beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
kde 3.5 (and windows, last I looked at it) had much more tiny graphics because the screens they were intended to be displayed on were much smaller. Nowdays, 1280x1024 19" lcd is pretty much low end whereas it was top of the line 5 years ago. So qt & kde evolves, and that's fine by me. I run 4.2 ATM, and while I'm eagerly waiting for 4.3, to iron out some quirks, I don't consider it a train wreck. 4.0 was rushed out and 4.1 made it somewhat barely usable, but 4.2 is really what 4.0 should have been in the 1st place. Not perfect, but sort of okay for everyday use.
You are sooooooooo wrong. Downloading an iso to replace the original DVD I legally own but innocently scratched is not a violation of the copyright nor of the license. In criminal law, you must prove the intent and the actual criminal facts ; you should never deduce from a neutral fact which outcomes can be both legal and criminal that it is criminal by itself. Of course there are statute laws that criminalize simple facts, because it makes the prosecution job easier, but this is a sloppy job and should not be tolerated in a free society. This type of justice has only be extensively used in red dictatorships like soviet Russia, and it's disheartening to see it invade our 'still not so long ago' free societies.
Those letting pass those treaties and laws are arsonists ; they intend to burn down big pokets of wild bush at once instead of getting dirty by doing a correct job with axes and chainsaws (ie, crafting good, reasonable laws with balance and exemptions clauses), but like fire itself, once the target has been burnt, the thing they created keeps on spreading by eating everything around, good crops and all.
You are correct when you deduce from my writing skills that I'm not a native english speaker. But I strongly refute the tautology (I somehow admit the first sentence of my 1st point can be considered a non-sequitur, but it's not part of the argumentation really). The crux of the problem lies within your previous post, where, in answering my proposition that GPL protects the end user freedom, you, yourself, enter a non-sequitur by theorizing an hypothetical situation where an implementation released under a CDDL license would need a rewrite in order to be GPL-compatible. The mere fact that this specific implementation does not fall yet under the GPL umbrella, under your own assumptions, excludes any positive conclusion because (and this is an ontology, to be precise), the GPL is only potent to provide end user freedom on GPLed implementations. I admit a certain irony on my side when I used your own device to turn your argument inside-out, but it ends there.
On your second point, yes, providing end users with binaries only solution is a bad thing. Binaries are convenient, but it's much more important to be able to rebuild them to have them match unforseen hardware upgrades. It aims at avoiding planned obsolescence schemes, and it doesn't matter than under certain very specific edge cases it comes as an annoyance to the producer. In any case, the end user benefits more by having access to the code he runs than by not having access to it. What if your own svn built binary works, but released material doesn't because of a regression only your user suffers from ?
On my third point, again, you are the origin of the non sequitur, because most of your arguments revolve around the idea that I was wrong because 10 years ago the GPLv2 didn't forsee some sneaky moves from various vendors that wanted to benefit from the GPL without giving back the freedom they used to their clients and found loopholes to do so, and thus the specific GPLv2 wasn't made compatible with newer licenses crafted hastily on the spot to cover those loopholes. You conveniently forget that even in this remote times, you could chose a GPLv2+ license, with provisions to become compatible with any newer revisions of the license. Those hand picked samples doesn't prove that the GPL, as a whole, is not designed and does not evolves with the aim to safeguard end users freedom.
I confess a sweet spot for David Baldacci. Not that his plots are better, or his characters more balanced, but I enjoy his witty writing. Another author I very much like is Cathy Reichs ; the TV Bones show is pretty bad, but her books are IMO very very good.
Thank you very much for proving my case better than I would have done it myself:
The end user becomes more free by having to pay someone to write a reimplementation of a CDDL algorithm to use with some GPL'd code?
At least, a sponsored GPL reimplementation of this code would become the common good of humanity. The mere fact that it would be needed just proves that CDDL is not concerned by the end user rights.
The user becomes more free by not being able to give their friend a copy of the binary without remembering to include a written offer for the source code, even though their friend (if they actually wanted the source) could still get it from the upstream source?
Providing a friend with a binary only module is a bad gift indeed. What if he further needs to port it ? What if he changes from processor ? Should he be deprived of your gift ? Your friend in that case is the end user, and you should treat him as well as you've been treated yourself before, because he's the one the GPL intends to protect now.
