> I do not have explicit permission from the > copyright holders to do what I have done, > so I have broken the law.
Always remind yourself that the entire civil legal system is first and foremost a way of resolving disputes, not a fixed body of commandments that represent justice.
Also remind yourself that if anybody who has ripped their own CD for their own use eventually goes to court, that the law itself, in the Anglo-Saxon system, goes to trial.
Also there are reasons that are perfectly legitimate, fair and non-damaging to the copyright holders for you to rip your own CDs and listen to them any way you want. Many other countries like the USA and Canada allows their citizens to do just that.
In other words, bring it on! Let's see if the copyright holders can justify this law.
Repeat after me: copyright infringement. Also I don't think the police will be going after you if you rip your own CDs, they have bigger fish to fry. Finally the minute the copyright holders try to go after this practice which is *very* widespread certainly in Australia, the minute the law will get changed.
So you should rip your own stuff, and see if "they" care.
This is a really good illustration that even for a great deal of scholastic knowledge, a distributed effort is better than a concerted one.
For very specialized knowledge encyclopedias are still useful, and it's hard (for me at least) to discount the pleasure of opening a volume at random and learning about something I never had the first idea about. Sure you can try the same trick with the web though I'm not sure the results would be the intended one...
For a while the Britannica was free online, but this is no longer the case.
Often museums are public building. In the US think of the Smithsonian, for example.
> If you're outdoors on a public right of way, you > can take photos of any damn thing you please
If you take a picture of someone even in public, AFAIK in most western democracies you generally need to ask permission. Sometimes permission is implied or not needed, but this is not the general case. Your right of taking pictures of what you want comes against their right to privacy or to make money (say) from their image. Usually the latter trumps the former. They can certainly forbid you to publish their image without their consent.
In C++ the way to work around lack of of finally{} clause is to use smart pointers, which deallocate their resources as soon as they go out of scope. Your main point however, which is that exception handling in C++ is not trivial is absolutely correct (as opposed to in Python, say).
There is only one kind of smart pointer in the standard library, but many more are available in Boost.
The main advantage of templates vs. #defines is syntax checking by the compiler. They also allow you do to pretty spectacular things like compile-time evaluations of complex expression (template meta-programming). I didn't think generics could do that, but maybe I am mistaken. Some libraries are now using template meta-programming for things such as matrix operations optimization (avoiding duplication and transposition, in particular).
You are right, RMS does not consider Java Free as Sun has complete control over the source. Certainly Sun was a right pain when it came to do the Linux port. It turned out that some group of independent developers had already done the port, and Sun just appropriated the whole lot without even proper credit. I'm not sure what ESR thinks of it.
Actually yes there are laws, such as privacy laws, or indeed copyright laws, that prevent the taking of pictures even in public areas. In most Western countries you can't assume that just because something is visible you automatically have a right to take a picture of it, much less that you can sell the proceeds or even give them away. Try taking pictures of paintings in a museum for example, even for your own enjoyment, and see if you can get away with it.
If you took your own picture of Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, assuming you could fend off the hordes of tourists just to perform that feat, and tried to sell the proceeds, I can guarantee you that you would be sued and that you would lose.
I'm not quite sure how this particular artist intends to enforce his copyright. I'm pretty sure that no one will stop you taking your own pictures for your own enjoyment, but technically they can definitely try. If you tried to then sell the pictures there are any number of laws you could be sued under.
I'm not saying that these laws are right or fair, for example it has become extremely difficult for European journalist photographers to do their work as they have to technically ask permission of everybody they take picture of. This makes taking pictures of public demonstration quite hard for example. There are exceptions, such in the case of celebrities, etc.
In Australia, for example, you are technically not allowed to take pictures of any event taking place on private land without the consent of everybody on the picture and of the landlord. Putting such pictures on a public web site without permission is a huge no no. I would presume that the UK has some similar set of laws, and I would definitely check if I were a professional photographer.
You can work around not having finally{}, although it is not always trivial, and according to both Alexandrescu and Stepanov, the latter being the guy who came up with the STL first with Ada and then C++, they think templates are better than generics.
However we are descending into language wars there, I don't really have an opinion. Although there are countless languages that are arguably better designed than C++, this language has so much support in the community (compilers, debuggers, interpreters, books, reviews, libraries, actual usage, importance on the CV, whatever) that it more than makes up for its shortcomings.
The Linux alternative are mplayer, xine and others for just playing the part of the DVD you want to watch (I was never aware there were mandatory warnings on DVDs until someone pointed them out to me, with the Linux software you can just jump straight in).
