In about 2000, I felt *really* left out because all my friends got phones (the price crashed in the UK in about 1998) but my parents didn't let me have one. I was allowed to use the "family phone" if I "needed" it, i.e. if my mum wanted to be able to contact me, but I didn't have my own phone until I went to university (and was given the family one, so I couldn't avoid my mum calling).
I was left out at school because a friend would text 6 friends "hey, we're going to the cinema" or something, and I'd never know until the next day at school. "Oh, sorry xaxa, you should really get a phone."
(Oh, and my parents wouldn't let me get a job either, and never gave me money, so if I wanted something they had to buy it for me.)
Thank you, it's hard to explain this to people that don't get it without clear examples.
Everyone says the same thing "I turned out fine, so you can live the same life I did and you will turn out fine" - but that's stupid. My parents grew up in the 60's and 70's, I grew up in the '90's and 2000's, and what made a person turn out "fine" then isn't the same now, because like I said, the social scene evolves. It would be ridiculous to think otherwise, but people still think that way. -Taylor
At risk of being a "social outcast"? Like some geek who hangs out on Slashdot?
How foolish of me to deny my son a phone while letting him play outside with his friends. Instead of spending that time together they could be busily texting each other about what they might have been doing.
Or worse, be like some idiot adults who have so little social skills that they spend most of their time with Person A ignoring them, and texting Person B. Only to reverse it later.
You seriously misunderstand the development of the social scene, and how tech relates to it. While i agree that kids should not just sit inside and text about what they could be doing, that's not normally what they do - that's just FUD meant to prove your point. Although some kids might do that, you can still encourage them to go out just as any parent would do in generations past when a kid was too hooked on TV. The point is that kids communicate a LOT now, and while they can still go out and hang out with someone, not being able to text other friends leaves them more out of the social circle.
There was just an article on slashdot i thought, that mentioned that when kids are hanging out texting other friends, it actually seems to make people feel more included - it's an interesting social phenomenon that should not just be ignorantly dismisses as social ineptitude. And while i can't find the article right now, just realize that this is all more complex that older people want to make it out to be. And either way, its the future. -Taylor
They shouldnt text, or even have phones. They shouldnt be going somewhere where there arent any land-lines by themselves. If they are going somewhere without land-lines or even on their way to a place with land-lines, they should have an adult with them, which would negate the need of a cell phone. That adult would more than likely have one. I didnt get a cell phone until I was old enough to drive and had a car, and I managed fine. When I see middle school- and elementary school-aged kids with cell phones, I cringe. When you get something like that at an early age, you get to where you depend on it. Texting is already becoming a huge issue in schools, this would only make it worse.
Even if an adult is around, kids have cells now to text with their friends, not to call for help. Tech is making the world more social and a kid who is well-behaved should have a cell-phone as a privilege. Communicating with your friends is becoming more important to our youth and taking that away from them at the level that cells provide will just make them more of an outcast. The world is changing, and you shouldn't just ignore that - some people got along fine without a cell their whole life, but that doesn't mean you weren't thrilled to get one at 16. I'm 24 and 16 was a good age to get one back then, but that just keeps getting younger, and if a kid is left out of that social circle, he's going to resent it. -Taylor
When they are old enough to buy their own texting device and pay their own bills then I'll let my kids text.
While I agree with the sentiment (that's what I did - got a job at 15 and paid for my own cell), you're forgetting how important communication is to kids these days. In most states you can't legally work till you're 15 or so, and that's really old to just be getting a cell. It may be hard to accept, but kids are getting phones much earlier now, and although toddler might be too young, 10 or 12 probably isn't. Making your kid wait till they're 15 or 16 means making them miss out on socializing with their friends, and you risk making them more of a social outcast as a result.
Life, as people have said for generations, just gets more complicated. You can't ignore that though. -Taylor
I once had a girlfriend who though porn was OK in principal, but she considered performing manual overrides as cheating because I wasn't thinking about her!
Don't you hate it when your laugh at your girlfriend, then realise she's serious...
Firefox does have a private browsing mode. Ctrl-Shift-P. Even saves the tabs you have open before you go into private mode.
Does it require you to close those tabs? Chrome just opens a new incognito window so you can check out a bit of porn and then go back to your work, which is nice. Heh. -Taylor
I quoted you exactly in my last comment, and I would disagree that (now paraphrasing) "If you're married you shouldn't look at porn" and "if you're married and worried that your spouse will see the links you should not look at porn" are the same thing, as they are not.