[...burps...] GPLv2 [more burps] GPLv2 [even more burps] The GPLv3 [and on and on]
I'm sure you know the difference between specifications and implementations, and pointing out defects of a specific version of a products merely show bugs that are therefore corrected upon identification. It does nothing to prove the underlying scheme right or wrong.
And, yes, IAL, and I read the GPL from top to bottom, every version of it.
I'm not sure what IAL means, I Am Legend maybe? Or did you mean to say that you are a lawyer, in which case I am not surprised by your skill at doublethink, just disappointed by it. Interesting that you don't specify which of the (mutually-incompatible) versions of the GPL you prefer.
Yes, I'm a lawyer. My personal choice is for the current version with provision you can relicense under any later revision (GPL v3+). Your sacarstic style (for a missing 'A', which is just a typo) just hints that you need to revert to ad hominem arguments when you clearly lack basis for your claim.
the DEC Alpha was the absolute epitome of 64 bits processing in its times, a fabulous cpu running loops around what intel had to offer, and head and shoulders above the competition from Sun and IBM. The Alpha was emulating a top of the line Ppro faster than the ppro could run natively. And those retards at MSFT just ported a 32 bits NT to it, and moreover were unable to provide native software for it (MS Office can't run on the Alpha).
Allegedly, the bulk of the work on the 64 bit version of NT (call it 2K_64, XP_64 or whatever, it's never been released) was conducted on Alpha hardware for the lack of competent Itanium platforms at the time.
In short, MS benefited from the Alpha while doing their very best to kill the product, by not delivering the promised goods for it. They created high public expectations and their shoddy behaviours finally put DEC in a bad light.
It makes me sick to read such statements. I still run a PWS under Linux for the good old days memories, and the only comforting thoughts I have are that AMD managed to build upon DEC expertise to create the Athlon 64 after DEC had been swallowed by Compaq and their R&D disbanded.
The GPL license shields the freedom of the end user from everyone, developpers of other open source and not-so-free licenses projects included. That's the point of its very existence.
You may want to or need to use another "free" license, but doing so always entail at some point that the end-user freedom can and will be reduced. This is not OK with the GPL, hence the strong stance on this point.
And, yes, IAL, and I read the GPL from top to bottom, every version of it.
I think you are not understanding me ; when I wrote "don't be careless", I meant in the light of my previous post, don't be a careless administrator. I understand your concerns, and I think strongly you're handling them backward. That's because you have, like most everyone, two hats and you are confused between when you have only your user hat on, and when you, as root, must treat your user double with a clue bat.
To follow on your video example, the main failure of it is : as a user, you want your 10GB disk real estate back. Dealing with disk space is not your problem as a user. That's when you put your root hat on, and become a BOFH against yourself. Not putting safeguards in this case, as an admin, is carelessness ; it means basically that you are servant to your users tyranny. Even as an admin, you should treat yourself with paranoia and don't fall into the almighty god power over everything trap.
That's when alias and scripts come handy, as a first line defense ; most of the time, removing a file to another location won't cause problem. After a certain delay, you, as root, can remove it for good. But you should stand firm to your own impetous, and, should you need 10GB on the spot, either tell yourself "nocando" or go buy a spare disk.
It's my layman opinion that undeletion doesn't belong to the filesystem, but to userspace ; kde and gnome already provide an undelete wastebasket. It is even conceivable on some systems to forbid users from truly deleting files (think White House staff, for instance). And you already can alias rm * to 'mv * ~/wastebasket/' for your regular users.
But what you are really asking for is a magical shield for your mistakes as root. Either write yourself a false rm script as you would for normal users, or pay attention. But really, you shouldn't delete anything as root unless you've tested by moving away what you intend to delete that the system is working without this specific file you want to erase. Only after testing, delete to your heart content.
Hum. My english level is not good enough for me to take such a stance. Let's say I was happy to read his novels because they were easy enough for my poor understanding the moment I needed it. Now that I've improved a bit, I tend to read more mature books. Before you criticize me, just think for a moment how many fiction books you read in another language than your own (I don't need to know the answer;-) ).