To be able to copy/transcode DVDs with Linux, use either mencoder (comes with mplayer) or transcode. Note that in many countries this is illegal.
Re:My favourite C++ introduction book
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately this book shows its age and the code used in it is not ISO/ANSI compliant. As such a student using a modern compiler would have a very hard time with it. It really needs a new edition.
The other O'Reilly C++ books are not very good either. Currently the best introductory C++ book is the Koenig/Moo referenced earlier. It jumps right in the modern way of using C++ (lots of templates, STL all the way, classes and OO take a secondary and advanced role, as few pointers as possible).
Objective C was good in the late 80s/early 90s as a much cleaner implementation of a C-like language with object oriented facilities than C++ was at the time. As such it predated a lot of what Java/C# have become.
However now C++ is no longer just C with objects, it is a language with generics (templates), exceptions and a number of other advanced features, including a large powerful library. Most importantly C++ and its associated libraries is now an ISO standard and is supported by a large number of compiler vendors. Those who describe C++ as a stupid language often haven't made a significant effort to understand it.
Objective C, nice as it is, has none of these features and lives only in a single implementation, that of GCC, with a couple of associated libraries, those of Apple again and of GNUstep. Consequently it cannot be recommended to anybody except Apple developers looking to develop Cocoa applications, and possibly those looking to port these applications to other platforms using the GNUstep platform.
I personally find the NeXTstep/Cocoa dvp tools wonderful, but to be honest there are C++ based tools that are just as good these days, including free ones, and certainly C++ is a more versatile and better supported language.
I have a great deal of respect for both figures even if I don't agree with everything they say. One thing that should be clear though is that RMS is *not* a figurehead for Open Source, he doesn't believe in it, and he think Open Source Software (OSS) is a dilution of his original ideas about Free Software (FS), which is a completely different concept.
All FS is by definition OSS, but the converse is not true. For example RMS is adamant that the Apple version of BSD Unix, Darwin, is not FS, because Apple has final and complete control over the source. RMS considers Darwin OSS.
I'm not saying who is right or wrong, there is a place in my opinion for both OSS and FS, and even for proprietary software, but it should be made clear that ESR and RMS are not competing for the same pie slice.
There is a limit to what refresh rate humans can see, but it is higher than 60Hz, for sure. 60Hz gives me headaches after a while.
Cinema (movies) are captured at 25Hz, but displayed at 100Hz in the theaters (each frame is displayed 4 times). True 25Hz display would trigger epileptic responses in some people and no one could stand it.
I once saw a movie shot at 100Hz, and the difference with normal movies was quite amazing. Next time you go to the movies, look in the center of the screen during a panoramic shot, and tell me if you can't see the refresh rate in the corners.
Actually the Itanium is compatible with existing applications, and there is a version of Windows that runs on it. The only problem with it is that it is very expensive both to buy and to run, and that no matter how you look at it, it is not good enough in terms of performance. Certainly the 32-bit performance is abysmal.
The only bright spot the floating point, but integer performance is about 70% of equivalent GHz AMD.
This is all very sad given all the resources that Intel and HP put into this CPU.
> I'm pretty sure that lasers, semiconductors and > microwave ovens are explainable in > non-relativistic QM
In fact not. The most fundamental equation of SR is E=mc^2. No laser without that. Actually you can't even write down the momentum of a photon without E=mc^2.
> GPS and interplanetary probes have to account > for GR, but they do not depend on it. If we > lived in a Newtonian universe, they would > still work.
That's a specious argument. Turn it around and you must say that in our present world, if you don't account for GR then interplanetary probes and GPS don't work. Therefore you need GR to make them work and they depend on it by your very definition.
You realize of course that there is no way to separate special relativity (SR) and QM? For example QED equations come out of writing down the state of a relativistic electron.
For GR, the big technologies that depend on it are GPS, atomic clocks and interplanetary probes. Try sending a probe to Mars using purely Newtonians physics and you would not hit the planet very often.
It doesn't work that way exactly. In a perfect world where people have the choice to hear and see what they want, your argument makes sense. However the US have the critical mass, political clout, technology and content developers to make mass-market products that sell cheaper than almost any locally-produced equivalent in most countries. As a result there is vastly more US content being developed, produced, distributed and marketed than the combined content of all the other countries, in spite of it not being that great a content.
The US can do that because their product are paid for with their unmatched large home market which has basically no competition (how often will the average American go and see a German film or watch an Indonesian TV drama?) and they can therefore dump their product worldwide for the price of marketing, which is a fixed cost for everybody.