One sounds like a moral judgement and the other is a logical suggestion. You said nothing about "and you're worried they'll see the links" in your statement, so I disagree that you originally said what you later claimed to have said. -Taylor
...All I said is that if you don't want them seeing your porn collection, maybe you shouldn't look at porn...
No, that's not what you said, even if you *intended* to say that. What you said was:
"Maybe if you're married and have children you shouldn't be looking at porn..."
Not "Maybe if you're married and *worried your spouse will see the links*..."
Although you may have *thought* you were saying the second one, you didn't.
For the sake of making an argument, it's important to be clear when you misspoke, not just go back and claim you said something else - that irritates people. -Taylor
Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser
Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...
Hah, are you kidding me!? I date girls that don't care if I look at porn because they like it too, and I'm not gonna marry anyone so prudish that she cares, because it's just porn! My only concern would be my kids finding it, but really I'd just have my own user account or my own computer so it wouldn't be a big deal.
You seriously are ridiculous if you think that being married means you can't enjoy porn, with or without your wife. -Taylor
But then, I've never used any of them, or any kind of versioning system, I'm just deliberately wasting your time. -Taylor
Re:And we're giving them /. publicity why?
on
Gaming the App Store
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
seriously, what the hell?
Do you suggest we pretend the evil people don't exist? I imagine the story is intended to out them as the scum they are, not give them publicity. -Taylor
Are there people out there who have more than 4GB of memory but still run old 32b operating systems? How uncharacteristically anachronistic of any technology enthusiast...
I tried 64 bit XP many years ago and it was terrible. Driver support was crap and you couldn't run old 16 bit programs, which can occasionally be useful.
I'm sure it's better now, and I've actually got a 64bit laptop showing up in the mail today, that will be eligible for the free Windows 7 upgrade when its available, but I wouldn't waste my time with 64bit XP, and since Vista sucks (i used it for years and gave up recently) I am not surprised that most people stay with XP and naturally stay with 32 bit.
And I don't run 4GB of memory because it would be a waste... but I wish i could have more, so I see the point of the article.
What some people call a "bullshit excuse" I consider a legitimate argument. TPB didn't directly host any copyrighted materials.
I would rather see the content owners suing P2P users directly than trying to shut down those who merely host a glorified index of P2P users. At least then the public has the option of using copyright violation as a pseudo-civil disobedience to put pressure on the content producers to make more meaningful products worthy of purchase.
I would much rather NOT see them suing individual users. A group like TPB has some money to fight fights like this, most users don't.
Funny how the synopsis mocks teenage girls, but we dont mock teenage fanboys who loudly declare "FAIL" after just seeing a teaser trailer.
Yeah, thanks for bringing that up! I've been meaning to ask, can we all stop using "FAIL" like it's funny? It's so goddamn cliche already it's just stupid. There was actually a slashdot article last week with "Epic FAILs" in the summary, it made me feel like I was reading some 13 year old's blog... because I was - it was a summary about some lame story that someone wrote in their lame blog, who very well could have been 13.
I want to read about crazy tongue vision systems and black holes, and reasonable info about sci-fi, not little kid rants about stupid shit. -Taylor
Joss Whedon is a derivative hack who can't help be defile every thing he touches with some sort of adolescent fantasy involving shitty, super-powered, little girls. Then his shows get canceled and the fucker throws a tantrum a 7 year old would envy, killing off all the likable characters and pile driving what little story there was face first into the fucking ground.
Really? I really enjoyed Firefly! And Buffy and Angel were pretty good too. They were all silly shows, but hey, silly doesn't have to be bad. I thought Firefly was really creative, and the stories were all interesting. The Firefly universe was good too.
Not familiar with any of his other work, but those were all decent so he can't be that much of a failure, even if everything else sucked. -Taylor
Yeah, people seriously need to think when they make references to an almost 30 year old movie that no one liked (and therefore fewer remember) that has the same name as a 12 year old mass suicide, which many more people remember.
Nerds need to get out sometimes, they forget that there is a real world, and that's what most people are familiar with. -Taylor
Be sure to make a FULL DRIVE IMAGE backup of the hard drive that has Windows on it, before putting Linux on it, even if you have a restore DVD. You can do that with the Ubuntu install DVD by starting a command line terminal shell. The earlier you do this, the smaller the compressed result will be. Unless you want to make a full size image copy to an equal sized external drive, it is best to make a compressed copy. The bzip2 compression is smaller when there are lots of blocks that have not been used and still contain binary zeros, but it runs slower (several hours for a 250GB drive). The gzip compression is faster, but the result is larger.
