeesh.
--
Simon
Re:Whose task is copy&paste
on
The Power of X
·
· Score: 1, Troll
You save to a file in app A and then open it in app B. Honestly, where's the attraction in having your data floating about in a clipboard like some etherial juggling act?
The attraction is that a clipboard is about a BILLION times faster and easier to use than juggling files, if all you want to do is move something from app A to app B.
I can't believe this kind of stuff needs to be explained to people/geeks. WHAT PLANET ARE YOU PEOPLE FROM?!?
Of course, then the BSD licensed stuff would be copied back into the GPL'd fork, as is allowed.
I think the more important question is, would there actually be any new BSD licensed stuff to copy into the GPL version? Companies are not required to release their changes in source form under the BSD licence. After all, that is the primary difference between the GPL and BSD licenses.
but why can't I write a wonderful new *general* tool and make money from it? Yeah, I know, some will say "Go ahead and try, it's a free world". But you know as well as I do that if I am successful then inevitably some kid in his parents' basement will write his own Open Source version of the thing, for free.
If your business model can be (legally) derailed by a kid in his spare time, then what does that say about your business model? It says to me that it's got a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through. Perhaps it is just not a viable business model. Perhaps it never was.
Sure, most people and developers are used to being able to sell shrinkwrapped software as a business model, but that doesn't mean that the model isn't flawed. Maybe just now with the internet, reality is catching up.
If the culture doesn't support the idea of paying for software (and music, and movies, etc) in some way, then we are basically just denying artists and programmers the right to make money from what they do
But you don't have a right to get paid for what you do. If you can't sell your work or effort for whatever reason, then you need to go do something else which people will pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
Mate, you're not even trying if that is all you can come up with. :-)
Try on:
* doesn't show the full path to the current directory!
* it seems you can't modify the big shortcut buttons on the left hand side of the dialog to point somewhere useful.
* you can't directly type in the directory you want.
* there is no way of entering a custom "filter by filetype" pattern. (eg. *.py)
* it always seems to forget its size and/or position between uses.
* when a model dialog (like the file dialog) is open, you can't even move the parent window. It's blocked completely. grrr.
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Simon
Clause 9 from the GPL 2 text says that you *can* use v2 with a later version of the GPL.
It may appear that the "no additional restrictions" clause in v2 might come into conflict with clause 9 and a GPL v3 (or later). But in this case I think that clause 9 clearly takes precedence. That appears to be spirit of the license and the intention of clause 9. You would have a hard time arguing that "no additional restrictions takes precedence" is how the GPL v2 should be read. IMHO.
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Simon
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Simon
Do you any examples of this in action? I mean a non-trivial example showing a Ruby block based solution for a problem that is clearly better than the more tradional (messy?) solution.
Impress me. :-)
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Simon
As far as I am concerned what Mandrake could gain from Connectiva is a move to apt-rpm and Synaptic.
huh? Mandrake can move to apt-rpm and Synaptic any time they want. They don't have to merge with Conectiva to do that! It's Free Software after all.
The merger has got little to do with software and technical features, and everything to do with getting entry to South American markets.
Besides, both are heading towards the SMART package manager.
--
Simon
That and advertisers not interested in using these free-internet companies to advertise to the cheapskate demographic.
--
Simon
-- Simon
The main benefit of Qt's container types is that they are the same on each platform. You have to deal with different STL implementations having different bugs. The other reason Qt doesn't use STL is simply because when Qt was started the STL hadn't settled yet and was a PITA to use for cross platform stuff. So then made their own. Now they have to continue using and supporting their containers types. Their customers have too much code depending on it now.
--
Simon
Black text on mid/light grey instead of white is my recommendation. Plenty of contrast and you avoid having to stare at a bright light-bulb thing all day. It's also not too radical. :) (This was the default colour scheme for AmigaOS 2.0 BTW. I don't know why everyone swears by white backgrounds these days).
Also LCDs are way better than CRTs. The image is just plain *sharper* and solid as a rock.