Moreover following WW-II and the Marshall plan, the content producing industries of Europe were basically gutted and mostly remained that way until now. Hollywood has no competitor. Even when, say, a French drama does "well" internationally, some US production house will buy the script and re-make it with twice the budget, half the talent and 10 times the marketing power for 20 times the returns on their home market alone, so much so than the original gets completely lost in the noise. I don't think I need to give examples.
This cultural hegemonism is very real and is not a reflection on what people will choose to buy. Go to any cinema anywhere including China, and see what is made available for people to choose from at the box office.
Living here in Australia it is extremely easy to watch *all* of the Australian content, good and bad, at the cinema produced in a year even if you only go to the movies once or twice a month. The output is a tiny fraction of what Hollywood exports week in, week out. If you tried to do that for the fraction of Hollywood movies that make it to Australia you'd be in the cinema all day, all week.
With that American content comes American culture, American product promotion and the great American dream and the cycle promotes itself.
However excellent world cinema is (and it is), it just can't compete with Hollywood any more than Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan can compete with Britney Spears on the number of albums sold, even though Khan was a revered musician in pretty much the whole of the Islamic world.
Research, and particularly fundamental research, does generate profits, in fact it is one of the most profitable way of investing money for the long term.
Sure short-term you are not looking at profits, but mid to long-term, the rewards of research are enormous. Also money needs to be invested in it in large amounts.
Just think of all the stuff surrounding you in your home or office, from the carpets to the paint on the ceilings via all the equipment you use every day, including your automobile.
Very little of that existed 100 years ago, and would have been impossible to make without the investment in fundamental research of the past centuries.
Slashdot Mirror
> I do not have explicit permission from the
> copyright holders to do what I have done,
> so I have broken the law.
Always remind yourself that the entire civil legal system is first and foremost a way of resolving disputes, not a fixed body of commandments that represent justice.
Also remind yourself that if anybody who has ripped their own CD for their own use eventually goes to court, that the law itself, in the Anglo-Saxon system, goes to trial.
Also there are reasons that are perfectly legitimate, fair and non-damaging to the copyright holders for you to rip your own CDs and listen to them any way you want. Many other countries like the USA and Canada allows their citizens to do just that.
In other words, bring it on! Let's see if the copyright holders can justify this law.
Repeat after me: copyright infringement. Also I don't think the police will be going after you if you rip your own CDs, they have bigger fish to fry. Finally the minute the copyright holders try to go after this practice which is *very* widespread certainly in Australia, the minute the law will get changed.
So you should rip your own stuff, and see if "they" care.
This is a really good illustration that even for a great deal of scholastic knowledge, a distributed effort is better than a concerted one.
For very specialized knowledge encyclopedias are still useful, and it's hard (for me at least) to discount the pleasure of opening a volume at random and learning about something I never had the first idea about. Sure you can try the same trick with the web though I'm not sure the results would be the intended one...
For a while the Britannica was free online, but this is no longer the case.
> A museum is generally not a public place
Often museums are public building. In the US think of the Smithsonian, for example.
> If you're outdoors on a public right of way, you
> can take photos of any damn thing you please
If you take a picture of someone even in public, AFAIK in most western democracies you generally need to ask permission. Sometimes permission is implied or not needed, but this is not the general case. Your right of taking pictures of what you want comes against their right to privacy or to make money (say) from their image. Usually the latter trumps the former. They can certainly forbid you to publish their image without their consent.
In C++ the way to work around lack of of finally{} clause is to use smart pointers, which deallocate their resources as soon as they go out of scope. Your main point however, which is that exception handling in C++ is not trivial is absolutely correct (as opposed to in Python, say).
There is only one kind of smart pointer in the standard library, but many more are available in Boost.
The main advantage of templates vs. #defines is syntax checking by the compiler. They also allow you do to pretty spectacular things like compile-time evaluations of complex expression (template meta-programming). I didn't think generics could do that, but maybe I am mistaken. Some libraries are now using template meta-programming for things such as matrix operations optimization (avoiding duplication and transposition, in particular).
Cheers
Yes you are right, I was only refererring to copyrighted material. Converting/transcoding stuff you have rights over is perfectly legal AFAIK.
You are right, RMS does not consider Java Free as Sun has complete control over the source. Certainly Sun was a right pain when it came to do the Linux port. It turned out that some group of independent developers had already done the port, and Sun just appropriated the whole lot without even proper credit. I'm not sure what ESR thinks of it.