A typical command (with some optimizing options shows) might be (after the place to save the image is mounted) might be (everything all on ONE command line despite how your browser splits it into two or more lines):
Be sure to backup the WHOLE device (no number at the end of the device name for Linux users) and not a partition. BSD users will need to use a different device name.
Hmm, interesting, but I'd probably just do a fresh install with an OEM disk if I ever put windows back on it, rather than trying to restore anything. The mini 10v was $99 with the purchase of another dell laptop, and I already have a desktop, so it will be my 3rd PC (not counting my media center, heh). I'm not planning on storing any data on it that i care about.
Or is there some other reason to do all that backing up?
I just bought a mini 10v, but I got it with windows because the price was the same, and I figure a free XP license is a good deal. I can always put Ubuntu on it and use that legally licensed copy of XP where I might really use it.
I also have gotten into the habit of writing down or snapping a pic of the license sticker on old PCs people throw away. A computer from 2002 might not be that useful, but an XP license from then is just as good as one now. You can use any XP disk, because it's the key that matters (well, keep OEM disks with OEM licenses, but yeah).
I jumped on vista right away and had vista ultimate on my home PC (bought the upgrade, but that was when MS gave people the option of just using an upgrade copy just for using the Beta, so it wasn't too bad) and when I finally couldn't stand Vista, I used an XP license from an old PC i found. It worked out great!:)
Apple went crazy with this one, far more than they have before.
The summary says: "Note that the app was eventually approved, but only after a few go-rounds and changes."
Yeah, the few go-rounds and changed included *Completely removing* words apple didn't like, including the word "ass" among other things.
Note that the developer already went out of their way on the very first version of the program to prevent offensive words from coming up as suggestions for other things - i.e. typing "fuc" did not bring up "fuck" as a suggestion, you had to already know a profane word in order to see its definition.
Apple still rejected it even with those modifications, and didn't approve it until certain words were completely removed, including fuck, shit, etc AND the developer had to give their program a 17+ age rating!
This goes beyond apple's normal bullshit into a whole new level of bullshit. -Taylor
My sarcasm detector is broken today, so I can't tell if your comment is serious or if it just made a big whooshing noise over my head.
But there's a lot of companies which (well, used to, mostly) make a living selling public domain software. The back pages of any computer rag in the 80s or early 90s were full of them.
Hmm, yeah, not Sarcasm. In the '80s I was no more than 6 years old, so I didn't realize people did that, but it makes sense for times before the internet. It would no longer make much sense to do it however, as anything like that could be found on the internet, so it would amuse me if people did it today. -Taylor
All this complaining over random numbers is silly. All you really have to do is use 5. It's just as random as any other number, and it's easy to generate a 5. -Taylor
I've known folks whose workplaces used to pay Sun a license fee for Perl... the same Perl you could download for free (as in beer); and yes, the same Perl that is one of the usual examples of successful free (as in speech) software.
No, they didn't get tech support. They didn't get to file bugs against Perl that would be resolved by a Sun engineer. They didn't even get a custom build of Perl optimized for their Sun hardware. They didn't even get a CD. What they got was an invoice... precisely what their company's IT procurement process required...
Yeah, I noticed SQLite allows for the option of purchasing a license, even though it is public domain, for that exact reason - when someone who doesn't get it above you makes you buy a license. Then they charge $1000. Heh.
Which makes me wonder... if it is in the public domain, couldn't anyone sell a license for it? And if that's the case, couldn't *I* sell a license for it, for cheaper? I could sell SQLite licenses for a mere $500!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the guy that switched our email service to Google. See, it only costs us $50/year/user and this has been the first outage in over year...
Well, actually they had an outage in Feb of this year. And in May.
But they are awesome generally, I think their uptime over the past couple years has been beyond 99.99% or something crazy good.
-Taylor
In about 2000, I felt *really* left out because all my friends got phones (the price crashed in the UK in about 1998) but my parents didn't let me have one. I was allowed to use the "family phone" if I "needed" it, i.e. if my mum wanted to be able to contact me, but I didn't have my own phone until I went to university (and was given the family one, so I couldn't avoid my mum calling).