This said, I think there are wonderful novelists in the US at the moment, and this is pretty exciting. But even Clive Cussler is someone to be proud of, this is a kind of litterature we used to have at the end of the XIXth century in France, and in my opinion, we badly miss it. Alexandre Dumas was widely despised too, in his days, for plotting unrealistic stories, and lambasted for his "poor" style. Nevertheless, his books remains because they were bigger than life (and made better stories than historical accuracy would have produced alone ; Dumas used to say you could rape history, in order to produce beautiful offsprings).
Nowdays, most french novelists are writing about their own navel, and it's awfully boring. This is largely the product of the narrow minds of professional critics who value style over everything. Crafting a good story seems to be a lost art. Fear the day when you might think the same of your own country writers !
... to prevent booting, I would rewire the connector of the disk so if extracted, and connected to a normal interface, it would malfunction / self destruct, with the bonus that any other disk plugged in place would also suffer from the non-standard interface (like applying power in a place reserved to data for instance).
You should be mod'ed up. The lack of OOP back in the days of lore is the major drawback to teaching the youngs today on those machines, because it's neither useful nor enlightening to type 1K+ lines of ancillary code where the true logic of your application can stay within 10 lines.
ORG 0100H
DB '....'
There's no educative value in that at a beginner's level. It can be important later on, if you devote your interests to extreme performance programming for embeded systems.
I Completely agree with you. My first exposure to computers back in the early 80's was on a CP/M-68K system, which became mine after some convoluted circumstances, and in the meantime I had a PC at home. After I acquired the CP/M system, I barely ever switched the PC on again and I kept my CP/M system well into the 90's. As a matter of fact, when I tried a couple of years ago to power on again both systems, the PC blew a cap and is now written off, whereas my Sord M68 still goes strong.
I've been pondering over the same questions for some time, and appart from starting your own project (a good way, but not everybody has the creativity to make a successful new application, many skilled persons are best performers when putting into code someone's else ideas), I would advise you to pick a middle sized project (2 or 3 regular devs), and begin with ancillary tasks.
Many small projects build badly for instance ; so why not clean things up there, providing a good configure script ? Submit this, do the package for your distro, and maintain it. That should give you some familiarity with the code.
Do the code documentation if lacking, or write the user doc. Most projects lack this too. Read each line of the code in the process. At this step, you will certainly become part of the team in some way, and you will have expertise over the code.
Clean bugs. Now, you begin to have a feeling where they might be lurking.
Get involved in the roadmap. Code the new features you feel like you can.
Being french (with a llm), I would like to point that the system the WTO is forcefeeding the world through the TRIPS agreement is not the system currently used in France (we call our system "droit d'auteur", and it's not even close to copyright). As a matter of fact, TRIPS is more a mixed bag of the harshest possible solutions of both copyright laws and "droit d'auteur". It takes the overlong protection time of droit d'auteur, for instance, but seeks to allow this right to be granted fully to a copyright holder who may not be the real author, whereas under french law an author cannot strip himself of all his rights, willfully or not.
This insidious action is a spinning trick for your politicians to tell you "the french had us do this", and our politicians telling us "ah, but the world sided with the US and forced us do this or that".
Mostly, we're all in the same boat where a handful of shody lobbyists from the MAFIAA are having their way by twisting laws at a level where we, citizens, have no elected representation.
Every dcraw-based software can open correctly LX3 raws. This was to me the 2nd most important selling point of this camera, 1st being the fabulous optic. (I've never liked canon glasses, but I reckon that's just me).
I'm a corporate lawyer, and that's exactly how I do it ; except that I encrypt files on the USB because I keep my files with my keys, and in the event I lose my keyring, I don't really want anyone to read it.
Online storage belongs to the problem set, not the solution set. It can fail in so many ways (including storage company going under) that it's just doomed to fail at the worst possible time.
16 Gb are all I need to keep track of 10 years history of the 30 subsidiaries of my company, employees files included.
Slashdot Mirror
please...
yes, but it makes more or less 5 words (depending on your counting style) ;-)
Themes.