Actually yes there are laws, such as privacy laws, or indeed copyright laws, that prevent the taking of pictures even in public areas. In most Western countries you can't assume that just because something is visible you automatically have a right to take a picture of it, much less that you can sell the proceeds or even give them away. Try taking pictures of paintings in a museum for example, even for your own enjoyment, and see if you can get away with it.
If you took your own picture of Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, assuming you could fend off the hordes of tourists just to perform that feat, and tried to sell the proceeds, I can guarantee you that you would be sued and that you would lose.
I'm not quite sure how this particular artist intends to enforce his copyright. I'm pretty sure that no one will stop you taking your own pictures for your own enjoyment, but technically they can definitely try. If you tried to then sell the pictures there are any number of laws you could be sued under.
I'm not saying that these laws are right or fair, for example it has become extremely difficult for European journalist photographers to do their work as they have to technically ask permission of everybody they take picture of. This makes taking pictures of public demonstration quite hard for example. There are exceptions, such in the case of celebrities, etc.
In Australia, for example, you are technically not allowed to take pictures of any event taking place on private land without the consent of everybody on the picture and of the landlord. Putting such pictures on a public web site without permission is a huge no no. I would presume that the UK has some similar set of laws, and I would definitely check if I were a professional photographer.
You can work around not having finally{}, although it is not always trivial, and according to both Alexandrescu and Stepanov, the latter being the guy who came up with the STL first with Ada and then C++, they think templates are better than generics.
However we are descending into language wars there, I don't really have an opinion. Although there are countless languages that are arguably better designed than C++, this language has so much support in the community (compilers, debuggers, interpreters, books, reviews, libraries, actual usage, importance on the CV, whatever) that it more than makes up for its shortcomings.
The Linux alternative are mplayer, xine and others for just playing the part of the DVD you want to watch (I was never aware there were mandatory warnings on DVDs until someone pointed them out to me, with the Linux software you can just jump straight in).
To be able to copy/transcode DVDs with Linux, use either mencoder (comes with mplayer) or transcode. Note that in many countries this is illegal.
Unfortunately this book shows its age and the code used in it is not ISO/ANSI compliant. As such a student using a modern compiler would have a very hard time with it. It really needs a new edition.
The other O'Reilly C++ books are not very good either. Currently the best introductory C++ book is the Koenig/Moo referenced earlier. It jumps right in the modern way of using C++ (lots of templates, STL all the way, classes and OO take a secondary and advanced role, as few pointers as possible).
from getmail's site:
> getmail
>
> A POP3 mail retriever with reliable Maildir and
> command delivery.
> [...]
> It is intended as a replacement for fetchmail.
That's nice, but people require IMAP these days (thanks MS Exchange), not so much POP3. Fetchmail does support IMAP.
Do you know another command-line IMAP client for Unix?
Objective C was good in the late 80s/early 90s as a much cleaner implementation of a C-like language with object oriented facilities than C++ was at the time. As such it predated a lot of what Java/C# have become.
However now C++ is no longer just C with objects, it is a language with generics (templates), exceptions and a number of other advanced features, including a large powerful library. Most importantly C++ and its associated libraries is now an ISO standard and is supported by a large number of compiler vendors. Those who describe C++ as a stupid language often haven't made a significant effort to understand it.
Objective C, nice as it is, has none of these features and lives only in a single implementation, that of GCC, with a couple of associated libraries, those of Apple again and of GNUstep. Consequently it cannot be recommended to anybody except Apple developers looking to develop Cocoa applications, and possibly those looking to port these applications to other platforms using the GNUstep platform.
I personally find the NeXTstep/Cocoa dvp tools wonderful, but to be honest there are C++ based tools that are just as good these days, including free ones, and certainly C++ is a more versatile and better supported language.
I have a great deal of respect for both figures even if I don't agree with everything they say. One thing that should be clear though is that RMS is *not* a figurehead for Open Source, he doesn't believe in it, and he think Open Source Software (OSS) is a dilution of his original ideas about Free Software (FS), which is a completely different concept.
All FS is by definition OSS, but the converse is not true. For example RMS is adamant that the Apple version of BSD Unix, Darwin, is not FS, because Apple has final and complete control over the source. RMS considers Darwin OSS.
I'm not saying who is right or wrong, there is a place in my opinion for both OSS and FS, and even for proprietary software, but it should be made clear that ESR and RMS are not competing for the same pie slice.
There is a limit to what refresh rate humans can see, but it is higher than 60Hz, for sure. 60Hz gives me headaches after a while.