I was left out at school because a friend would text 6 friends "hey, we're going to the cinema" or something, and I'd never know until the next day at school. "Oh, sorry xaxa, you should really get a phone."
(Oh, and my parents wouldn't let me get a job either, and never gave me money, so if I wanted something they had to buy it for me.)
Thank you, it's hard to explain this to people that don't get it without clear examples.
Everyone says the same thing "I turned out fine, so you can live the same life I did and you will turn out fine" - but that's stupid. My parents grew up in the 60's and 70's, I grew up in the '90's and 2000's, and what made a person turn out "fine" then isn't the same now, because like I said, the social scene evolves. It would be ridiculous to think otherwise, but people still think that way.
-Taylor
At risk of being a "social outcast"? Like some geek who hangs out on Slashdot?
How foolish of me to deny my son a phone while letting him play outside with his friends. Instead of spending that time together they could be busily texting each other about what they might have been doing.
Or worse, be like some idiot adults who have so little social skills that they spend most of their time with Person A ignoring them, and texting Person B. Only to reverse it later.
You seriously misunderstand the development of the social scene, and how tech relates to it. While i agree that kids should not just sit inside and text about what they could be doing, that's not normally what they do - that's just FUD meant to prove your point. Although some kids might do that, you can still encourage them to go out just as any parent would do in generations past when a kid was too hooked on TV. The point is that kids communicate a LOT now, and while they can still go out and hang out with someone, not being able to text other friends leaves them more out of the social circle.
There was just an article on slashdot i thought, that mentioned that when kids are hanging out texting other friends, it actually seems to make people feel more included - it's an interesting social phenomenon that should not just be ignorantly dismisses as social ineptitude. And while i can't find the article right now, just realize that this is all more complex that older people want to make it out to be. And either way, its the future.
-Taylor
They shouldnt text, or even have phones. They shouldnt be going somewhere where there arent any land-lines by themselves. If they are going somewhere without land-lines or even on their way to a place with land-lines, they should have an adult with them, which would negate the need of a cell phone. That adult would more than likely have one. I didnt get a cell phone until I was old enough to drive and had a car, and I managed fine. When I see middle school- and elementary school-aged kids with cell phones, I cringe. When you get something like that at an early age, you get to where you depend on it. Texting is already becoming a huge issue in schools, this would only make it worse.
Even if an adult is around, kids have cells now to text with their friends, not to call for help. Tech is making the world more social and a kid who is well-behaved should have a cell-phone as a privilege. Communicating with your friends is becoming more important to our youth and taking that away from them at the level that cells provide will just make them more of an outcast. The world is changing, and you shouldn't just ignore that - some people got along fine without a cell their whole life, but that doesn't mean you weren't thrilled to get one at 16. I'm 24 and 16 was a good age to get one back then, but that just keeps getting younger, and if a kid is left out of that social circle, he's going to resent it.
-Taylor
When they are old enough to buy their own texting device and pay their own bills then I'll let my kids text.
While I agree with the sentiment (that's what I did - got a job at 15 and paid for my own cell), you're forgetting how important communication is to kids these days. In most states you can't legally work till you're 15 or so, and that's really old to just be getting a cell. It may be hard to accept, but kids are getting phones much earlier now, and although toddler might be too young, 10 or 12 probably isn't. Making your kid wait till they're 15 or 16 means making them miss out on socializing with their friends, and you risk making them more of a social outcast as a result.
Life, as people have said for generations, just gets more complicated. You can't ignore that though.
-Taylor
I once had a girlfriend who though porn was OK in principal, but she considered performing manual overrides as cheating because I wasn't thinking about her!
Don't you hate it when your laugh at your girlfriend, then realise she's serious...
Haha, lame!
Firefox does have a private browsing mode. Ctrl-Shift-P. Even saves the tabs you have open before you go into private mode.
Does it require you to close those tabs? Chrome just opens a new incognito window so you can check out a bit of porn and then go back to your work, which is nice.
Heh.
-Taylor
I'm not claiming to have said anything else than what I said. This is exactly what I said: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1348533&cid=29205115, I'm not sure how you misconstrue that.
I quoted you exactly in my last comment, and I would disagree that (now paraphrasing) "If you're married you shouldn't look at porn" and "if you're married and worried that your spouse will see the links you should not look at porn" are the same thing, as they are not.