They work great.
kde 3.5 (and windows, last I looked at it) had much more tiny graphics because the screens they were intended to be displayed on were much smaller. Nowdays, 1280x1024 19" lcd is pretty much low end whereas it was top of the line 5 years ago. So qt & kde evolves, and that's fine by me. I run 4.2 ATM, and while I'm eagerly waiting for 4.3, to iron out some quirks, I don't consider it a train wreck. 4.0 was rushed out and 4.1 made it somewhat barely usable, but 4.2 is really what 4.0 should have been in the 1st place. Not perfect, but sort of okay for everyday use.
c'mon... sh -> bash ; csh -> tcsh ; ksh -> pdksh
You are sooooooooo wrong. Downloading an iso to replace the original DVD I legally own but innocently scratched is not a violation of the copyright nor of the license. In criminal law, you must prove the intent and the actual criminal facts ; you should never deduce from a neutral fact which outcomes can be both legal and criminal that it is criminal by itself. Of course there are statute laws that criminalize simple facts, because it makes the prosecution job easier, but this is a sloppy job and should not be tolerated in a free society. This type of justice has only be extensively used in red dictatorships like soviet Russia, and it's disheartening to see it invade our 'still not so long ago' free societies.
where are my points when I need them ?
Those letting pass those treaties and laws are arsonists ; they intend to burn down big pokets of wild bush at once instead of getting dirty by doing a correct job with axes and chainsaws (ie, crafting good, reasonable laws with balance and exemptions clauses), but like fire itself, once the target has been burnt, the thing they created keeps on spreading by eating everything around, good crops and all.
You are correct when you deduce from my writing skills that I'm not a native english speaker. But I strongly refute the tautology (I somehow admit the first sentence of my 1st point can be considered a non-sequitur, but it's not part of the argumentation really). The crux of the problem lies within your previous post, where, in answering my proposition that GPL protects the end user freedom, you, yourself, enter a non-sequitur by theorizing an hypothetical situation where an implementation released under a CDDL license would need a rewrite in order to be GPL-compatible. The mere fact that this specific implementation does not fall yet under the GPL umbrella, under your own assumptions, excludes any positive conclusion because (and this is an ontology, to be precise), the GPL is only potent to provide end user freedom on GPLed implementations. I admit a certain irony on my side when I used your own device to turn your argument inside-out, but it ends there.
On your second point, yes, providing end users with binaries only solution is a bad thing. Binaries are convenient, but it's much more important to be able to rebuild them to have them match unforseen hardware upgrades. It aims at avoiding planned obsolescence schemes, and it doesn't matter than under certain very specific edge cases it comes as an annoyance to the producer. In any case, the end user benefits more by having access to the code he runs than by not having access to it. What if your own svn built binary works, but released material doesn't because of a regression only your user suffers from ?
On my third point, again, you are the origin of the non sequitur, because most of your arguments revolve around the idea that I was wrong because 10 years ago the GPLv2 didn't forsee some sneaky moves from various vendors that wanted to benefit from the GPL without giving back the freedom they used to their clients and found loopholes to do so, and thus the specific GPLv2 wasn't made compatible with newer licenses crafted hastily on the spot to cover those loopholes. You conveniently forget that even in this remote times, you could chose a GPLv2+ license, with provisions to become compatible with any newer revisions of the license. Those hand picked samples doesn't prove that the GPL, as a whole, is not designed and does not evolves with the aim to safeguard end users freedom.
I confess a sweet spot for David Baldacci. Not that his plots are better, or his characters more balanced, but I enjoy his witty writing. Another author I very much like is Cathy Reichs ; the TV Bones show is pretty bad, but her books are IMO very very good.
Thank you very much for proving my case better than I would have done it myself :
The end user becomes more free by having to pay someone to write a reimplementation of a CDDL algorithm to use with some GPL'd code?
At least, a sponsored GPL reimplementation of this code would become the common good of humanity. The mere fact that it would be needed just proves that CDDL is not concerned by the end user rights.
The user becomes more free by not being able to give their friend a copy of the binary without remembering to include a written offer for the source code, even though their friend (if they actually wanted the source) could still get it from the upstream source?
Providing a friend with a binary only module is a bad gift indeed. What if he further needs to port it ? What if he changes from processor ? Should he be deprived of your gift ? Your friend in that case is the end user, and you should treat him as well as you've been treated yourself before, because he's the one the GPL intends to protect now.
