dbtx
...ever since I was too young to vote. Now I'm a little unhappy about the Hanford Site and about tetraethyl lead, for example. I know that has nothing to do with satellites.
(read linux/Documentation/admin-guide/sysrq.rst before you try this)
This varies with goals, attitudes, background, bias, etc. Besides, if you know a little C, you can livecode over at glslsandbox or shadertoy and be immediately rewarded.
> It isn't the kind of thing you tackle because you need hirable job skills by the end of the month.
No, not really. This also roughly says "JS doesn't necessarily require lots of experience" which is not much of a plus, as someone already pointed out.
I remain unconvinced.
> If Oracle wins you are the copyright holder of that code, including the API.
I said "what if I'm NOT", as in, "how will this ruin everything for me in the most common case, that of being only a user?"
But I am planning a library and it is meant to be free-as-in-sunlight if it ever gets there. I'm not worried, I just find it easier to agree with those who are saying the opposite. They seem to think Oracle winning will be precedent for an incredible amount of control to be exercised by software publishers, especially regarding operating systems... this would basically throw a bucket of sand into the proverbial gearbox, for everyone, down to the last user.
Not everyone wants more control. On the flip side, not everyone wants more users just for the sake of proving they made a more useful thing.
IIUC Google winning means I have to be mentally prepared for someone to someday take advantage of my work, which is what I wanted from the very beginning. Whether or not that feels "fair" depends entirely on my definition of "fair", not the court's. Anyone who decides to do that will have paid me a compliment, unless of course someone reuses my work to do something specific that I happen to really dislike. But people are very different from me, so that's almost inevitable, and I might not even learn about any of it, and anyway I accept the possibility.
Maybe. I seem to be saying that with both languages and APIs, licensing-related restrictions are worse than useless. Anyone can go write a compiler that translates a pre-existing language into object code, right? If you can insist on being the only one who can compile your language, good luck getting people to write in it.
> But If I invent a different language and publish it in a book, why should I lose the rights to it simply because of what the language is or how people would use it.
Which rights? Isn't that the original question, the one of what rights are implied as 'granted' when you publish a thing, such as 'the right to read and understand it'? (No I didn't purchase your book, I found it at a library.) You don't "lose the rights" to it, that sounds a bit like false dichotomy. You merely would not have had all the rights you had hoped, from the beginning.
---
I can almost see it Oracle's way: they own all the results of a great deal of work that Sun('s employees) did, and later on Google managed to avoid a chunk of that work and so help their own bottom line. Google also takes advantage of the industry's pre-existing familiarity with it. I still think Oracle is on the wrong side of common sense because Google was also helping Oracle's thing stay popular by increasing the motivation for anyone to gain familiarity with it, and I would call it a fair trade. But that's me, and my business sense is rather like a phantom limb.
> Google winning will allow any large company to replace open source software with proprietary software with no ability for devs to protect themselves.
Can you back this up? What should I be reading if I wanted to convince myself that this is true? What if I'm not releasing a FOSS library (and necessarily publishing the API) which I hope people will use if only to justify the time I spent designing and implementing it?
This is DH3. [0] I need some more red meat. :)
> Nobody on this thread has given a reasonable argument as to why APIs are not more or less like code.
I think they did, though. An API is designed and written, and then it is "a design". (OK "an interface" but that's jargon, the design and formal requirements and patterns are what matters) Code is designed and written, then it is "an implementation". If there's anything special about your design so that you want to control how and whether people are legally allowed to implement it, you get a patent, not a copyright. Then (IINM which seems probable because IANAL) the separate (perhaps royalty-paying) patent licensee can still copyright their own implementation. Don't get me wrong-- I don't want even more patents around software, I just hope people will call things what they are. I have to admit that I could merely be mincing words, if only because that's what I want to accuse someone else of doing. I don't envy the court.
If you're going to write some code, then you usually choose to base your work on a particular language, which means you copy a lot of the design decisions and original work that went into it, and that is hopefully what everyone wanted ITFP. You (or O'Reilly) copyright a thorough description of the language's syntax, not the syntax itself. An API's function signatures are a more specific and elaborate kind of syntax, but all are just facts about the world now that someone published the thing. edit: I mean that the uncopyrightable fact is that "if you are going to use this thing, here is exactly the way it must be done".
This goes much further than 'imitation is the sincerest form of flattery'. The reason e.g. Microsoft published the reference for MFC is because they wanted people to be able to use it, and actually use it. My shallow opinion is that interfaces are like that. You want people to build on top of it rather than making up a new and utterly foreign thing every time, so you want people to copy the exact things about it that make this possible, correctly.
You could argue that Oracle didn't own any of the code that different bits of Android were interfacing with, so they didn't have any incentive there. But that only means Oracle forgot or doesn't care about that thing called 'mindshare'. People learning and using identical interfaces "should" have been something that Oracle wanted.
(I don't mean to imply any notable similarity in the two cases, but people knowing when and where the trains were running-- so they could use those and keep on deciding to use those-- "should" be something that MTA wanted.)
On the side, obsessing over protection is precisely what I've said is distasteful about the GPL.
$0.02
wget $(...) -O - | display -Did that feel good? Well, it was preventable. That's a kind of thing that a reasonably interesting person might want to prevent.
Anyway, this happened. Not that I'm, like, supposed to be reasonably interesting or anything. ;)
FWIW, this is just what I do with the keyboard (but more slowly) when something went wrong enough that I can't even switch to a text VT and recover. Sometimes even 'b' won't hard reset it-- which indicates everything was already hosed, or maybe just the keyboard. Presumably the umount didn't work either, but I gave it a chance.
echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger
I think that we do partly agree on a thing. The way so many are-- as I like to put it-- running massive marketing campaigns to define and redefine "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is pretty horrible. We probably don't agree on which definitions should stick or fall away, but that's off topic, too.
"Is that an accident" was not entirely meant to be the accusing rhetorical question that it seems like now. It's also, what's your angle? And you answered that.
P.S. (hating people with stupid views) < (hating their stupid views)
I used Scrapbook in the past (which also still works) but I usually just save random things in ~/webpages/ since (apparently) 2011. The earliest is a copy of the landing page at bigthink.com. Of course now almost every link is broken, excluding social media buttons, About Us, Contact Us, RSS, Privacy, Terms of Use, Login, and the header logo pointing at the same page.
Not by that name... https://commonmark.org/
Anyway, thanks for the guide.
I need to do a handful of experiments to see exactly how this interacts with Sync, even though I've (foolishly) already synced the important profiles. I'd hope that the cloud copies of the places database just keeps growing, but in any case, I'd rather combine them all offline anyway.
So... yeah, you nailed it.