Cinema (movies) are captured at 25Hz, but displayed at 100Hz in the theaters (each frame is displayed 4 times). True 25Hz display would trigger epileptic responses in some people and no one could stand it.
I once saw a movie shot at 100Hz, and the difference with normal movies was quite amazing. Next time you go to the movies, look in the center of the screen during a panoramic shot, and tell me if you can't see the refresh rate in the corners.
This is correct, and this is a limitation of XFree86, which does not support DRI and Xinerama at the same time.
The only practical way to have 3D and dual-display at the same time under Linux is to use NVidia hardware.
Actually the Itanium is compatible with existing applications, and there is a version of Windows that runs on it. The only problem with it is that it is very expensive both to buy and to run, and that no matter how you look at it, it is not good enough in terms of performance. Certainly the 32-bit performance is abysmal.
The only bright spot the floating point, but integer performance is about 70% of equivalent GHz AMD.
This is all very sad given all the resources that Intel and HP put into this CPU.
The article says it has been shrinking.
Both Qt and GTK are essentially fancy wrappers on top of Xlib, which they link against, so yes they are derivative works by the definition of the FSF.
Has got to be RedHat.
Big gun French Opera is not confined to 19th century:
17th century:
Lully, Charpentier
18th century:
Rameau (same website as above)
19th century:
Besides Bizet, Gounod and Offenbach (Opera bouffe only), You forgot Berlioz.
20th century:
Ravel, Poulenc.
You are right in the sense that Carmen is the one true popular French opera
> I'm pretty sure that lasers, semiconductors and
> microwave ovens are explainable in
> non-relativistic QM
In fact not. The most fundamental equation of SR is E=mc^2. No laser without that. Actually you can't even write down the momentum of a photon without E=mc^2.
> GPS and interplanetary probes have to account
> for GR, but they do not depend on it. If we
> lived in a Newtonian universe, they would
> still work.
That's a specious argument. Turn it around and you must say that in our present world, if you don't account for GR then interplanetary probes and GPS don't work. Therefore you need GR to make them work and they depend on it by your very definition.
Thanks for the reply. Cheers.
OK,
You realize of course that there is no way to separate special relativity (SR) and QM? For example QED equations come out of writing down the state of a relativistic electron.
For GR, the big technologies that depend on it are GPS, atomic clocks and interplanetary probes. Try sending a probe to Mars using purely Newtonians physics and you would not hit the planet very often.
It doesn't work that way exactly. In a perfect world where people have the choice to hear and see what they want, your argument makes sense. However the US have the critical mass, political clout, technology and content developers to make mass-market products that sell cheaper than almost any locally-produced equivalent in most countries. As a result there is vastly more US content being developed, produced, distributed and marketed than the combined content of all the other countries, in spite of it not being that great a content.
The US can do that because their product are paid for with their unmatched large home market which has basically no competition (how often will the average American go and see a German film or watch an Indonesian TV drama?) and they can therefore dump their product worldwide for the price of marketing, which is a fixed cost for everybody.
Moreover following WW-II and the Marshall plan, the content producing industries of Europe were basically gutted and mostly remained that way until now. Hollywood has no competitor. Even when, say, a French drama does "well" internationally, some US production house will buy the script and re-make it with twice the budget, half the talent and 10 times the marketing power for 20 times the returns on their home market alone, so much so than the original gets completely lost in the noise. I don't think I need to give examples.
This cultural hegemonism is very real and is not a reflection on what people will choose to buy. Go to any cinema anywhere including China, and see what is made available for people to choose from at the box office.
Living here in Australia it is extremely easy to watch *all* of the Australian content, good and bad, at the cinema produced in a year even if you only go to the movies once or twice a month. The output is a tiny fraction of what Hollywood exports week in, week out. If you tried to do that for the fraction of Hollywood movies that make it to Australia you'd be in the cinema all day, all week.
With that American content comes American culture, American product promotion and the great American dream and the cycle promotes itself.
However excellent world cinema is (and it is), it just can't compete with Hollywood any more than Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan can compete with Britney Spears on the number of albums sold, even though Khan was a revered musician in pretty much the whole of the Islamic world.
Research, and particularly fundamental research, does generate profits, in fact it is one of the most profitable way of investing money for the long term.
Sure short-term you are not looking at profits, but mid to long-term, the rewards of research are enormous. Also money needs to be invested in it in large amounts.
Just think of all the stuff surrounding you in your home or office, from the carpets to the paint on the ceilings via all the equipment you use every day, including your automobile.
Very little of that existed 100 years ago, and would have been impossible to make without the investment in fundamental research of the past centuries.