[...burps...] GPLv2 [more burps] GPLv2 [even more burps] The GPLv3 [and on and on]
I'm sure you know the difference between specifications and implementations, and pointing out defects of a specific version of a products merely show bugs that are therefore corrected upon identification. It does nothing to prove the underlying scheme right or wrong.
And, yes, IAL, and I read the GPL from top to bottom, every version of it.
I'm not sure what IAL means, I Am Legend maybe? Or did you mean to say that you are a lawyer, in which case I am not surprised by your skill at doublethink, just disappointed by it. Interesting that you don't specify which of the (mutually-incompatible) versions of the GPL you prefer.
Yes, I'm a lawyer. My personal choice is for the current version with provision you can relicense under any later revision (GPL v3+). Your sacarstic style (for a missing 'A', which is just a typo) just hints that you need to revert to ad hominem arguments when you clearly lack basis for your claim.
OMG, what a sad joke it was !
the DEC Alpha was the absolute epitome of 64 bits processing in its times, a fabulous cpu running loops around what intel had to offer, and head and shoulders above the competition from Sun and IBM. The Alpha was emulating a top of the line Ppro faster than the ppro could run natively. And those retards at MSFT just ported a 32 bits NT to it, and moreover were unable to provide native software for it (MS Office can't run on the Alpha).
Allegedly, the bulk of the work on the 64 bit version of NT (call it 2K_64, XP_64 or whatever, it's never been released) was conducted on Alpha hardware for the lack of competent Itanium platforms at the time.
In short, MS benefited from the Alpha while doing their very best to kill the product, by not delivering the promised goods for it. They created high public expectations and their shoddy behaviours finally put DEC in a bad light.
It makes me sick to read such statements. I still run a PWS under Linux for the good old days memories, and the only comforting thoughts I have are that AMD managed to build upon DEC expertise to create the Athlon 64 after DEC had been swallowed by Compaq and their R&D disbanded.
The GPL license shields the freedom of the end user from everyone, developpers of other open source and not-so-free licenses projects included. That's the point of its very existence.
You may want to or need to use another "free" license, but doing so always entail at some point that the end-user freedom can and will be reduced. This is not OK with the GPL, hence the strong stance on this point.
And, yes, IAL, and I read the GPL from top to bottom, every version of it.
I think you are not understanding me ; when I wrote "don't be careless", I meant in the light of my previous post, don't be a careless administrator. I understand your concerns, and I think strongly you're handling them backward. That's because you have, like most everyone, two hats and you are confused between when you have only your user hat on, and when you, as root, must treat your user double with a clue bat.
To follow on your video example, the main failure of it is : as a user, you want your 10GB disk real estate back. Dealing with disk space is not your problem as a user. That's when you put your root hat on, and become a BOFH against yourself. Not putting safeguards in this case, as an admin, is carelessness ; it means basically that you are servant to your users tyranny. Even as an admin, you should treat yourself with paranoia and don't fall into the almighty god power over everything trap.
That's when alias and scripts come handy, as a first line defense ; most of the time, removing a file to another location won't cause problem. After a certain delay, you, as root, can remove it for good. But you should stand firm to your own impetous, and, should you need 10GB on the spot, either tell yourself "nocando" or go buy a spare disk.
Everybody can make a typo without being stupid. I'd rather sum up my words by "don't be careless, problem solved".
It's my layman opinion that undeletion doesn't belong to the filesystem, but to userspace ; kde and gnome already provide an undelete wastebasket. It is even conceivable on some systems to forbid users from truly deleting files (think White House staff, for instance). And you already can alias rm * to 'mv * ~/wastebasket/' for your regular users.
But what you are really asking for is a magical shield for your mistakes as root. Either write yourself a false rm script as you would for normal users, or pay attention. But really, you shouldn't delete anything as root unless you've tested by moving away what you intend to delete that the system is working without this specific file you want to erase. Only after testing, delete to your heart content.
Hum. My english level is not good enough for me to take such a stance. Let's say I was happy to read his novels because they were easy enough for my poor understanding the moment I needed it. Now that I've improved a bit, I tend to read more mature books. Before you criticize me, just think for a moment how many fiction books you read in another language than your own (I don't need to know the answer ;-) ).