One sounds like a moral judgement and the other is a logical suggestion. You said nothing about "and you're worried they'll see the links" in your statement, so I disagree that you originally said what you later claimed to have said.
-Taylor
...All I said is that if you don't want them seeing your porn collection, maybe you shouldn't look at porn...
No, that's not what you said, even if you *intended* to say that. What you said was:
"Maybe if you're married and have children you shouldn't be looking at porn..."
Not "Maybe if you're married and *worried your spouse will see the links*..."
Although you may have *thought* you were saying the second one, you didn't.
For the sake of making an argument, it's important to be clear when you misspoke, not just go back and claim you said something else - that irritates people.
-Taylor
Or these porn-surfers could be less lazy and simply memorize their porn URLs. It can't be that hard.
They'd still have to type them in, and then when you start typing "bigblackcollanders.com", the wrong URL might come up in the suggestions...
Really the solution is a Chrome-like incognito mode, which I thought the new FF had, but i dunno.
-Taylor
Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser
Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...
Hah, are you kidding me!? I date girls that don't care if I look at porn because they like it too, and I'm not gonna marry anyone so prudish that she cares, because it's just porn! My only concern would be my kids finding it, but really I'd just have my own user account or my own computer so it wouldn't be a big deal.
You seriously are ridiculous if you think that being married means you can't enjoy porn, with or without your wife.
-Taylor
But then, I've never used any of them, or any kind of versioning system, I'm just deliberately wasting your time.
-Taylor
seriously, what the hell?
Do you suggest we pretend the evil people don't exist? I imagine the story is intended to out them as the scum they are, not give them publicity.
-Taylor
Are there people out there who have more than 4GB of memory but still run old 32b operating systems? How uncharacteristically anachronistic of any technology enthusiast...
I tried 64 bit XP many years ago and it was terrible. Driver support was crap and you couldn't run old 16 bit programs, which can occasionally be useful.
I'm sure it's better now, and I've actually got a 64bit laptop showing up in the mail today, that will be eligible for the free Windows 7 upgrade when its available, but I wouldn't waste my time with 64bit XP, and since Vista sucks (i used it for years and gave up recently) I am not surprised that most people stay with XP and naturally stay with 32 bit.
And I don't run 4GB of memory because it would be a waste... but I wish i could have more, so I see the point of the article.
-taylor
What some people call a "bullshit excuse" I consider a legitimate argument. TPB didn't directly host any copyrighted materials.
I would rather see the content owners suing P2P users directly than trying to shut down those who merely host a glorified index of P2P users. At least then the public has the option of using copyright violation as a pseudo-civil disobedience to put pressure on the content producers to make more meaningful products worthy of purchase.
I would much rather NOT see them suing individual users. A group like TPB has some money to fight fights like this, most users don't.
-Taylor
Funny how the synopsis mocks teenage girls, but we dont mock teenage fanboys who loudly declare "FAIL" after just seeing a teaser trailer.
Yeah, thanks for bringing that up! I've been meaning to ask, can we all stop using "FAIL" like it's funny? It's so goddamn cliche already it's just stupid. There was actually a slashdot article last week with "Epic FAILs" in the summary, it made me feel like I was reading some 13 year old's blog... because I was - it was a summary about some lame story that someone wrote in their lame blog, who very well could have been 13.
I want to read about crazy tongue vision systems and black holes, and reasonable info about sci-fi, not little kid rants about stupid shit.
-Taylor
Joss Whedon is a derivative hack who can't help be defile every thing he touches with some sort of adolescent fantasy involving shitty, super-powered, little girls. Then his shows get canceled and the fucker throws a tantrum a 7 year old would envy, killing off all the likable characters and pile driving what little story there was face first into the fucking ground.
Really? I really enjoyed Firefly! And Buffy and Angel were pretty good too. They were all silly shows, but hey, silly doesn't have to be bad. I thought Firefly was really creative, and the stories were all interesting. The Firefly universe was good too.
Not familiar with any of his other work, but those were all decent so he can't be that much of a failure, even if everything else sucked.
-Taylor
Yeah, people seriously need to think when they make references to an almost 30 year old movie that no one liked (and therefore fewer remember) that has the same name as a 12 year old mass suicide, which many more people remember.
Nerds need to get out sometimes, they forget that there is a real world, and that's what most people are familiar with.