--
Simon
And of course the UI designer doesn't design the software under the UI, that's the job of a Software Engineer. The UI designer creates the specification for UI and then gives it to the SE who takes it plus any other technical specs (such as which CPU/OS) and then designs and implements software itself. That is UI-centric design. Everything is directed toward supporting the user and UI, and that is where you begin.
And as for the other poster and designing the F-16. Computer applications and fighter jets are totally different situations when it comes to design.
--
Simon
This just looks like another case of using US taxpayer money to fund US high-tech industries/corporations. I mean, the US government can't say "Hey, let's just hand over $24 billion to these high-tech corporations". People won't accept that, but they can say "The military needs $24 billion to build a new superduper network thingy to fight terrorists or whatever". People won't blink an eyelid at that: "That stuff sounds complicated! What would we know!".
Either way the money goes to the same place. Whether the military gets a new network or not is irrelevant. The corporations get to use the money to fund their R&D (or line their pockets) safe in the knowledge that a regular "welfare" cheque will be coming in from the US government. Any inventions/products can then be brought onto the so-called 'free' market. Except this time everything will be properly patented, trade-secret-ed or whatever, unlike Internet version 1.
--
Simon
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Simon
I'm not sure, but I have a dark feeling that this is not refering to ID per se, but to employers actully holding employees' passports in thier possesion during thier term of employment and using that to make it difficult for employees to quit at will.
--
Simon
--
Simon
--
Simon
Castle Wolfenstein was one of the first games that showed the PC doing something (textured 3D) which hadn't already been done on the other computer systems at the time. It was the start of the PC as a gaming platform. (3D gfx cards and modular/upgradable nature of the PC being key here. Other systems like the Amiga couldn't evolve their gfx hardware fast enough).
--
Simon
As for PCs as a gaming platform. The PC was always seen and marketed as the "serious business computer" in the 80s. DOS games were absolute crap in comparision to the competion then. It wasn't until the early 90s that the PC started to emerge as the primary home gaming platform.
--
Simon
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Simon
Filesize: But when a new computer comes with a 200Gb harddrive do most people these days even care that MP3 maybe isn't the most effective compression algorithm? I mean, you've got plenty for space so who cares if the typical music collection is 5Gb or 10Gb?
Quality: Most people are happy with CD quality. 192Kb MP3 pretty much gives you that quality. Most people are more than happy with MP3, especially on a portable device where listen conditions are 'suboptimal' shall we say.
Portablity vs DRM: This is the killer feature of digital music. The music industry wants to stop it, for everyone else it is all about being able to move music around. This is the one 'feature' that people do not want to see go.
What I've trying to say here is that people are more than happy with MP3 and the 'problems' with MP3 really aren't an issue for the majority of people, while these replacement formats kill the one feature that people really care about.
Good luck marketing your new formats, music industry. You'll need it!
--
Simon
yeah right! This is the company that measures the productivity of their overseas workforce in fractions of a cent. give me a break.
--
Simon
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Simon
no, not really. It seems very reasonable considering that english is most likely the native language of the researchers. Research is hard enough without introducing extra complexity through using a foreign language and then having to find subjects that are fluent in that language.
You can't study everything at the same time. Quit complaining for the sake of complaining... sheeesh.
--
Simon
The attraction is that a clipboard is about a BILLION times faster and easier to use than juggling files, if all you want to do is move something from app A to app B.
I can't believe this kind of stuff needs to be explained to people/geeks. WHAT PLANET ARE YOU PEOPLE FROM?!?
--
Simon
--
Simon
If your business model can be (legally) derailed by a kid in his spare time, then what does that say about your business model? It says to me that it's got a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through. Perhaps it is just not a viable business model. Perhaps it never was.
Sure, most people and developers are used to being able to sell shrinkwrapped software as a business model, but that doesn't mean that the model isn't flawed. Maybe just now with the internet, reality is catching up.
If the culture doesn't support the idea of paying for software (and music, and movies, etc) in some way, then we are basically just denying artists and programmers the right to make money from what they do
But you don't have a right to get paid for what you do. If you can't sell your work or effort for whatever reason, then you need to go do something else which people will pay for.
--
Simon