This said, I think there are wonderful novelists in the US at the moment, and this is pretty exciting. But even Clive Cussler is someone to be proud of, this is a kind of litterature we used to have at the end of the XIXth century in France, and in my opinion, we badly miss it. Alexandre Dumas was widely despised too, in his days, for plotting unrealistic stories, and lambasted for his "poor" style. Nevertheless, his books remains because they were bigger than life (and made better stories than historical accuracy would have produced alone ; Dumas used to say you could rape history, in order to produce beautiful offsprings).
Nowdays, most french novelists are writing about their own navel, and it's awfully boring. This is largely the product of the narrow minds of professional critics who value style over everything. Crafting a good story seems to be a lost art. Fear the day when you might think the same of your own country writers !
As far as I know, Clive Cussler already plotted a Dirk Pitt novel around this device. Can't remember which one though, he's quite a prolific writer.
You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a "realist," he
is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.
-- Sydney Harris
... to prevent booting, I would rewire the connector of the disk so if extracted, and connected to a normal interface, it would malfunction / self destruct, with the bonus that any other disk plugged in place would also suffer from the non-standard interface (like applying power in a place reserved to data for instance).
You should be mod'ed up. The lack of OOP back in the days of lore is the major drawback to teaching the youngs today on those machines, because it's neither useful nor enlightening to type 1K+ lines of ancillary code where the true logic of your application can stay within 10 lines.
ORG 0100H
DB '....'
There's no educative value in that at a beginner's level. It can be important later on, if you devote your interests to extreme performance programming for embeded systems.
I Completely agree with you. My first exposure to computers back in the early 80's was on a CP/M-68K system, which became mine after some convoluted circumstances, and in the meantime I had a PC at home. After I acquired the CP/M system, I barely ever switched the PC on again and I kept my CP/M system well into the 90's. As a matter of fact, when I tried a couple of years ago to power on again both systems, the PC blew a cap and is now written off, whereas my Sord M68 still goes strong.
I've been pondering over the same questions for some time, and appart from starting your own project (a good way, but not everybody has the creativity to make a successful new application, many skilled persons are best performers when putting into code someone's else ideas), I would advise you to pick a middle sized project (2 or 3 regular devs), and begin with ancillary tasks.
Many small projects build badly for instance ; so why not clean things up there, providing a good configure script ? Submit this, do the package for your distro, and maintain it. That should give you some familiarity with the code.
Do the code documentation if lacking, or write the user doc. Most projects lack this too. Read each line of the code in the process. At this step, you will certainly become part of the team in some way, and you will have expertise over the code.
Clean bugs. Now, you begin to have a feeling where they might be lurking.
Get involved in the roadmap. Code the new features you feel like you can.
That would be my take on the process
Being french (with a llm), I would like to point that the system the WTO is forcefeeding the world through the TRIPS agreement is not the system currently used in France (we call our system "droit d'auteur", and it's not even close to copyright). As a matter of fact, TRIPS is more a mixed bag of the harshest possible solutions of both copyright laws and "droit d'auteur". It takes the overlong protection time of droit d'auteur, for instance, but seeks to allow this right to be granted fully to a copyright holder who may not be the real author, whereas under french law an author cannot strip himself of all his rights, willfully or not.
This insidious action is a spinning trick for your politicians to tell you "the french had us do this", and our politicians telling us "ah, but the world sided with the US and forced us do this or that".
Mostly, we're all in the same boat where a handful of shody lobbyists from the MAFIAA are having their way by twisting laws at a level where we, citizens, have no elected representation.
Just my opinion, but you might consider it.
Every dcraw-based software can open correctly LX3 raws. This was to me the 2nd most important selling point of this camera, 1st being the fabulous optic. (I've never liked canon glasses, but I reckon that's just me).
I'm a corporate lawyer, and that's exactly how I do it ; except that I encrypt files on the USB because I keep my files with my keys, and in the event I lose my keyring, I don't really want anyone to read it.
Online storage belongs to the problem set, not the solution set. It can fail in so many ways (including storage company going under) that it's just doomed to fail at the worst possible time.
16 Gb are all I need to keep track of 10 years history of the 30 subsidiaries of my company, employees files included.