-Taylor
Be sure to make a FULL DRIVE IMAGE backup of the hard drive that has Windows on it, before putting Linux on it, even if you have a restore DVD. You can do that with the Ubuntu install DVD by starting a command line terminal shell. The earlier you do this, the smaller the compressed result will be. Unless you want to make a full size image copy to an equal sized external drive, it is best to make a compressed copy. The bzip2 compression is smaller when there are lots of blocks that have not been used and still contain binary zeros, but it runs slower (several hours for a 250GB drive). The gzip compression is faster, but the result is larger.
A typical command (with some optimizing options shows) might be (after the place to save the image is mounted) might be (everything all on ONE command line despite how your browser splits it into two or more lines):
dd if=/dev/sda iflag=direct ibs=1048576 obs=16384 | bzip2 -9 > /media/windows-2009-08-14.img.bz2
Be sure to backup the WHOLE device (no number at the end of the device name for Linux users) and not a partition. BSD users will need to use a different device name.
Hmm, interesting, but I'd probably just do a fresh install with an OEM disk if I ever put windows back on it, rather than trying to restore anything. The mini 10v was $99 with the purchase of another dell laptop, and I already have a desktop, so it will be my 3rd PC (not counting my media center, heh). I'm not planning on storing any data on it that i care about.
Or is there some other reason to do all that backing up?
Or, i suppose it doesn't have a disk drive, huh?
I haven't thought too much about it.
-Taylor
I just bought a mini 10v, but I got it with windows because the price was the same, and I figure a free XP license is a good deal. I can always put Ubuntu on it and use that legally licensed copy of XP where I might really use it.
I also have gotten into the habit of writing down or snapping a pic of the license sticker on old PCs people throw away. A computer from 2002 might not be that useful, but an XP license from then is just as good as one now. You can use any XP disk, because it's the key that matters (well, keep OEM disks with OEM licenses, but yeah).
I jumped on vista right away and had vista ultimate on my home PC (bought the upgrade, but that was when MS gave people the option of just using an upgrade copy just for using the Beta, so it wasn't too bad) and when I finally couldn't stand Vista, I used an XP license from an old PC i found. It worked out great! :)
-Taylor
This summary is way too forgiving!
Apple went crazy with this one, far more than they have before.
The summary says: "Note that the app was eventually approved, but only after a few go-rounds and changes."
Yeah, the few go-rounds and changed included *Completely removing* words apple didn't like, including the word "ass" among other things.
Note that the developer already went out of their way on the very first version of the program to prevent offensive words from coming up as suggestions for other things - i.e. typing "fuc" did not bring up "fuck" as a suggestion, you had to already know a profane word in order to see its definition.
Apple still rejected it even with those modifications, and didn't approve it until certain words were completely removed, including fuck, shit, etc AND the developer had to give their program a 17+ age rating!
This goes beyond apple's normal bullshit into a whole new level of bullshit.
-Taylor
My sarcasm detector is broken today, so I can't tell if your comment is serious or if it just made a big whooshing noise over my head.
But there's a lot of companies which (well, used to, mostly) make a living selling public domain software. The back pages of any computer rag in the 80s or early 90s were full of them.
Hmm, yeah, not Sarcasm. In the '80s I was no more than 6 years old, so I didn't realize people did that, but it makes sense for times before the internet. It would no longer make much sense to do it however, as anything like that could be found on the internet, so it would amuse me if people did it today.
-Taylor
All this complaining over random numbers is silly. All you really have to do is use 5. It's just as random as any other number, and it's easy to generate a 5.
-Taylor
Yes, you can sell public domain works. No one can stop you since no one holds a copyright to it.
Hah, nice. That would be a hilarious business.
-Taylor
I've known folks whose workplaces used to pay Sun a license fee for Perl ... the same Perl you could download for free (as in beer); and yes, the same Perl that is one of the usual examples of successful free (as in speech) software.
No, they didn't get tech support. They didn't get to file bugs against Perl that would be resolved by a Sun engineer. They didn't even get a custom build of Perl optimized for their Sun hardware. They didn't even get a CD. What they got was an invoice ... precisely what their company's IT procurement process required...
Yeah, I noticed SQLite allows for the option of purchasing a license, even though it is public domain, for that exact reason - when someone who doesn't get it above you makes you buy a license. Then they charge $1000. Heh.
Which makes me wonder... if it is in the public domain, couldn't anyone sell a license for it? And if that's the case, couldn't *I* sell a license for it, for cheaper? I could sell SQLite licenses for a mere $500!
Anyone know about that?
-Taylor